time: the refreshing river 



as the physiological reflection of an already existing class structure of 

 society. Such ideas are found in Aristotle and Plato, with the added 

 notion that to the three sorts of soul (the vegetative, the sensitive, 

 and the rational) there must correspond three groups of men in social 

 life. Shakespeare made use of this doctrine in the opening act of 

 Coriolanus^ where the First Citizen is compared with society's big 

 toe. Here is an urbane statement of the same idea by a seventeenth- 

 century divine, George Hickes, Dean of Worcester. "Civil equality is 

 morally impossible, because no commonwealth, little or great, can 

 subsist without poor. They are necessary for the establishment of 

 superiority and subjection within human societies, where there must 

 be members of dishonor as well as honor, and some to serve and obey, 

 as well as others to command. The poor are the hands and feet of the 

 body politick . . . who hew the wood and draw the water of the rich. 

 They plow our lands, and dig our quarries and cleanse our streets, 

 nay those who fight our battels in the defence of their country are 

 the poor soldiers. . . . But were all equally rich there would be no 

 subordination, none to command nor none to serve." 



There is nothing wrong with the idea that society is an organism. 

 But it is an organism of far higher grade than any of the biological 

 individual organisms, and hence the biologist must even to-day be on 

 his guard against the crude taking over of biological ideas in the 

 service of the ruling class. The Victorians were interested in the 

 analogy. Herbert Spencer, in his Sociology^ elaborated it in much 

 detail, not even hesitating to refer to the peasant class of a human 

 community as its endoderm-cells, and to the military class as its 

 ectoderm. Executive scribes corresponded to the central nervous 

 system and the king's council to the spinal medulla. All such analogies 

 tremble on the verge of absurdity, and fall to the ground because 

 man in his societies constitutes a higher level of organisation and 

 complexity than anything else met with in the living or non-living 

 world. The possession of consciousness and communication bet^^en 

 individuals in a highly developed state, and especially the use of tools 

 in the processes of production, mark off human society as a higher 

 level than biology, just as biology itself deals with systems more 

 highly organised than those of physics and chemistry. Herbert Spencer, 

 however, was aware of the dangers of biological analogies applied to 

 human affairs. So also was Walter Bagehot, in his Physics and Politics^ 

 which treads on the same ground. And in our own time the physio- 



^ (London, 1872.) 

 IT4 



