378 THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 



tlie same in the body natural ; the wealth and riches of all the 

 particular members are the strength; sains populi^ the peopU^A 

 safety, its business ; counsellors, hj whom all things needful for it 

 to know are suggested unto it, are the memory ; equity and laws 

 an artificial reason and will ; concord, health; sedition, sicJcness ; 

 civil war, death,'''' ^ 



And Hobbes carries this comparison so far as actually 

 to give a drawing of the Leviathan — a vast human-shaped 

 figure, whose body and limbs are made up of multitudes oi 

 men. Just noting that these different analogies asserted 

 by Plato and Hobbes, serve to cancel each other (being, as 

 they are, so completely at variance), we may say that on 

 the whole those of Hobbes are the more plausible. But 

 they are full of inconsistencies. If the sovereignty is the 

 soul of the body politic, how can it be that magistrates, 

 who are a kind of deputy-sovereigns, should be comparable 

 to joints? Or, again, how can the three mental functions, 

 memory, reason, and will, be severally analogous, the first to 

 counsellors, who are a class of public officers, and the other 

 two to equity and laws, which are not classes of officers, 

 but abstractions ? Or, once more, if magistrates are the 

 artificial joints of society, how can reward and punishment 

 be its nerves ? Its nerves must surely be some class of 

 persons. Reward and punishment must in societies, as m 

 individuals, be conditio7is of the nerves, and not the nerves 

 themselves. 



But the chief errors of these comparisons made by Plato 

 and Hobbes, lie much deeper. Both thinkers assume that 

 the organization of a society is comparable, not simply to 

 the organization of a living body in general, but to the or- 

 ganization of the human body in particular. There is no 

 warrant whatever for assuming this. It is in no way im- 

 plied by the evidence ; and is simply one of those fancies 

 which we commonly find mixed up with the truths of early 

 speculation. Still more erroneous are the two conceptiongi 



