38 SOCIAL SCIENTIST and inclusiveness. At times he thought, somewhat on Plato's lines, of a symmetric system of isomorphic wholes. In fact, the notion of symmetry was so strong in him that he planned in a grand scale about three works on body celestial, body civil and body natural—in modern terms, natural universe, society and man. His universe was material. Anything that was not body was simply nothing. He made a small concession to the then current superstition in admitting that spirits existed, but added, not without a certain humour, that they too had body—a statement calculated to hurt the sentiments of the spirits more than a simple denial of their existence. Hobbes was a mechanist with exceptional imagination. In his system, man, society and nature formed a scheme of machines within machines. All those machines were however obligingly constructed on a single model—Hobbes's favourite machine, the watch2. He used the simile of the clock with rare effect, so successfully that subsequently men tended to forget that it was a simile. The universe was a Cartesian cosmos in which the function of God was that of a great mathematician.3 All natural processes were exquisitely and perfectly controlled by natural laws. The mystcriousness of the medieval conception of nature was destroyed. From the earlier distinction between the known and the mysterious, philosophy now moved to the more confident distinction between the known and the not yet known. Appropriately, Leviathan opens with the famous mechanical allegory: Nature (ihe art whereby God has made and governs the world) is by the art of man; as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs. . . why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an aritificial life? For what is the heart but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body such as was intended by the artificer? Art does yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created the great Leviathan called a commonwealth or state. The whole is a composite of its parts. "The wealth and riches of all pariticular members are strength (of the state); salus populi its business; . . . equity and law are artificial reason and will; concord health; sedition sickness; and civil war death." One is sometimes not entirely sure if it is still a simile or a serious argument about the transitivity of characteristics from the units