The liver, the heart, and the brain

Abstract

In the introduction to Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes notes that man succeeds so well in imitating nature that, unknowingly, he is able to "make an artificial animal." "Why may we not say," he wonders, "that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?" Indeed, man's heart is "but a spring," the nerves "so many strings," and the joints "so many wheels giving motion to the whole body." The body politic, Hobbes insists, is also a human creation, a creature: "an artificial man." In keeping with this set of similes, Hobbes defines sovereignty as an "artificial soul. .. giving life and motion to the whole body" and the members of the executive order as "artificial joints" linked to "reward and punishment" as if to "nerves." 1 As construed by Hobbes, the body politic is not immune to pathological dysfunction; in the commonwealth, concord is health, sedition is sickness, and civil war is death. The physician and art theorist Francesco Scannelli (1616-63) 2 is unlikely to have been acquainted with Hobbes's work.