502 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SOME MATERIAL FORCES OF THE SOCIAL 



ORGANISM.* 



By Peof. JOHN W. LANGLEY. 



AT the outset of this paper I wish to define one or two terms, 

 - and my own position in using them. The expression "the 

 social organism " is generally taken in a merely figurative sense, 

 but to me it has more significance than that. I will employ it 

 with nearly its full literal meaning. 



Society, denoting by that the people collectively of any one 

 nation or government, is an organism distinctly endowed with 

 the attributes of a living structure. Its individual units, men 

 and women, are alive ; its various political parties, charities, in- 

 dustrial groups, and its government all have an organic charac- 

 ter ; and, finally, the Avhole society shows the fundamental attri- 

 butes of vitality in the specialization of parts, the partial co-ordi- 

 nation of these for a common end, and particularly by the constant 

 phenomena of mutation and change. 



The social organism is, then, a vitalized structure, not only in 

 its separate parts but in its entirety. Now, if this is so, then 

 many of the conditions which modify the more familiar forms of 

 life may be expected to, indeed necessarily will, influence and 

 modify the progress of social development and growth. 



Foremost and most obvious of these conditions will be the 

 character of the raw material of society I mean matter, sub- 

 stance, material things. For, just as a brick house differs from a 

 wooden one, even if the general plan is the same, because one is 

 made of mineral matter while the other is vegetable ; or, as a por-. 

 celain vase will differ from a bronze one of exactly the same shape 

 by all the fundamental properties belonging to clay and metal, so 

 equally must the possibilities of social conditions be fundamen- 

 tally controlled and limited by the properties of matter. 



There is a very different view from the above, illustrated by 

 this quotation from Bishop Berkeley : " Some truths there are so 

 near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes 

 to see them. Such I take this important one to be, namely, that 

 all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth in a word, all 

 those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world have 

 not any substance without a mind." 



But the question I raise here is not one between the Berkeleian 

 or the an ti- Berkeleian philosophy, or between idealism and mate- 

 rialism, because for the practical purposes of this paper it makes 

 no difference in which camp we stand ; and while the language 



* Delivered before the Cleveland Council of Sociology, June 25, 1894. 



