1. We have been guided throughout our argument by the idea that the relation of a given mind to the mind of society [1] is comparable to the relation between our apprehension of a single object and our view of nature as a whole. The former term, in each case, we cannot but suppose to be an individualised case of the latter. The latter seems inevitably to imply a universal principle corresponding to every feature of the former. We can never see through the connections, and the connections of the connections--_e.g._ of gravitation and of colour--in every part. But our ideal as theorists would be to analyse the physical object into features, every one of which should be a case of a natural law, and the whole taken together a case of the whole system of natural law, which would be our scientific view of the world. [1] I neglect, for the moment, the difference between the mind of society and mind at its best. The difference is practically considerable, but I shall attempt to make it appear, in the course of the present chapter, to be a difference of progress but not of direction. In treating of a human mind in its relation to {297} Society and the State, our ideal is comparable to this. We should like to analyse any given mind into features each of which should be an individual case of a universal principle, and the whole of which, taken together, should be a case of the whole system of principles incarnate in the world, and proximately in the social world. Plato, simplifying for the sake of elucidation the City-state, which to our minds was already simple, represented a community, in diagrammatic form, as consisting in a threefold structure of classes, in which were incarnate the three main features which he discriminated in the individual soul--the desires necessary to living, the spirit of action, and the power of seeing things as a whole. 2. The principles which constitute a society are facts as well as ideas, and purposes as well as facts. This threefold character is united in what we describe by the general term “institutions,” a term which would apply perfectly well to Plato’s “classes” in virtue of the definite relations with which he invests them.