532 DISSOLUTION. 



perpetually checked by its dissipation, constantly tends to 

 produce a reverse transformation, and eventually does pro- 

 duce it. When Evolution has run its course — when the 

 aggregate has at length parted with its excess of motion, 

 and habitually receives as much from its environment as it 

 habitually loses — when it has reached that equilibrium in 

 which its changes end; it thereafter remains subject to all 

 actions in its environment which may increase the quantity 

 of motion it contains, and which in the lapse of time are 

 sure, either slowly or suddenly, to give its parts such excess 

 of motion as will cause disintegration. According as its 

 equilibrium is a very unstable or a very stable one, its dis- 

 solution may come quickly or may be indefinitely delayed — 

 may occur in a few days or may be postponed for millions of 

 years. But exposed as it is to the contingencies not simply 

 of its immediate neighbourhood but of a Universe every- 

 where in motion, the period must at last come when, either 

 alone or in company with surrounding aggregates, it has its 

 parts dispersed. 



The process of dissolution so caused, we have here to look 

 at as it takes place in aggregates of different orders. The 

 course of change being the reverse of that hitherto traced, 

 we may properly take the illustrations of it in the reverse 

 order — beginning with the most complex and ending with 

 the most simple. 



§ 178. Regarding the evolution of a society as at once 

 an increase in the number of individuals integrated into a 

 corporate body, an increase in the masses and varieties of 

 the parts into which this corporate body divides as well as 

 of the actions called their functions, and an increase in the 

 degree of combination among these masses and their func- 

 tions; we shall see that social dissolution conforms to the 

 general law in being, materially considered, a disintegration, 

 and, dynamically considered, a decrease in the movements 

 of wholes and an increase in the movements of parts; while 



