* Thirdly, what is a Christian Commonwealth. * Secondly, how, and by what covenants it is made what are the rights and just power or authority of a sovereign and what it is that preserveth and dissolveth it.
To describe the nature of this artificial man, I will consider * First, the matter thereof, and the artificer both which is man.
Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength salus populi (the people’s safety) its business counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory equity and laws, an artificial reason and will concord, health sedition, sickness and civil war, death. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial 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 goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. NATURE (the art whereby God hath 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. ►→ A Brief Life of Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679 United architects – essays table of content all sites ►→ see also ►→ THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1679)
0 kommentar(er)
