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 in individuals, be
_conditions_ 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 organization of the 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 commonly find
mixed up with the truths of early speculation. Still more erroneous are
the two conceptions in this, that they construe a society as an
artificial structure. 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 a like view. "For by
_art_," he says, "is 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 likenesses, crudely as they are thought out,
should have been alleged by Plato and Hobbes and others, is a reason
for suspecting that _some_ analogy exists. The untenableness of the
particular parallelisms above instanced, is no ground for denying an
essential parallelism; since early ideas are usually but vague
adumbrations of the truth. Lacking the great generalizations of biology,
it was, as we have said, impossible to trace out the real relations of
social organizations to organizations of another order. We propose here
to show what are the analogies which modern science discl