We need not enter at length upon the question whether the good which extends beyond oneself { 110} is adequately described as the good which is general or common to oneself and others. It is plain that the unity of myself with others in a common good is the same in principle as the unity of myself with myself which I aim at in aiming at my own good. Thought and language, we should bear in mind, unite me to myself just as they unite me to others, and they expand my being by binding my own life into a whole no less than by making intercourse possible between my fellow men and myself. Just so, the good at which I aim extends beyond my trivial or momentary self--that is to say, is universal as against myself as particular--in ways which are not _prima facie_ exhausted by saying that they include the good of others. But again, just like thought and language, the good which enables me to enter deeper into communion with myself or with the world must always have an aspect of extending that communion to others; and therefore, for the purposes of social philosophy, we may treat the universal good or self as also in its nature a general or common good or self. It is that at least, though it may be more, in accordance with the logical relation between the rational universal, and the numerical generality.
This indestructible impulse towards the Good, which is necessarily a common good, the substantial unity and filling of life by the interests through which man is human, is what Rousseau plainly has before him in his account of the General Will. But it has rightly been observed [1] that he did not really distinguish this conception, analogous as it is to what Plato or Aristotle might have said { 111} of the “divine reason which is the source of the laws and discipline of the ideal polity,” from the legal idea of the sovereign “in the sense of some power of which it could reasonably be asked how it was established in the part where it resides, when and by whom and in what way it is exercised.” We will point out, however, the negative and positive indications which he furnishes as to where it is not and where it is to be looked for. That he fails to emancipate himself from the fallacies which he acutely indicates is a phenomenon for which the reader is, I trust, sufficiently prepared.