CHAPTER XIV

PSYCHOLOGICAL

_Evolution of Mind--Body and Mind--Experience and Intuitions--Test of Truth_

In seeking to appreciate Spencer's contributions to Psychology, it seems necessary to distinguish between what he tried to do and his success in doing it. For an attempt, especially a pioneer attempt, may have great historical importance although it is only to a limited degree successful. The attempts to cross a continent, or to scale a mountain, to make a flying machine, or to discover the nature of protoplasm, may be relative failures, but even the attempts may spell progress. They may offer clues for other attempts, or they may show that certain ways of attacking the problem are unpromising. And so while the doctors of philosophy differ as to the value of many of Spencer's psychological essays, there are few who go the length of denying their historical interest and importance.

(1) _Evolution of Mind._--In his imaginary review of his _Principles of Psychology_, which is not without a grim humour, Spencer supposes the critic to begin by saying: "Our attitude towards this work is something like that of the Roman poet to whom the poetaster brought some verses with the request that he would erase any parts he did not like, and who replied--one erasure will suffice. We reject absolutely the entire doctrine which the book contains; and for the sufficient reason that it is founded on a fallacy." The fallacy was, of course, the evolution-idea, and it was Spencer's chief contribution to Psychology that he insisted on regarding the human mind as a product, the outlines of whose history could be more or less clearly descried. In other words, he attempted a genetic interpretation of our mental life in the light of antecedent simpler expressions of mentality in the child and in the animal world. In so doing he was a pioneer, and he doubtless made a pioneer's mistakes. None the less he helped to effect for psychology the transition from a static and morphological mode of interpretation to one which is distinctively kinetic, physiological, and historical. That this is nowadays the mood of all psychologists is well-known. Thus one of our leading modern exponents says, "We may define psychology as the science of the development of mind."[12]

Spencer sought to make mental processes more intelligible by disclosing the gradualness of their evolution. "It is not more certain that, from the simple reflex action by which the infant sucks, up to the elaborate reasoning of the adult man, the progress is by daily infinitesimal steps, than it is certain that between the automatic actions of the lowest creatures and the highest conscious actions of the human race, a series of actions displayed by the various tribes of the animal kingdom may be so placed as to render it impossible to say of any one step in the series, Here intelligence begins." Objectively, with data drawn from the animal world and from child-study, he attempted to trace the evolution of mind from reflex action through instinct to reason, memory, feeling, and will, by the interaction of the nervous system with its gradually widening environment. Subjectively, in his analytic task, he endeavoured to show that all mental states are referable to primitive elements of consciousness or units of feeling, which he called nervous or psychical shocks.

Spencer's general position is thus summed up:--

"The Law of Evolution holds of the inner world as it does of the outer world. On tracing up from its low and vague beginnings the intelligence which becomes so marvellous in the highest beings, we find that under whatever aspect contemplated, it presents a progressive transformation of like nature with the progressive transformation we trace in the Universe as a whole, no less than in each of its parts. If we study the development of the nervous system, we see it advancing in integration, in complexity, in definiteness. If we turn to its functions, we find these similarly show an ever-increasing inter-dependence, an augmentation in number and heterogeneity, and a greater precision. If we examine the relations of these functions to the actions going on in the world around, we see that the correspondence between them progresses in range and amount, becomes continually more complex and special, and advances through differentiations and integrations like those everywhere going on. And when we observe the correlative states of consciousness, we discover that these, too, beginning as simple, vague, and incoherent, become increasingly numerous in their kinds, are united into aggregates which are larger, more multitudinous, and more multiform, and eventually assume those finished shapes we see in scientific generalisations, where definitely-quantitative elements are co-ordinated in definitely-quantitative relations" (_Principles of Psychology_, i. p. 627).

In Spencer's system mind is a secondary and derivative expression of life; it emerges after corporeal evolution has made some strides; it is always dependent on the development of the nervous system. This is an inference from the facts of individual development and racial evolution, which clearly show that mental life emerges from antecedent stages in which only bodily life can be discerned. And if mental life were a merely incidental quality, like the possession of red blood, there would be no objection to the inference. But since mental life is almost from the first a necessary postulate--wherever we have to deal with behaviour--and as we are quite unable to suggest how it can arise out of metabolism, it seems more scientific, at present, to regard the potentiality of mind as being just as primitive as metabolism. It should be noted that the most recent researches[13] on the behaviour of the simplest animals disclose something more than reflex actions, namely a pursuit of the method of trial and error, involving some of the fundamental qualities seen in higher animals.

Just as inorganic evolution must have made many advances before organisms became possible, so organic evolution must have made many advances before the mental side of life could find distinct expression. But as we cannot retranslate the daily activities of even a very simple animal into chemico-physical language, we are forced at present to conclude that what is called inanimate matter has somehow wrapped up with it the potentiality of life; and as we cannot retranslate behaviour into the metabolism of nerve-cells, we are forced at present to conclude that life has somehow wrapped up with it the potentiality of mind. In other words, what is called the evolution of mind is a genetic description of the stages in its emergence from its state of universal potentiality.

(2) _Body and Mind._--A second service Spencer rendered to Psychology was that of linking it to Biology. He gave clear expression to the doctrine, which many workers had been reaching towards, of the correlation of mind and body. Although sagacious thinkers at many different dates had pointed out that the flesh not only wars against the spirit, but in a humiliating way conditions its activity, the recognition of the intimate correlation of body and mind was still requiring its advocate when Spencer wrote his _Psychology_. Ignoring what had been clearly shown even by Descartes and the truth in Hartley's _Observations on Man_ (1749), there was still a school who practically dealt with the mind and its faculties on the one side, the body and its functions on the other side, as entirely independent existences. The old idea that character inheres in the ghost, and that the body is merely the ghost's house, having no causal relation to it, still lingered in more or less refined form when Spencer set himself to show "that, in both amounts and kinds, mental manifestations are in part dependent on bodily structures. Mind is not as deep as the brain only, but is, in a sense, as deep as the viscera." In a detailed way, he sought to show that "the amounts and kinds of the mental actions constituting consciousness vary, other things equal, according to the rapidity, the quantity, and the quality, of the blood-supply; and all these vary according to the sizes and proportions of the sundry organs which unite in preparing blood from food, the organs which circulate it, and the organs which purify it from waste products." To put it concretely, he contended that when we consider Handel, for instance, "so wonderfully productive, so marvellous for the number and vigour of his musical compositions," we must also remember that he had an unusually active digestion. "And not the quantity of mind only, but the quality of mind also, is in part determined by these psycho-physical connections. Amount and structure of brain being the same, not only may the totality of feelings and thoughts be greater or less according as this or that viscus is well or ill-developed, but the feelings and thoughts may also be favourably or unfavourably modified in their kinds." So morality, as well as mind, is as deep as the viscera.

Here again the general truth which Spencer forcibly expounded, though it was not of course peculiarly his, is one that has met with almost universal recognition. As Prof. G. F. Stout says:--

"The life of the brain is part of the life of the organism as a whole, and inasmuch as consciousness is the correlate of brain-process, it is conditioned by organic process in general. It is clear that the unity and connection of psychical states cannot be clearly conceived without taking into account the unity and connection of the processes of the organism as a whole."[14]

As Prof. James Ward says[15]:--

"Modern science is content to ascertain co-existences and successions between facts of mind and facts of body. The relations so determined constitute the newest of the sciences, psychophysiology or psychophysics. From this science we learn that there exist manifold correspondences of the most intimate and exact kind between states and changes of consciousness on the one hand, and states and changes of brain on the other. As respects complexity, intensity, and time-order, the concomitance is apparently complete. Mind and brain advance and decline _pari passu_; the stimulants and narcotics that enliven or depress the action of the one tell in like manner upon the other. Local lesions that suspend or destroy, more or less completely, the functions of the centres of sight and speech, for instance, involve an equivalent loss, temporary or permanent, of words and ideas."

_Experience and Intuitions._--The history of psychology discloses a long drawn-out dispute between schools of "empiricists," who said "all our knowledge is derived from experience," and schools of "intuitionalists," who said, "Nay, but we have innate ideas or intuitions which transcend experience." A parallel dispute was long continued in regard to moral ideas. Between the disputants Spencer appeared as a peace-maker, and the reconciliation he proposed was in terms of evolution. We can best express it by a sentence from a letter to John Stuart Mill:--

"Just in the same way that I believe the intuition of space, possessed by any living individual, to have arisen from organised and consolidated experiences of all antecedent individuals who bequeathed to him their slowly-developed nervous organisations--just as I believe that this intuition, requiring only to be made definite and complete by personal experiences, has practically become a form of thought, apparently quite independent of experience; so do I believe that the experiences of utility, organised and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding nervous modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition--certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility."

In short, Spencer maintained that intellectual and moral intuitions had arisen from gradually organised and inherited experience. "What the transcendentalist called a _priori_ principles the evolutionist regards as _a priori_ indeed to the individual, but _a posteriori_ to the race; that is as race experiences which in the individual appear as intuitions."[16]

This was an ingenious _eirenicon_, but it does not seem to satisfy all the philosophers, those namely who feel that intuitions--both intellectual and moral--have a validity, universality, and compelling necessity which cannot be accounted for if they are simply the outcome of race-experience. The only alternative seems to be to say that their validity depends on the nature of mind itself, or, what comes to the same thing, because they are in harmony with the spiritual principle in nature.

Nor are the biologists quite satisfied with Spencer's reconciliation, between empiricism and apriorism, for, in the form he gave it, there is the tacit assumption that results of experience are as such transmissible. But this is biologically a hazardous assumption. The only alternative would be to suppose that the advance to rational intuitions came about by the selection of variations towards that type of mental constitution which rational and moral intuitions express--a probably very slow process which would be sheltered by the individual moulding himself to the social heritage in which many results of experience are registered and entailed independently of any germ-plasm. It is possible that there has been an underestimate of the extent to which what are regarded as intuitions are sustained by tradition in the widest sense, and an underestimate of the extent to which they are individually acquired by each successive generation.

When we speak of either instincts or intuitions arising by the selection of variations, we need not think of such wonderful results as originating in fortuitous mental sports; we are quite entitled to think of definiteness in mental (at the same time neural) variation as in bodily variation; we are quite entitled to think of mental (at the same time neural) 'mutations' as well as bodily 'mutations'; we do not require to burden natural selection with more than the pruning off of irrationalities, instabilities, disharmonies, and imbecilities. Thus even biologically we may admit that the validity of intuitions depends on the nature of mind itself, socially confirmed from age to age.

_Test of Truth._--Spencer took great stock in "intuitions," especially in his _First Principles_, and yet he believed in their empirical origin; and this leads us to ask what his test of truth was. It may be summed up in the phrase "the inconceivability of the opposite." After a curiously self-contradictory attempt to show by reasoning that "a certainty greater than that which any reasoning can yield has to be recognised at the outset of all reasoning," he states the "universal postulate": "The inconceivableness of its negation is that which shows a cognition to possess the highest rank--is the criterion by which its insurpassable validity is known."

He admitted, however, that there were limitations to the utility of this test of truth. "That some propositions have been wrongly accepted as true, because their negations were supposed inconceivable when they were not, does not disprove the validity of the test, for these reasons: (1) That they were complex propositions, not to be established by a test applicable only to propositions no further decomposable; (2) that this test, in common with any test, is liable to yield untrue results, either from incapacity or from carelessness in those who use it." In regard to which Prof. Sidgwick says:[17] "These two qualifications surely reduce very much the practical value of the criterion. For how are we to proceed if philosophers disagree about the application of the criteria? How are we to test 'undecomposability'? For notions which on first reflection appear to us simple are so often found on further reflective analysis to be composite. Which conclusion, then, are we to trust, the earlier or the later? This seems to me a serious dilemma for Mr Spencer; whichever way he answers he is in a difficulty."

It would seem then that Spencer did not get much further than others who have tried to answer the question: _What is the test of truth?_ Nor for our part can we supply the deficiency. It is probably more profitable, as Sidgwick says, "to turn from infallible criteria to methods of verification, from the search after an absolute test of truth to the humbler task of devising modes of excluding error." "These verifications are based on experience of the ways in which the human mind has actually been convinced of error, and been led to discard it; _i.e._, three modes of conflict, conflict between a judgment first formed, and the view of this judgment taken by the same mind on subsequent reconsideration; conflict between two different judgments, or the implications of two partially different judgments formed by the same mind under different conditions; and finally, conflict between the judgments of different minds." In other words, what is true for us is that which survives these conflicts, but the conflict is unceasing.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] G. F. Stout, _Analytic Psychology_, vol. i., 1896, p. 9.

[13] H. S. Jennings, "Publications of Carnegie Institute," Washington, No. 16 (1904), pp. 1-256.

[14] _Op. cit._, p. 27.

[15] _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, 1899, vol. i. p. 10.

[16] W. H. Hudson, Introduction to the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer.

[17] _The Philosophy of Kant and other Lecturers_, 1905, p. 319

XV

SOCIOLOGICAL

_What Sociology is--Criticism of Sociology--Sociology and History--Spencer's Sociological Data--Central Ideas of Spencer's Sociology--The Idea of the Social Organism--Parallelisms between a Society and an Individual Organism_

While Spencer had little agreement with Comte, he was at one with him in regarding Sociology as a possible science and as the crowning science.

_What Sociology is._--By sociology is meant the study of the structure and activity, development and evolution of social groups, which have sufficient integration or unity to justify their being regarded as "organisms," with a life--and a mind--of their own. That many active-minded people persist in looking askance at sociology--as "a mass of facts about society," and "no science," is not unnatural, since the science is still very young and its definition is still elastic. At certain points it necessarily comes in contact with biology, _e.g._ in the study of heredity and eugenics; with psychology, _e.g._ in the study of tradition and religion; with anthropology and history; with economics and politics. But it has a distinctive place to fill as the study of human integrates, of groups capable of acting, consciously or unconsciously, as unities, as more than the sum of their parts. When it has grown up and done more work, it will be justified, like Wisdom in general, of its children, and any discussion of its claims to be a "science" will be an anachronism. Meanwhile, though the youngest of the sciences is still struggling for existence, we need not fear for its safety--it is a Hercules in the cradle.

_Criticism of Sociology._--The distrust which many thoughtful minds have of "Sociology" is well expressed by Prof. Henry Sidgwick in one of his essays:--

"It is not necessary to show that if we could ascertain from the past history of human society the fundamental laws of social evolution as a whole, so that we could accurately forecast the main features of the future state with which our present social world is pregnant--it is not needful, I say, to show that the science which gave this foresight would be of the highest value to a statesman, and would absorb or dominate our present political economy. What has to be proved is that this supremely important knowledge is within our grasp; that the sociology which professes this prevision is really an established science."[18]

He goes on to say that there are two simple tests of the establishment of a science, recognised by Comte in his discussion of this very subject, which can be quickly and decisively applied to the claims of existing sociology. These tests may be characterised as (1) Consensus or Continuity, and (2) Prevision. The former Sedgwick explains in Comte's own words: "When we find that recent works, instead of being the result and development of what has gone before, have a character as personal as that of their authors, and bring the most fundamental ideas into question--then," says Comte, "we may be sure we are not dealing with any doctrine deserving the name of positive science." [The validity of Comte's criterion seems very doubtful, but let that pass.]

"Now," Sidgwick continues, "if we compare the most elaborate and ambitious treatises on sociology, of which there happens to be one in each of the three leading scientific languages--Comte's _Politique Positive_, Spencer's _Sociology_, and Schäffle's _Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers_--we see at once that they exhibit the most complete and conspicuous absence of agreement or continuity in their treatment of the fundamental questions of social evolution." Sidgwick illustrates this, in the first place, by taking the exceedingly difficult question of the future of religion, and shows easily enough how the three doctors differ. Perhaps it would have been fairer to have selected a less difficult problem.

It seems profitable to follow Sidgwick's contrast since it brings out some of Spencer's characteristic doctrines.

"If we inquire after the characteristics of the religion of which their science leads them to foresee the coming prevalence, they give with nearly equal confidence answers as divergent as can be conceived. Schäffle cannot comprehend that the place of the great Christian Churches can be taken by anything but a purified form of Christianity; Spencer contemplates complacently the reduction of religious thought and sentiment to a perfectly indefinite consciousness of an Unknowable and the emotion that accompanies this peculiar intellectual exercise; while Comte has no doubt that the whole history of religion--which, as he says, 'should resume the entire history of human development,' has been leading up to the worship of the Great Being, Humanity, personified domestically for each normal male individual by his nearest female relatives. It would seem that the science which allows these discrepancies in its chief expositors must be still in its infancy." "I do not doubt that our sociologists are sincere in setting before us their conception of the coming social state as the last term of a series of which the law has been discovered by patient historical study; but when we look closely into their work it becomes only too evident that each philosopher has constructed on the basis of personal feeling and experience his ideal future in which our present social deficiencies are to be remedied; and that the process by which history is arranged in steps pointing towards his Utopia bears not the faintest resemblance to a scientific demonstration."

The remark on the influence of "personal feeling and experience" recalls the interesting sentence in the preface to Spencer's _Autobiography_, "One significant truth has been made clear--that in the genesis of a system of thought the emotional nature is a large factor: perhaps as large a factor as the intellectual nature." One cannot but ask if Sidgwick supposed that his own contributions were uninfluenced by his "personal feeling and experience." Is it not almost a truism that until science reaches the stage of measurement or other modes of direct perceptual verification, it must be tinctured with personal feeling?

Sidgwick goes on to point out that similar discrepancies are evident "when we turn from religion to industry, and examine the forecasts of industrial development offered to the statesman in the name of scientific sociology as a substitute for the discarded calculations of the mere economist. With equal confidence, history is represented as leading up, now to the naïve and unqualified individualism of Spencer, now to the carefully guarded and elaborated socialism of Schäffle, now to Comte's dream of securing seven-roomed houses for all working men--with other comforts to correspond--solely by the impressive moral precepts of his philosophic priests. Guidance, truly, is here enough and to spare: but how is the bewildered statesman to select his guidance when his sociological doctors exhibit this portentous disagreement?" "Nor is it only that they adopt diametrically opposed conclusions: we find that each adopts his conclusion with the most serene and complete indifference to the line of historical reasoning on which his brother sociologist relies."

Now this is wholesome criticism, but its force is due to the fact that sociology is still very young. It would be equally easy to discredit evolution-lore by showing the discrepancies between the ætiology of Darwin and Wallace, or Spencer and Weismann. But it must not be imagined that Sidgwick was opposed to Sociology or doubted its validity; he was simply advocating caution. "There is no reason to despair of the progress of general sociology; but I do not think that its development can be really promoted by shutting our eyes to its present very rudimentary condition." He evidently looked forward with hope to a time "when the general science of society has solved the problems which it has as yet only managed to define more or less clearly--when for positive knowledge it can offer us something better than a mixture of vague and variously applied physiological analogies, imperfectly verified historical generalisations, and unwarranted political predictions--when it has succeeded in establishing on the basis of a really scientific induction its forecasts of social evolution." The recently established "Sociological Society"[19] has in its first volume of publications suggested many ways in which those interested can assist in the development of this new science, and already as one of its indirect fruits we can point to the establishment of well defined courses of Sociology in the University of London.

_Sociology and History._--Something must be said in regard to Spencer's somewhat peculiar attitude to history. "I take," he said, "but little interest in what are called histories, but am interested only in Sociology, which stands related to these so-called histories much as a vast building stands related to the heaps of stones and brick around it." He went the length of saying: "Had Greece and Rome never existed, human life, and the right conduct of it, would have been in their essentials exactly what they now are: survival or death, health or disease, prosperity or adversity, happiness or misery, would have been just in the same ways determined by the adjustment or non-adjustment of actions to requirements." When we reflect on the complex ways in which the influence of Greece and Rome has saturated into our life, and has become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, in literature and art, in philosophy and science, so that the ideas and feelings among and in which we live and move are hardly intelligible apart from it, we can hardly believe our ears when we listen to Spencer's sentence. It seems to throw a weird light on his Sociology.

For lack of personal interest and in his preoccupation with general movements, Spencer failed to do justice to what is ordinarily called history. While we can sympathise with his recoil from historical studies which lose the wood in the trees, which are like palæontologies that never disclose the ascent of life, the same limitation befalls every kind of specialist study, and is almost a necessary evil, due as Spencer would phrase it to "the imbecilities of our understanding."

Spencer's point of view was this:--

"To have before us, in manageable form, evidence proving the correlations which everywhere exist between great militant activity and the degradation of women, between a despotic form of government and elaborate ceremonial in social intercourse, between relatively peaceful social activities and the relaxation of coercive institutions, promises furtherance of human welfare in a much greater degree than does learning whether the story of Alfred and the cakes is a fact or a myth, whether Queen Elizabeth intrigued with Essex or not, where Prince Charles hid himself, and what were the details of this battle or that siege--pieces of historical gossip which cannot in the least affect men's conceptions of the ways in which social phenomena hang together, or aid them in shaping their public conduct."

Here, of course, Spencer was making game of what he termed "so-called histories," for, to do them justice, they are not wholly composed of gossip, else they would be more read, but he was scoring a definite point that history is incomplete without sociological generalisation. He did not seem to see that we need the most scrupulous historical scholarship if we are to make sure of our generalisations. Nor did he understand how essential it is to some minds to have in their vision of the past just those personal details and picturesque touches, which he despised as gossip.

The antithesis between the sociologist and the conventional historian is comparable to that between the biologist and the descriptive naturalist. The painstaking scrupulous describer, with an almost personal affection for his subjects, the gatherer of exact data to whom nothing is common or unclean, nothing trivial or without significance, often shrinks from the sweeping statements and far-reaching formulæ of the generaliser; his detailed knowledge makes him a purist in science, enables him to recall difficult exceptions, makes him distrustful of the summing-up phrases which cover a multitude of individualised occurrences. But just as the specialist is indispensable, so there can be no science without interpretation.

We presume, however, that the historians agree with Spencer that their chief aim is to give an account, as rational as is possible for them, of the movement of human history, as Gibbon, for instance, did in his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," but that they have a scientific instinct of recoil from generalising formulæ, and probably doubt the validity of some of Spencer's. We presume that they admit that all events are not equally important, and that they are laws of perspective applicable to historical pictures, but that they doubt Spencer's competence--especially after that sentence of his regarding Greece and Rome--to act as judge of what is important or in proportion. Just as the descriptive naturalist justly resents any dictation from the biologist as to what is or is not worth observing, so the descriptive historian resents the sociologist's interference. And it is to be feared that men, both in history and in life, were too much mere "phenomena" to the Synthetic Philosopher, and that his Sociology was more biological than human.

_Spencer's Sociological Data._--Spencer may be accused of a lack of personal interest in the details of human history, of a lack of appreciation of what modern societies owe to the past, and of taking too mechanical a view of social evolution, but to accuse him of _a priori_ methods is gratuitously unjust. Darwin in his theorising was no less scrupulously careful than he was in his monographing of barnacles, and, however we may disagree with any of Spencer's sociological generalisations, we must remember the carefulness with which he prepared himself for his task. From 1867 to 1874, with the help of Mr David Duncan, Mr James Collier, and Dr Scheppig, he worked at the compilation of sociological data, showing "in fitly classified groups and tables, facts of all kinds, presented by numerous races, which illustrate social evolution under its various aspects." This detailed work was begun solely to facilitate his own generalisations; it was published "apart from hypotheses, so as to aid all students of Social Science in testing such conclusions as they have drawn and in drawing others."

Most admirable was the ideal which Spencer had before him in collecting his data of Sociology.

"Indications of the climate, contour, soil, and minerals, of the region inhabited by each society delineated, seemed to me needful. Some accounts of the Flora and Fauna, in so far as they affected human life, had to be given. And the characters of the surrounding tribes or nations were factors which could not be overlooked. The characters of the people, individually considered, had also to be described--their physical, moral, and intellectual traits. Then, besides the political, ecclesiastical, industrial and other institutions of the society--besides the knowledge, beliefs, and sentiments, the language, habits, customs, and tastes of its members--there had to be noticed their clothing, food, and arts of life."

_Central Ideas of Spencer's Sociology._--The central ideas of Spencer's sociological work are thus summed up by Prof. F. H. Giddings:--

"Spencer's propositions could be arranged in the following order: (1) Society is an organism; (2) in the struggle of social organisms for existence and their consequent differentiation, fear of both the living and the dead arises, and for countless ages is a controlling emotion; (3) dominated by fear, men for ages are habitually engaged in military activities; (4) the transition from militarism to industrialism, made possible by the consolidation of small social groups into large ones, which war accomplishes, to its own ultimate decline, transforms human nature and social institutions; and this fact affords the true interpretation of all social progress."

Spencer sought to disclose the evolution of human ideas and customs, ceremonials and institutions. He emphasised the true idea that any society worthy of the name is an integrate like an individual organism, with the capacity of co-ordinated action or unified behaviour distinct from the life of the component units, and he used other biological concepts to render social evolution more intelligible.

He relied greatly on the influence of Fear in the early stages of social evolution: fear of living competitors gave rise to political control--to ceremonies and institutions; fear of the dead gave origin to religion whose primitive expressions are seen in ancestor-worship or worship of the dead. The conception of another life originated mainly in "such phenomena as shadows, reflections, and echoes," and gave origin to conceptions of gods.

Pressure of population and competitive struggle between societies have been potent factors in evolution, promoting differentiation and integration, and continually tending to disappear as their ends are achieved. Morality is developed as an adaptive expedient under the complex struggle for existence, and industrial organisation replaces military organisation as the social integrates grow and multiply and coalesce. As solidarity deepens with increased peaceful synergy, the severe centralised control, necessary when militarism is dominant, should be replaced by greater freedom of individual life, and by a restriction of governmental function to securing justice, to maintaining equitable relations, preventing one individual infringing on his neighbour's liberty. The formula of absolute justice is that "every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man." In militant times the individuals exist for the state; in industrial times the state is to be maintained solely for the benefit of the citizens, and a better than industrial freedom is to be looked for when it is more fully realised that life is not for work but work is for life. Spencer believed so much in the beneficence of peace and individual liberty, that he said "there needs but a continuance of absolute peace externally, and a vigorous insistence on non-aggression internally, to ensure the moulding of men into a form characterised by all the virtues"--a fine illustration of evolutionary optimism. To him the goal of human progress was a completed individualism, but "the ultimate individual will be one whose private requirements coincide with public ones. He will be that manner of man who, in spontaneously fulfilling his own nature, incidentally performs the functions of a social unit, and yet is only enabled so to fulfil his own nature by all others doing the like."

_The Idea of the Social Organism._--Spencer has been largely responsible for popularising the conception expressed in the phrase "The Social Organism"--that a society or societary form is in many ways comparable to an individual organism, _e.g._ in growing, in differentiating, in showing increased mutual dependence of its parts, and so on. It is true that the comparison of society to an organism is at least as old as the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, but Spencer was one of the first to fill in the analogy with biological details. The idea was briefly expressed in _Social Statics_, and was elaborated in an essay which appeared in the "Westminster Review" in January 1860. There he likened government to the central nervous system, agriculture and industry to the alimentary tract, transport and exchange to the vascular system of an animal, and pointed out that like an individual organism a society grows, becomes more complex, shows increasing inter-relations, division of labour, and mutual dependence among its parts, and has a life immense in length when compared with the lives of the component units. At the same time, it should be carefully noted that it was Spencer who introduced the term _super-organic_ as descriptive of social phenomena, indicating thereby that the biological categories may require considerable modification before they can be safely used in Sociology.

_Parallelisms between a Society and an Individual Organism._--Spencer indicated four chief parallelisms between a society and an individual organism:--

(1) Starting as small aggregates both grow in size.

(2) As they grow their initial relative simplicity is replaced by increasing complexity of structure.

(3) With increasing differentiation there comes about an increasing mutual dependence of the component parts, until the life and normal functioning of each becomes dependent on the life of the whole.

(4) The life of the whole becomes independent of and far more prolonged than the life of the component units.

It is obvious that this pleasing analogy may be pursued far. Thus a society may be compared to an organism as regards the genetic kinship of the component units (the cells being compared to individuals); in the fact that continued existence depends on continued functioning; in the power of retaining integrity or viable equilibrium in spite of ceaseless changes both internal and external; in the internal struggle of parts which co-exists with some measure of mutual subordination; in owing its peculiar virtue to the subtle inter-relations between its unified elements; in its power of coalescing with another form or of giving birth to another form; in its power of varying as a whole; in its habit of competing with other forms, as the result of which adaptation or elimination may ensue; and so on. In fact the analogy is far-reaching and persuasive and it is helped over some of its difficulties by the consideration that just as there are many grades of social-group, from the nomad herd to the French Republic, so there are many grades of organism from sponge to eagle.

Schäffle, in his famous work on the _Structure and Life of the Social Body_ (1875), carried the metaphor of the social organism to an extreme which has induced many to recoil from it altogether. The family is the cell, and the body consists of simple connective tissue (expressed in unity of speech, etc.), and of various differentiated tissues, such as sensory and motor apparatus. The comparison is as interesting as a game, but when we find writers speaking of the social ectoderm and endoderm, and so forth, we cannot but feel that the metaphor is being stretched to the breaking-point.

Spencer was himself quite conscious that the metaphor had its limitations, for he indicates four contrasts between a society and an individual organism.

(1) Societies have no specific external forms.

(2) The units of an organism are physically continuous, but the units of a society are dispersed persons.

(3) The elements of an organism are mostly fixed in their relative positions; while units of a society are capable of moving from place to place.

(4) In the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with feeling; in a society all the members are so endowed. The social nervous system is happily wider than the government.

There are other limitations, _e.g._, that the social organism does not seem to pass _necessarily_ through a curve of life ending in senility and death; that when a particular form disappears it is usually by being incorporated into another in whose life it shares.

As it appears to us the real analogy is between a human societary form and an animal societary form, such as an ant-hill or a bee-hive or a beaver-village, and not between a society and an individual organism. Moreover, since the biologist has not yet arrived at a clear conception of the innermost secret of the individual organism, notably the secret of its unity, the comparison implied in the metaphor of the social organism is an attempt to interpret _obscurum per obscurius_. The analogy, such as it is, is probably destined to be of more use to the biologist than to the sociologist.

In thinking of the unity of the individual organism--which remains in great measure an enigma to Biology--we have to distinguish (_a_) _the physical unity_, which rests on the fact that all the component units are closely akin, being lineal descendants of the fertilised ovum, and on the fact that they are subtly connected with each other in mutual dependence and co-operation, whether by intercellular bridges, or by the commonalty established by the vascular and nervous systems; and (_b_) the correlated _psychical unity_, the _esprit de corps_, which in a manner inconceivable to us makes the whole body one. That there are organisms, like sponges, in which the psychical unity is quite unverifiable is probably only a passing difficulty, greatly lessened by our increasing knowledge of the life of the simplest unicellular organisms whose behaviour is now seen to include trial by error and other traits which we cannot interpret without using psychical terms.

The same is true in regard to the social organism; we have here to distinguish (_a_) _the physical unity_ which rests on hereditary kinship and on similar environmental conditions, and (_b_) _the psychical unity_, the "social mind," developed with relation to certain ends--"a unity which is the end of its parts." It seems probable that in early days, the physical unity was more prominent than later on, when, as in the case of mixed racial groups, the psychical bond is practically supreme. But genetic and environmental bonds do not as physical facts constitute a society. Until there is enough of correlated psychical unity for the group to act, however imperfectly, as a group with a mind of its own, controlling the egoism of the individual members, there is no human society.

In short, if we continue to speak of a society as a social organism, we must safeguard the analogy by remembering that the character of society as an organism exists in the thoughts, feelings, and activities of the component members, and that the social bonds are not those of sympathy and synergy only, but that the rational life is intrinsically social.

As Green said, "Social life is to personality what language is to thought."

The chief difficulty that Spencer had with his metaphor was that in the individual organism there is a centred consciousness in the nervous system, whereas the social group as a whole has no corporate consciousness. Thus "while in individual bodies the welfare of all other parts is rightly subservient to the welfare of the nervous system, whose pleasurable or painful activities make up the good or ill of life; in bodies politic the same thing does not hold, or holds only to a very slight extent. It was well that the lives of all parts of an animal should be merged in the life of the whole, because the whole has a corporate consciousness capable of happiness or misery. But it is not so with a society, since its living units do not and cannot lose individual consciousness, and since the community as a whole has no corporate consciousness. And this is an everlasting reason why the welfare of citizens cannot rightly be sacrificed to some supposed benefit of the State: but why, on the other hand, the State is to be maintained solely for the benefit of citizens. The corporate life must here be subservient to the lives of the parts, instead of the lives of the parts being subservient to the corporate life" ("The Social Organism," _Essays_, vol. i.). In other words, Spencer found the metaphor useful even when it broke down, for it enabled him to corroborate his doctrine of individualism. If he had pursued the analogy between the human social group and the animal social group, such as that of bees or beavers, the corroboration would not have been so easy, though Spencer would doubtless have arrived at the same result.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] "The Scope and Method of Economic Science," _Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses_, 1904, p. 193.

[19] For a discussion of the validity and scope of Sociology we may refer to the following papers: "On the Origin and Use of the word Sociology," "Note on the History of Sociology," by Mr Victor V. Branford; "The Relation of Sociology to the Social Sciences and to Philosophy," two papers by Prof. E. Durkheim and Mr Branford; "Sociology and the Social Sciences," by Prof. Durkheim and M. E. Fauconnet;--all published in "Sociological Papers," the first volume of the Sociological Society's Proceedings.