THE PROSPECTS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 



generally said to have held that society is an organism, his 

 own statement of the matter warrants no such opinion. It 

 remained for certain French and German writers to make 

 such a downright assertion and to attempt to demonstrate 

 it by ingenious reasoning. Spencer, on the contrary, said 

 only that society is like an organism because it grows, 

 differentiates, and has systems of agencies which may 

 conveniently be called sustaining, circulatory, and regu- 

 latory. He then added that these likenesses are only 

 analogies and that the truths pictured by them were equally 

 true without analogical support. Moreover, being the 

 outstanding protagonist of political individualism, he was 

 very careful to point out that society has no central 

 censorium and hence cannot feel and think as a unitary 

 body. Since the individual is the feeling and acting unit, 

 it follows, he pointed out, that the welfare of the individual 

 is the sole end and justification of social policy and social 

 organization. He expressly stated that society is not 

 classifiable with any known type of organism and that 

 those products of social activity represented broadly by the 

 terms tradition and institutions are genuinely super- 

 organic and constitute a new social environment in which 

 the individual lives, moves, and has his being. 



Spencer's view seems essentially sound. When he con- 

 cluded that, after all is said, the basic and enduring analogy 

 between society and an organism is the mutual inter- 

 dependence of parts in both, he meant that society may 

 rightly be viewed as a separate and special object of 

 scientific investigation and that it must be conceived as an 

 integrated, complex whole in which are included many 

 delicately interrelated parts. Society is thus something more 

 than the mechanical juxtaposition of a number of indi- 

 viduals. As Spencer indicated, its evolution is attended by 

 an increasing differentiation of parts held together in an 

 even more complex coordination and cooperation of units 



[31] 



