COMTE AND SPENCER ON SOCIOLOGY. 69 



serted till the last few years by the most authoritative scholars — or 

 whether organic cells themselves consist of individualized elements 

 (plastids) still more primordial. But that is not intimately connected 

 with the main object of the present essay, and the biologists are now 

 somewhat at variance on the point. I shall only observe that the 

 great De Candolle distinguished six degrees of individuality in plants 

 alone ; Schleiden reduced that number to three (the cell, the shoot, 

 the cormus or stock) ; while Haeckel, again, doubled that number. 

 For shortness' sake, we may admit the classification very recently (in 

 1883) proposed by a young Italian scholar, M. Cattaneo,* who, con- 

 sidering the question from a zoological point of view, fixed the num- 

 ber of such degrees of individuality at four, as follows : 1. Plastids, 

 i. e., cells or any other primordial elements, after dividing which we 

 should get not a being of any kind, but mere amorphic organic mat- 

 ter ; 2. Merids, i. e., colonies of such plastids ; 3. Zo'ids, i. e., such in- 

 dividuals as are autonomous so far as their individual preservation is 

 concerned, but which are obliged to unite with other individuals of 

 the same series for preservation of species (like superior animals and 

 men) ; and, 4. Dems, i. e., colonies of zo'ids : conjugal couples or pairs, 

 families, tribes, societies. 



Assuming that the proper aim of sociology is the investigation of 

 the natural laws regulating the connections between individuals and 

 society, it is obvious that, before we approach sociological studies 

 themselves, we must answer the preliminary question, Which of the 

 various degrees of individuality above mentioned we accept as the 

 starting-point of our researches ; or, in other terms, where ought the 

 domain of social science properly to begin ? 



For Comte social life begins as soon as two individuals of the se- 

 ries of zo'ids (he explicitly says, man and woman) unite themselves in 

 a conjugal pair, the result of which union is the arising of a dem, 

 i. e., a compound individual of a superior species. Thus he asks us 

 to look for the object of sociology, not in the material fact of an ag- 

 gregation, but in the consensus or convergence of forces represented 

 by the uniting individuals, aiming at an end which is personal to none 

 of them. In that sense his teaching seems to be of capital signifi- 

 cance for the progress of the real social science. But that meaning 

 can be only obtained from the spirit of his doctrine, not from its 

 letter ; and the great philosopher himself was more than once false to 

 his own premises. It seems that Comte was not fully aware of the 

 extreme difficulty of settling in a scientific sense the point where 

 individual life becomes social, and we hasten to see how the far more 

 learned English evolutionist — I mean Herbert Spencer — gets out of 

 the whirlpool where the ship of the French positive philosophy foun- 

 dered with all hands on board. 



In his " Principles of Sociology " Herbert Spencer pays but little 

 * " Le colonie lineari e la morfologia dei molluschi." 



