Article IV. On the Members or Associates of the Commonwealth

560. Excessive use has been made from ancient times, even by the Philosopher, of the comparison of the parts and the body, so that he contended that, when the State perishes, individual men and families remain only equivocally,¹ as though they had begun to be subject to another substantial being. The Scholastic Doctors perhaps imitated this too much as well. For if this rationale of parts were pressed, why could the State not make individual men entirely subject to itself? Why, in a necessity, could it not even pour out the life of innocent persons, just as it is lawful to amputate members to save the body? Moreover, no rationale is contained in a comparison.

¹ Politics, bk. 1, chap. 3, no. 4.

But it must be said that human persons as such do not take the place of parts, but merely place in the midst of society both their necessities, that they may be supplied, and their faculties, that these may receive the common use which, after an equitable distribution of burdens has been made, the common good demands and the necessary relation to their proper end permits. Nor is the faculty by which public power can set aside certain private rights on account of the common good derived formally from the rationale of parts, but merely from the fact that civil society can scarcely subsist without such subordination and, as we were saying, nature, which willed society to exist, willed it to be furnished with the requisite means.