452 The Doctrine of Evolution. 



organic and inorganic worlds into a series of suggestive 

 formulas, the next thing to be done was to inquire into the 

 applicability of the law of evolution to the higher manifes- 

 tations of vital activity in other words, to psychical and 

 social life. Here it was easy to point out analogies between 

 the development of society and the development of an 

 organism. Between a savage state of society and a civilized 

 state it is easy to see the contrasts in complexity of life, in 

 division of labor, in interdependence and coherence of 

 operations and of interests. The difference resembles that 

 between a vertebrate animal and a worm. 



Such analogies are instructive, because at the bottom of 

 the phenomena there is a certain amount of real identity. 

 But Mr. Spencer did not stop with analogies ; he pursued 

 his problem into much deeper regions. There is one mani- 

 fest distinction between a society and an organism. In the 

 organism the conscious life, the psychical life, is not in the 

 parts but in the whole ; but in a society there is no such 

 thing as corporate consciousness : the psychical life is all in 

 the individual men and women. The highest development 

 of this psychical life is the end for which the world exists. 

 The object of social life is the highest spiritual welfare 

 of the individual members of society. The individual hu- 

 man soul thus comes to be as much the center of the Spen- 

 cerian world as it was the center of the world of mediaeval 

 theology; and the history of the evolution of conscious 

 intelligence becomes a theme of surpassing interest. 



This is the part of his subject which Mr. Spencer has 

 handled in the most masterly manner. Nothing in the 

 literature of psychology is more remarkable than the long- 

 sustained analysis in which he starts with complicated acts 

 of quantitative reasoning and resolves them into their ele- 

 mentary processes, and then goes on to simpler acts of judg- 

 ment and perception, and then down to sensation, and so on 

 resolving and resolving, until he gets down to the simple 

 homogeneous psychical shocks or pulses in the manifold 

 compounding and recompounding of which all mental action 

 consists. Then, starting from that conception of life as the 

 continuous adjustment of inner relations within the or- 

 ganism to outer relations in the environment a conception 

 of which he made such brilliant use in his Principles of 

 Biology he shows how the psychical life gradually becomes 

 specialized in certain classes of adjustments or correspond- 

 ences, and how the development of psychical life consists in 



