384 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



wavering social traits, physical and mental ; of shifting 

 geographic, climatic, and biologic conditions, where 

 heredity, political history, and education, play their 

 respective roles. These agencies, in their all-together 

 working, deflect the streams of social conveyance into 

 specific channels, restrict, or stimulate, the play of 

 social services, thereby outlining the areas of social co- 

 operation, and their intervening cleavage zones. 



Thus this terrestrial social film is broken up into 

 specific functional blocks, called states, or nations, or 

 empires. But the intervening walls, like semi-per- 

 meable membranes, are never stationary, or impassable, 

 or wholly exclusive or inclusive. They waver from 

 place to place, under the varying osmotic pressure of 

 social metabolism; open or close from time to time, 

 checking the passage of certain influences and allowing 

 others to pass more freely through. The sum total of 

 all these influences is what gives individuality to a 

 given state, or province, marking it off from others as 

 a more or less self-determining sphere of cooperative 

 life, definitely qualified by one or more specific condi- 

 tions. If we choose to press our comparison, these 

 imperial, national, tribal and village spheres of cooper- 

 ative social life may be likened to the organic placodes 

 and unlike specific cell groups, or cleavage areas, of 

 embryonic life; civic capitals and local governments 

 are their representative and administrative nuclear 

 centres; and manufacturing districts, or other centres 

 of social metabolism, may be compared with plastids 

 and other bodily organs, where specific industries are 

 localized. 



But we need not further press the parallel. Analo- 

 gies serve a double purpose ; for all analogies ultimately 



