EEKOES OF TLATO AND IIOBBES. 379 



in this, that they construe a society as an artificial struc 

 ture. Plato s model republic his ideal of a healthful body 

 politic is to be consciously put together by men ; just as 

 a watch might be : and Plato manifestly thinks of societies 

 in general as thus originated. Quite specifically does 

 Hobbes express this view. &quot;For by art&quot; he says, &quot;ia 

 created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH.&quot; 

 And lie even goes so far as to compare the supposed 

 social contract, from which a society suddenly originates, 

 to the creation of a man by the divine fiat. Thus they 

 both fall into the extreme inconsistency of considering a 

 community as similar in structure to a human being, and 

 yet as produced in the same way as an artificial mechanism 

 in nature, an organism ; in history, a machine. 



Notwithstanding errors, however, these speculations 

 have considerable significance. That such analogies, crude 

 ly as they are thought out, should have been alleged by 

 Plato and Ilobbcs and many others, is a reason for suspect 

 ing that some analogy exists. The untenableness of the 

 particular comparisons above instanced, is no ground for 

 denying an essential parallelism ; for early ideas are usually 

 but vague adumbrations of the truth. Lacking the great 

 generalizations of biology, it was, as we have said, im 

 possible to trace out the real relations of social organiza 

 tions to organizations of another order. We propose here 

 to show what are the analogies which modern science dis 

 closes to us. 



Let us set out by succinctly stating the points of 

 similarity and the points of difference. Societies agree 

 with individual organisms in four conspicuous peculiari 

 ties : 



1. That commencing as small aggregations, they insensi 

 bly augment in mass : some of them eventually reaching 

 ten thousand times what they originally were. 



2. That while a,t first so simple in structure as to be 



