INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



Stopped short at nineteenth-century England and found in its indi- 

 viduaHsm nature's supreme achievement. The common ownership of 

 the means of production, logical though it might be, did not seem to 

 him the necessary next step in organisation, the next integrative level. 

 There is thus a striking contradiction in his evolutionary thought. 

 By what strange arguments was he able to convince himself that the 

 liberal economic individualism of the mid-nineteenth century was the 

 high state of integration to which all cosmic development had been 

 tending? His life, his controversies with others, the internal evidence 

 of his writings, may give us the clue. 



A society, he says, is an organism.^ How must we envisage its 

 integration and differentiation? At once arises the question of the 

 origin of classes and vocations, the division of labour.^ It is the 

 physiological division of labour, says Spencer, which makes the 

 society, like the animal, a living whole. Complication of structure 

 accompanies increase of mass, as the classes, military, priestly, slave, 

 etc., differentiate — a progress from the general to the special. But he 

 always fails to emphasise the different relationships of these classes 

 to the production of goods or commodities, he always regards them 

 with an exclusively political eye. Instead of seeking the origins of 

 their economic relationships he elaborates, to a degree sometimes 

 almost fantastic, the analogy bet^'een animal and social organisms. 

 Thus the superior military class of warriors corresponds to the 

 ectoderm, and the inferior class of cultivators, in close contact with 

 the mechanism of food-supply, to the endoderm.^ The origin of the 

 State, he thinks, was the necessity of a centralised neural apparatus 

 to co-ordinate the military activities of the organism-society against 

 other societies. The more plausible explanation, that it was required 

 as the instrument of domination of one class over the other, does not 

 occur to him. As the peasants correspond to endoderm, so the king's 

 council corresponds to medulla.* 



In spite of this, however, Spencer was well aware of the limitations 

 of the analogy.^ There was, he said, a cardinal difference bet^^een the 

 animal and the social aggregate. "In the one, consciousness is con- 

 centrated in a small part, in the other it is diffused throughout; all 



^ Though full of errors, both in fact and tlieory, the grandiose world history of 

 O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, which since its first uncritical reception, has fallen 

 into undeserv^ed discredit, is strikingly in the Spencerian tradition, for it delineates the 

 rise and fall of quite distinguishable cultural "organisms." 



2 PS, I. 468, 470, 491, 495. 3 PS, I. 512. 



* PS, I. 547, 552. 5 ps^ I. ^79 and 612, A, I. 504. 



249 



