592 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



wonderful complication of the transformations wrought by the 

 immense amount of internal mobility retained. These transfor- 

 mations are to us the mark, the distinguishing feature of life. 



Having thus got the nature of the differences between the or- 

 ganic and inorganic worlds into a series of suggestive formulas, the 

 next thing to be done was to inquire into the applicability of the 

 law of evolution to the higher manifestations of vital activity in 

 other words, to psychical and social life. Here it was easy to point 

 out analogies between the development of society and the develop- 

 ment of an organism. Between a savage state of society and a 

 civilized state it is easy to see the contrasts in complexity of life, 

 in division of labor, in interdependence and coherence of opera- 

 tions and of interests. The difference resembles that between a 

 vertebrate animal and a worm. 



Snch analogies are instructive, because at the bottom of the 

 phenomena there is a certain amount of real identity. But Mr. 

 Spencer did not stop with analogies ; he pursued his problem into 

 much deeper regions. There is one manifest distinction between 

 a society and an organism. In the organism the conscious life, 

 the psychical life, is not in the parts but in the whole ; but in a 

 society there is no such thing as corporate consciousness : the 

 psychical life is all in the individual men and women. The highest 

 development of this psychical life is the end for which the world 

 exists. The object of social life is the highest spiritual welfare of 

 the individual members of society. The individual human soul 

 thus comes to be as much the center of the Spencerian world as it 

 was the center of the world of mediaeval theology ; and the history 

 of the evolution of conscious intelligence becomes a theme of sur- 

 passing interest. 



This is the part of his subject which Mr. Spencer has handled 

 in the most masterly manner. Nothing in the literature of psy- 

 chology is more remarkable than the long-sustained analysis in 

 which he starts with complicated acts of quantitative reasoning 

 and resolves them into their elementary processes, and then goes 

 on to simpler acts of judgment and perception, and then down to 

 sensation, and so on, resolving and resolving, until he gets down to 

 the simple homogeneous psychical shocks or pulses in the mani- 

 fold compounding and recompounding of which all mental action 

 consists. Then, starting from that conception of life as the con- 

 tinuous adjustment of inner relations within the organism to outer 

 relations in the environment a conception of which he made such 

 brilliant use in his Principles of Biology he shows how the psy- 

 chical life gradually becomes specialized in certain classes of ad- 

 justments or correspondences, and how the development of psy- 

 chical life consists in a progressive differentiation and integration 

 of such correspondences. Intellectual life is shown to have arisen 



