504 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE IN THE CENTURY. 



its elements ; in its power of coalescing with another 

 form or of giving birth to another form ; in its 

 habit of competing with other forms, as the result 

 of which adaptation or elimination may ensue; and 

 so on. The analogy is far-reaching and persuasive, 

 and it is helped over some of its difficulties by the 

 consideration that just as there are many forms of 

 social-group, from the nomad herd to the French 

 Republic, so there are many forms of organism from 

 sponge to eagle. 



Schaffle, in his famous work on the Structure and 

 Life of the Social Body (1875), carried the meta- 

 phor of the social organism to an extreme which has 

 induced many to recoil from it altogether. The 

 family is the cell, and the body consists of simple 

 connective tissue (expressed in unity of speech, etc.) 

 and of various differentiated tissues, including a 

 sensory and motor apparatus, and so on. The com- 

 parison is as interesting as a game. 



In his lucid exposition of the modern outlook,* 

 Professor Fairbanks admits that a society deserves 

 to be called organic, because of its structural com- 

 plexity; its dynamical unity of correlated parts; 

 its unity and development determined from within 

 (surely not wholly?) ; its dependence on the environ- 

 ment, both physical and social ; and its intelligibility 

 only as part of a larger process, — the evolution of 

 human society as a whole. But he adds that a so- 

 ciety differs from a " biological organism,'^ let us 

 say a bird, in the greater original discreteness of its 

 elements, in its less fixed and permanent form, in 

 the greater interdependence of the parts, and in the 

 fact that consciousness remains centered in the 

 discrete individual elements. Perhaps the enthu- 

 * Internat. Journ. Ethics, VIII., 1897, p. 61. 



