534 DISSOLUTION. 



of ideas, this fabric began to fall to pieces. There is now in 

 progress a political dissolution. Probably a political re- 

 organization will follow; but, be this as it may, the change 

 thus far produced by an outer action is a change towards 

 dissolution — a change from integrated motions to disinte- 

 grated motions. 



Even where a society that has developed into the highest 

 form permitted by the characters of its units, begins there- 

 after to dwindle and decay, the progressive dissolution is 

 still essentially of the same nature. Decline of numbers is, 

 in such case, brought about partly by emigration; for a 

 society having the fixed structure in which evolution ends, 

 is necessarily one that will not yield and modify under 

 pressure of population: so long as its structure will yield 

 and modify, it is still evolving. Hence the surplus popula- 

 tion continually produced, not held together by an organiza- 

 tion that adapts itself to an augmenting number, is contin- 

 ually dispersed: the influences brought to bear on the citi- 

 zens by other societies, cause their detachment, and there is 

 an increase in the uncombined motions of units instead of an 

 increase of combined motions. Gradually as rigidity be- 

 comes greater, and the society becomes still less capable of 

 being re-moulded into the form required for successful 

 competition with growing and more plastic societies, the 

 number of citizens who can live within its unyielding frame- 

 work becomes positively smaller. Hence it dwindles both 

 through continued emigration and through the diminished 

 multiplication that follows innutrition. And this further 

 dwindling or dissolution, caused by the number of those 

 who die becoming greater than the number of those who 

 survive long enough to rear offspring, is similarly a decrease 

 in the total quantity of combined motion and an increase 

 in the quantity of uncombined motion — as we shall pres- 

 ently see when we come to deal with individual dissolution. 



Considering, then, that social aggregates differ so much 

 from aggregates of other kinds, formed as they are of units 



