ar ideas to the
political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished
from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had
prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.

Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first
rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy
of government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of
either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were
each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or
was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to
their own case or to that of their adversaries.[220] Hebrew precedents
and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church
doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptance
of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a
social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was
very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences
between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury.
The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The
one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a
state of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved
man, the other that they had improved him.[221] But these differences
did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a
curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the
conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of
which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin
supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes
the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception
of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two
together he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike the
crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of
the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently
well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other
obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall
point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the
notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in
Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a
definition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relations