98 THE STUDY OF ANIMAL LIFE CHAP. 



species to rear its progeny with the least waste of energy, 

 and to maintain its numbers, albeit with a very slow 

 birth-rate ; it enables the gregarious animals to migrate 

 in search of new abodes. Therefore, while fully admit- 

 ting that force, swiftness, protective colours, cunning, 

 and endurance of hunger and cold, which are mentioned 

 by Darwin and Wallace as so many qualities making the 

 individual or the species the fittest under certain cir- 

 cumstances, we maintain that under cmy circumstances 

 sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for 

 life. . . . The fittest are thus the most sociable animals, 

 and sociability appears as the chief factor of evolution, 

 both directly, by securing the well-being of the species 

 while diminishing the waste of energy, and indirectly 

 by favouring the growth of intelligence. . . . Therefore 

 combine practise mutual aid ! That is the surest means 

 for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best 

 guarantee of existence and progress bodily, intellectual, 

 and moral. That is what nature teaches us." 



10. A Note on " The Social Organism." Herbert 

 Spencer insisted on regarding a human societary form as 

 a " social organism," and the metaphor is not only sug- 

 gestive but convenient suggestive because it is profitable 

 to biologist and sociologist alike to follow r out the analogies 

 between an organism and a society, convenient because 

 there is among organisms in aggregates like sponges, 

 in perfected integrates like birds a variety comparable 

 to the diverse grades of society. 



It may be questioned, however, whether we need any 

 other designation for society than the word society sup- 

 plies, and whether the biological metaphor, with physical 

 associations still clinging to it, is not more illusory than 

 helpful. For the true analogy is not between society 

 and an individual organism, but between human society 

 and those incipient societies which were before man was. 

 Human society is, or ought to be, an integrate a 

 spiritual integrate of organisms, of which the bee-hive 

 and the ants' nest, the community of beavers and the 

 company of monkeys, are like far-off prophecies. And 

 in these, as in our own societies, the modern conception 



