In the middle ages 239

to some part of the state. The prince is the head;

the senate is the heart; officers and judges are the

eyes, ears, and tongue; officials are the hands; the

peasants and the workers are the feet of the state, —

so that, remarks this Enghsh writer, the state has

more feet than a centipede or a scolopendra. The

function of protecting the people becomes the

"footwear" of the state. Indeed, there is no reason

why one might not continue this little game of

anthropomorphic comparison withoul end.^^

The idea is no discovery of John of Salisbury's.

He himself refers it to a letter written by Plutarch

to Trajan (falsely so far as we yet know). The

comparison is repeated in the thirteenth century,

but it has lost its literal value. Each state, each

church, each city, even each guild, is compared to

a natural body. But the philosophers of that cen-

tury are not misled by its purely figurative value,

and Engelbert of Volkersdorf, abbot of Admont,

who writes about 1290 a treatise concerning the

rule of Princes, speaks of a moral and political

body, in contrast with the body of nature." Fur-

ther, when Thomas Aquinas calls the collectivity

of the citizens a public person, persona puhlica,^^

there is no doubt possible about his true meaning.

Reduced to the role of an imaginative instru-

ment, the comparison is not wanting in elegance;

21 Polycraticus, lib. V, cap. 1 and 2.

22 Gierke, op, cit., p. 24.

2aSumma Theol. Ia2ae, q, XC, art. 3.

240 PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION

it shows in a striking way that, in a political or ec-

clesiastical organism, the members do not occupy

the same place; that there are diversities of func-

tions; that there are intermediate articulations;

that a healthy organ can help or supply a weak or

defective organ. The comparison is well suited to

the mediaeval mind with its delight in symbols, and

to an age which speaks of the mystical marriage of

Christ with the Church and of the bishop with his

diocesan church, and which likens to daughters the

various abbeys which have grown out of the mother

abbey. Such symbols, and many more, deceived

no one. Nor do we^ today take literally Tennyson's

comparison of "the million-footed mob,""^ or the

expression "adopted towns," which was given to

certain cities crushed during the war, or "mother-

towns" as the name proudly assumed by certain

other cities which undertook the adoption. The

philosophers of the thirteenth century did not mis-

take the sjfcraw of words for the grain of ideas. The

organic theory, made fashionable today by certain

German philosophers is contrary to the genius of

scholastic philosophy, as it is opposed to the juri-

dical doctrine of the thirteenth century ; both would

have regarded it as a seductive mirage.

VII

A short time before the war, I made a brief stay

at Strasbourg. In visiting its magnificent cathe-

24 The Fleet.