NATURE CROWNED IN MAN 561 



of it on the intelligent plane is to be found in the beaver 

 village and the band of monkeys. 



Professor Mclver has argued very clearly that in man- 

 kind there are no individuals who are not social individuals, 

 and that a society is not other or more than the members 

 who compose it. The social relationships of every individual 

 are not outside him, they are aspects of his individuality. 

 There is no social function which is other than the functions 

 of personalities. 



We agree that there is no mysterious entity which we 

 call a society, or a social integrate, or a societary form ; that 

 each is composed of a number of more or less like-minded 

 and like-bodied individuals. But we are inclined to think 

 that Mr. Maclver's recoil from a false antithesis between 

 society and the individual, leads to an under-appreciation 

 of the difference that social life makes. When men are 

 associated and organised and integrated, their corporate 

 behaviour does not follow as a matter of course from what 

 we know of them as individuals. There is a strange psychol- 

 ogy of the crowd. The same holds true of animals, to whom 

 it is always a relief to turn. Termites sometimes go on 

 food-collecting forays, 300,000 in a vigorous band, about 200 

 soldiers to 1,000 workers. At critical places the soldiers form 

 a guard for the foragers ; they give signals, they act as scouts, 

 they keep or restore order. If they lose their presence of 

 mind and fall back among the workers there may be a panic. 

 Here, on an instinctive line, is social organisation, and our 

 point is simply that, when integrates of individuals act as 

 units of a higher order, a new complication is introduced. 

 This complication is necessarily much greater in mankind 

 where social tradition counts for much, and where the in- 

 tegrates, such as communities or nations, that now and again 



