SOCIAL EVOLUTION. 611 



"The fact is," says Prof. Huxley, "that the sovereign power of the body 

 thinks for the physiological organism, acts for it, and rules the individual com- 

 ponents with a rod of iron. . . . The questioning of his authority involves death, 

 or that partial death which we call paralysis. Hence, if the analogy of the body 

 politic with the body physiological counts for any thing, it seems to me to be in 

 favor of a much larger amount of governmental interference than exists at pres- 

 ent, or that I, for one, at all desire to see. But, tempting as the opportunity is, 

 I am not disposed to build up any argument in favor of my own case upon this 

 analogy, curious, interesting, and in many respects close as it is, for it takes no 

 cognizance of certain profound and essential differences between the physiologi- 

 cal and political bodies." 



And Prof. Huxley proceeds to point out one of those profound and 

 essential differences, which, if the reader will refer to his argument, 

 will be seen to come, in effect, to very much what Mr. Spencer himself 

 had admitted, in his original essay, in the passage which I have 

 quoted. As the reader is probably aware, Mr. Spencer replied to 

 Prof. Huxley's attack in an elaborate article, now printed in the third 

 series of his collected essays ; but, though he might have claimed to 

 have anticipated the objection urged against him by pointing to the 

 passage in which the failure of the analogy in the circumstance in 

 question was admitted and even insisted on, he did not take this 

 course. In truth, though he might thus have avoided the reductio ad 

 absurdum with which he was pressed by Prof. Huxley, and might 

 also have saved his own consistency, he could only have done so by 

 the entire surrender of his main position ; for he must have admitted 

 that the all-sufficing analogy, " curious, interesting, and in many re- 

 spects close " as no doubt it is, was yet, for the purpose of political 

 argument, entirely destitute of cogency ; and this was an admission 

 which Mr. Spencer did not see his way to make. 



It may still, however, be contended that, though of small account 

 as a criterion in practical politics in the sphere of what we may call 

 the statics of sociology this analogy between the individual and so- 

 cial organisms may nevertheless possess value in reference to the 

 dynamical aspects of the social problem, as throwing light, that is to 

 say, on the course of social evolution. And such, it appears to me, is 

 the case so long as we confine ourselves to a very primitive stage in 

 the social history of man. In that primitive stage (as Mr. Darwin has 

 taught us), while man remains still a savage, and even perhaps for 

 some time after he has emerged from the savage condition, the influ- 

 ences which mould his social development are substantially the same 

 with those which govern the development of a species. It is not 

 strange, therefore, that evolution in the human and in the animal 

 kingdom should, during this period, follow a very similar course. But 

 a time arrives in the progress of social development when societies 

 of men become conscious of a corporate existence, and when the im- 

 provement of the conditions of this existence becomes for them an 

 object of conscious and deliberate effort. At what particular stage in 



