, for perfect, even if
alien, achievements, and this, so long as perfection had not been
actually attained, would indicate a mind dead to the ideal.

[Sidenote: Fable of the belly and the members.]

[Sidenote: Fallacy in it.]

Menenius Agrippa expressed very well the aristocratic theory of society
when he compared the state to a human body in which the common people
were the hands and feet, and the nobles the belly. The people, when they
forgot the conditions of their own well-being, might accuse themselves
of folly and the nobles of insolent idleness, for the poor spent their
lives in hopeless labour that others who did nothing might enjoy all.
But there was a secret circulation of substance in the body politic, and
the focussing of all benefits in the few was the cause of nutrition and
prosperity to the many. Perhaps the truth might be even better expressed
in a physiological figure somewhat more modern, by saying that the
brain, which consumes much blood, well repays its obligations to the
stomach and members, for it co-ordinates their motions and prepares
their satisfactions. Yet there is this important difference between the
human body and the state, a difference which renders Agrippa's fable
wholly misleading: the hands and feet have no separate consciousness,
and if they are ill used it is the common self that feels the weariness
and the bruises. But in the state the various members have a separate
sensibility, and, although their ultimate interests lie, no doubt, in
co-operation and justice, their immediate instinct and passion may lead
them to oppress one another perpetually. At one time the brain,
forgetting the members, may feast on opiates and unceasing music; and
again, the members, thinking they could more economically shift for
themselves, may starve the brain and reduce the body politic to a colony
of vegetating microbes. In a word, the consciousness inhabiting the
brain embodies the functions of all the body's organs, and responds in a
general way to all their changes of fortune, but in the state every
cell has a separate brain, and the greatest citizen, by his existence,
realises only his own happiness.

[Sidenote: Theism expresses better the aristocratic ideal.]

For an ideal aristocracy we should not look to Plato's Republic, for
that Utopia is avowedly the ideal only for fallen and corrupt states,
since luxury and injustice, we are told, first necessitated war, and the
guiding idea of all the P