power may be transmitted, but not
the will;"[203] sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle, but
in object;[204] and so forth. We shall have to consider these remarks
from another point of view. At present we refer to them as
illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of a number of
expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with the
facts of which the words are representatives. This way of treating
political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude and
precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke
poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and
algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming
demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's
disciples with a supreme and undoubting confidence which leaves the
modern student of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness
of Robespierre's ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we
remember that he had not trained himself to look upon it as the art of
dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile
passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces.
He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre and
unsubstantial argumentation as the following:--"Let us suppose the
state composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only be
considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality
as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign is
to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each member
of the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of the
sovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his own
entirety. If the people be composed of a hundred thousand men, the
condition of the subjects does not change, and each of them bears
equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to a
hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing them up.
Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the
sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whence
it follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty
diminish."[205]

Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the deep charm which
their assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of
which England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists
and Fifth Monarchy men, but which