Rousseau was also a great synthesizer who was deeply engaged in a dialog with his contemporaries and with the writers of the past, such as the theorists of Natural Law, Hobbes and Grotius. Like "the body politic", "the general will" was a term of art and was not invented by Rousseau, though admittedly Rousseau did not always go out of his way to explicitly acknowledge his debt to the jurists and theologians who influenced him. Prior to Rousseau, the phrase "general will" referred explicitly to the general (as opposed to the particular) will or "volition" (as it is sometimes translated) of the Deity. It occurs in the theological writings of Malebranche, who had picked it up from Pascal, and in the writings of Malebranche's pupil, Montesquieu, who contrasted "volonté particulière" and "volonté générale" in a secular sense in his most celebrated chapter (Chapter XI) of "De L'Esprit des Lois" (1748). In his "Discourse on Political Economy", Rousseau explicitly credits Diderot's "Encyclopédie" article ""Droit Naturel"" as the source of "the luminous concept" of the general will, of which he maintains his own thoughts are simply a development. Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau's innovation was to use the term in a secular rather than theological sense.