154 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



direct interests in maintaining it. For the ideas and sentiments of a 

 community as a whole progressively adapt themselves to the regime 

 familiar from childhood, in such wise that it comes to be looked upon 

 as natural, and as the only thing possible. In proportion as public 

 agencies occupy a larger space in daily experience, leaving but a smaller 

 space for other agencies, there comes a greater tendency to think of 

 public control as everywhere needful, and a less ability to conceive of 

 activities as otherwise controlled. At the same time the sentiments, 

 adjusted by habit to the regulative machinery, become enlisted on its 

 behalf, and adverse to the thought of a vacancy to be made by its 

 absence. In brief, the general law, that the social organism and its 

 units act and react in such ways as to become congruous, implies that 

 every further extension of political organization increases the obstacle 

 to reorganization, not only by increasing the strength of the regula- 

 tive part and decreasing the strength of the part regulated, but also 

 by producing in citizens thoughts and feelings in harmony with the 

 resulting structure, and out of harmony with anything substantially 

 different. Both France and Germany furnish examples of this truth. 

 M. Comte, while looking forward to an industrial state, was so swayed 

 by the ideas and sentiments appropriate to the French form of society, 

 that his scheme of organization for the industrial state prescribes its 

 arrangements with a definiteness and detail charactei'istic of the mili- 

 tant type, and utterly at variance with the industrial type. Indeed, 

 he had a profound aversion to that individualism which is a product 

 of industrial life and gives the character to industrial institutions. So, 

 too, in Germany, we see that the Socialist party, who are regarded and 

 who regard themselves as wishing to entirely reorganize society, are 

 so incapable of really thinking away from the social type under which 

 they have been born and nurtured, that their proposed social system 

 is in essence nothing else than a new form of the system they would 

 destroy. It is a system under which life and labor are to be arranged 

 and superintended by public instrumentalities, omnipresent like those 

 which already exist and no less coercive, the individual having his 

 life even more regulated for him than now. 



"While, then, on the one hand, in the absence of settled arrange- 

 ments, there can not be cooperation, yet cooperation of a higher kind 

 is hindered by the arrangements which facilitate cooperation of a lower 

 kind. Though, without some established relations among parts, there 

 can be no combined actions, yet, the more extensive and elaborate 

 such relations grow, the more difficult does it become to make an 

 improved combination of actions. There is an increase of the forces 

 which tend to fix, and a decrease of the forces which tend to unfix ; 

 until the fully-structured social organism, like fully-structured individ- 

 ual organism, becomes no longer adaptable. 



In a living animal, formed as it is of aggregated units originally 



