[52] Rousseau (_Contrat Social_: I. vi.) regards the social contract as tacitly implied in every actual society: its articles “are the same everywhere, and are everywhere tacitly admitted and recognised, even though they may never have found formal expression” in any constitution. In the same way he speaks of a state of nature “which no longer exists, which perhaps never has existed.” (Preface to the _Discourse on the Causes of Inequality_.) But Rousseau’s interpretation of these terms is, on the whole, literal in spite of these single passages. He speaks throughout the _Contrat Social_, as if history could actually record the signing and drawing up of such documents. Hobbes, Hooker, (_Ecclesiastical Polity_, I. sect. 10—see also Ritchie: _Darwin and Hegel_, p. 210 _seq._) Hume and Kant use more careful language. “It cannot be denied,” writes Hume, (_Of the Original Contract_) “that all government is, at first, founded on a contract and that the most ancient rude combinations of mankind were formed chiefly by that principle. In vain are we asked in what records this charter of our liberties is registered. It was not written on parchment, nor yet on leaves or barks of trees. It preceded the use of writing and all the other civilised arts of life. But we trace it plainly in the nature of man, and in the equality, or something approaching equality, which we find in all the individuals of that species.” This fine passage expresses admirably the views of Kant on this point. Cf. _Werke_, (Rosenkranz) IX. 160. The original contract is merely an idea of reason, one of those ideas which we think into things in order to explain them. Hobbes does not professedly make the contract historical, but in Locke’s _Civil Government_ (II. Ch. VIII. § 102) there is some attempt made to give it a historical basis.—By consent all were equal, “till by the same consent they set rulers over themselves. So that their politic societies all began from a voluntary union, and the mutual agreement of men freely acting in the choice of their governors, and forms of government.”