518 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



Before Darwin various important biological ideas and 

 discoveries connected with the names of Oken, Schleiden, 

 Schwann, Kolliker, Milne-Edwards, and others had com- 

 pletely revolutionised the earlier biology of Bichat ; but 

 there remained the perplexing problem of the different 

 types or classes in the living creation and their origin. 

 Darwin not only solved this by his idea of natural 

 selection, but through it brought natural things and 

 events into connection with each other in a way which 

 had not been attempted before. This broadening of the 

 basis of research was increased by the study of environ- 

 ment. Thus individual things and events were brought 

 together and connected both in their temporal and spatial 

 existence. No idea could be a more suitable example of 

 Comte's esprit d'ensemble nor more welcome to the student 

 of society, who had before that been troubled how to find 

 the transition from the individual to the social unit. 

 Accordingly we find a whole school taking up with more 

 hope of success the idea, familiar already to Comte, that 

 s. society is an organism, and we have the counterpart of 



Society as an 



organism, this idea in Virchow's conception of the animal organism 

 as a society of cells. 



No thinker has done more to urge this analogy be- 

 tween the individual animal organism and society as the 

 collective organism than. Spencer himself, 1 whose earlier 



1 An elaborate and very inter- sociology represented in Comte's 



esting exposition and criticism of system by the hierarchical principle 



this portion of Spencer's Sociology in the development of the sciences, 



will be found in Dr Earth's work, and then proceeds to show how the 



pp. 100-115. In following up the i other side of Comte's sociology, 



rudiments laid down by Cointe for | the biological conception of Society, 



a methodical study of social pheno- ; was taken up and further devel- 



mena Dr Earth deals first with , oped. But he significantly remarks 



what he terms the classifying that Spencer, the most prominent 



