oses of religion or learning to twenty
individuals not incorporated, there is no legal way of continuing the
property to any other persons for the same purposes, but by endless
conveyances from one to the other, as often as the hands are changed.
But, when they are consolidated and united into a corporation, they
and their successors are then considered as one person in law: as one
person, they have one will, which is collected from the sense of the
majority of the individuals: this one will may establish rules and
orders for the regulation of the whole, which are a sort of municipal
laws of this little republic; or rules and statutes may be prescribed
to it at it's creation, which are then in the place of natural laws:
the privileges and immunities, the estates and possessions, of the
corporation, when once vested in them, will be for ever vested,
without any new conveyance to new successions; for all the individual
members that have existed from the foundation to the present time, or
that shall ever hereafter exist, are but one person in law, a person
that never dies: in like manner as the river Thames is still the same
river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instant.

THE honour of originally inventing these political constitutions
entirely belongs to the Romans. They were introduced, as Plutarch
says, by Numa; who finding, upon his accession, the city torn to
pieces by the two rival factions of Sabines, and Romans, thought it a
prudent and politic measure, to subdivide these two into many smaller
ones, by instituting separate societies of every manual trade and
profession. They were afterwards much considered by the civil law[a],
in which they were called _universitates_, as forming one whole out of
many individuals; or _collegia_, from being gathered together: they
were adopted also by the canon law, for the maintenance of
ecclesiastical discipline; and from them our spiritual corporations
are derived. But our laws have considerably refined and improved upon
the invention, according to the usual genius of the English nation:
particularly with regard to sole corporations, consisting of one
person only, of which the Roman lawyers had no notion; their maxim
being that "_tres faciunt collegium_[b]." Though they held, that if a
corporation, originally consisting of three persons, be reduced to
one, "_si universitas ad unum redit_," it may still subsist as a
corporation, "_et stet nomen universitatis_