138 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC 



idea of Plato's model republic'' to be ''the 

 correspondence between the parts of a society 

 and the faculties of the human mind." 



Hobbes, the philosopher of Malmesbury, 

 comes next with his celebrated "Leviathan/* 

 Hobbes sought to establish a still more definite 

 parallelism; not, however between a society 

 and the mind, but between a society and 

 the human body. Hobbes' "Leviathan" was 

 the Commonwealth and he "carries this com- 

 parison so far as to actually give a drawing of 

 the Leviathan — a vast human-shaped figure, 

 whose body and limbs are made up of mul- 

 titudes of men." 



Spencer criticizes these analogies of Plato 

 and Hobbes in detail, but finds the chief error 

 of both writers to consist in the assumption by 

 both "that the organization of a society is 

 comparable, not simply to the organization of 

 a living body in general, but to the organiza- 

 tion of a human body in particular. There is 

 no warrant whatever for assuming this. It is 

 in no way implied by the evidence; and is 

 simply one of those fancies which we com- 

 monly find mixed up with the truths of early 

 speculation." But, insists Spencer: "The un- 

 tenableness of the particular parallelisms above 

 instanced, is no ground for denying an es- 

 sential parallelism ; since early ideas are 



