io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



significance a contrast fundamentally affecting our idea of the ends 

 to be achieved by social life. 



Though the discreteness of a social organism does not prevent sub- 

 division of functions and mutual dependence of parts, yet it does 

 prevent that differentiation by which one part becomes an organ of 

 feeling and thought, while other parts become insensitive. High ani- 

 mals, of whatever class, are distinguished from low ones by complex 

 and well-integrated nervous systems. While in inferior types the 

 minute scattered ganglia may be said to exist for the benefit of other 

 structures, the concentrated ganglia in superior types are the struct- 

 ures for the benefit of which the rest may be said to exist. Though 

 a developed nervous system so directs the actions of the whole body 

 as to preserve its integrity, yet the welfare of the nervous system is the 

 ultimate object of all these actions, damage to any other organ being 

 serious only because it immediately or remotely entails that pain or 

 loss of pleasure which the nervous system suffers. But the discrete- 

 ness of a society negatives differentiations carried to this extreme. 

 In an individual organism the minute living units, most of them per- 

 manently localized, growing up, working, reproducing, and dying away 

 in their respective places, are in successive generations moulded to 

 their respective functions, so that some become specially sentient and 

 others entirely insentient. But it is otherwise in a social organism. 

 The units of this, out of contact and much less rigidly held in their 

 relative positions, cannot be so much differentiated as to become feel- 

 ingless units and units which monopolize feeling. There are, indeed, 

 slight traces of such a differentiation. Human beings are unlike in 

 the amounts of sensation and emotion producible in them by like 

 causes: here great callousness, here great susceptibility, is characteris- 

 tic. In the same society, even where its members are of the same race, 

 and still more where its members are of dominant and subject races, 

 there exists a contrast of this kind. The mechanically-working and 

 hard-living units are less sensitive than the mentally-working and 

 more protected units. But while the regulative structures of the 

 social organism tend, like those of the individual organism, to become 

 seats of feeling, the tendency is checked by this want of physical co- 

 hesion which brings fixity of function ; and it is also checked by the 

 continued need for feeling in the mechanically-working units for the 

 due discharge of their functions. 



Hence, then, a cardinal difference in the two kinds of organisms. 

 In the one, consciousness is concentrated in a small part of the aggre- 

 gate. In the other, it is diffused throughout the aggregate : all the 

 units possess the capacities for happiness and misery, if not in equal 

 degrees, still in degrees that approximate. As, then, there is no social 

 sensorium, it results that the welfare of the aggregate, considered 

 apart from that of the units, is not an end to be sought. The society 

 exists for the benefit of its members ; not its members for the benefit 



