GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

CRITICISM OF IDEALIST THEORY 763
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE HUMAN BODY
AND THE BODY POLITIC. Although in these respects
the analogy between the human body and the body politic
is fruitful, it has done harm to political theory rather than
good. For between the human body and the body politic
there are highly important differences. First, the organs
of the human body have admittedly no rights of their own
and no ends of their own. The individual members of the
State have both individual rights and individual ends.
Secondly, the organs of the human body have no purpose
apart from the whole, for their sole purpose is to con*
tribute to the well-being of the whole. But society has no
save such as is realized in the lives of its members.
purpose
Thirdly, while the organs of the human body have no
life outside the human body, but derive their life from that
to which they belong, the members of a society have a life
apart from it, whereas society has no life apart from that
of its members. Society, in fact, subsists in the wills, the
desires, the sympathies and the thoughts of the men whom
it knits together. It is constituted by comradeship in work,
by fellowship in purpose and in hope, by general inheritance
of thought; in other words, by a common life and by the
social consciousness in and through which men become
aware of the common life. Apart from these things, it is
nothing. Herbert Spencer sought to express this distinction
between the body politic and the human body by the
phrases "discrete organism" and "concrete organism*',
a society being classed as the former, the human body as
the latter.
Fourthly, society only comes into being through the
association of its members. The existence of its individual
members is, that is to say, logically prior to that of society,
even if they do not it precede in point of time. But there is
no sense in saying that the organs of a human body
and the
precede the body. The organs of the body
body logically entail each other in precisely the same sense
as the sides and angles of a triangle and the triangle
logically entail each other*