ERRORS OF PLATO AND HOBBES. 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. " For by ar^," he says, " ia 

 created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth." 

 And he 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 Hobbes 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 w^e 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 at first so simple in structure as to be 



