28 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART I 



all for each, is only hinted in natural organisms, but is 

 achieved in the life of reason and of goodness. Men of 

 science need not trouble to tell idealists of supposed 

 errors in the idealist conception of an organism. Idealist 

 philosophers go to science for hints, for rough outline 

 sketches, for parables ; it is to reason they apply for 

 final and authoritative revelations. Few animal organ- 

 isms may display any perfect relativity of the whole to 

 the parts, and of the parts to the whole. If you cut off 

 my head I die. If you cut off my arm, unless you do it 

 very clumsily, I do not die. The head therefore seems 

 to be a necessary and integral element in the organism ; 

 the arm does not. Or, again, if a lobster loses a claw 

 he can grow another. I, alas ! may lose a leg or an 

 arm, and still survive, but I cannot replace the missing 

 limb. Is the lobster the truer and worthier organism ? 

 It cannot do without any one part, and if any part goes 

 amissing, what has been lost is reproduced by the 

 remainder of the organism. Or an organism which, so 

 to speak, was all heads, would seem to be a meta- 

 physically perfect or beau -ideal organism, where every 

 part was vitally necessary, because each part was implied 

 in all the rest. The human organism, happily for us, 

 does not illustrate the metaphysical category in this 

 phase of perfection. Yet the category is not irrelevant. 

 In the healing of a wound physiologists recognise some- 

 thing analogous to the mysterious power by which the 

 lobster grows a fresh claw. Thus the parable exists in 

 nature, but the fulfilment is found in reason and in 

 conscience. Far more fully than any members in one 

 of nature's organisms, " we " human beings, God's 

 children " are members one of another." Our mutual 

 dependence is absolute ; our life, if torn asunder from 

 each other, is no human life at all. 



