380 THE SOCIAL ORGANISM. 



considered structureless, they assume, in the course of 

 their growth, a continually-increasing complexity of 

 structure. 



3. That though in their early, undeveloped states, 

 there exists in them scarcely any mutual dependence of 

 parts, their parts gradually acquire a mutual dependence ; 

 which becomes at last so great, that the activity and life 

 of each part is made possible only by the activity and life 

 of the rest. 



4. That the life and development of a society is inde- 

 pendent of, and far more prolonged than, the life and de- 

 velopment of any of its component units ; who are severally 

 born, grow, work, rep/oducCj and die, while the body poli- 

 tic composed of them survives generation after generation, 

 increasing in mass, completeness of structure, and fanc- 

 tional activity. 



These four parallelisms will appear the more significant 

 the more we contemplate them. While the points speci- 

 fied, are points in which societies agree with individual or- 

 ganisms, they are points in which individual organisms 

 agree with each other, and disagree with all things else. 

 In the course of its existence, every plant and animal in- 

 creases in mass, in a way not parallelled by inorganic ob 

 jects : even such inorganic objects as crystals, which arise 

 by growth, show us no such definite relation between 

 grow^th and existence as organisms do. The orderly pro- 

 gress from simplicity to complexity, displayed by bodies 

 politic in common with all living bodies, is a characteristic 

 which distinguishes living bodies from the inanimate bodies 

 amid which they move. That functional dependence of 

 parts, which is scarcely more manifest in animals or plants 

 than nations, has no counterpart elsewhere. And in no 

 aggregate except an organic, or a social one, is there a 

 perpetual removal and replacement of parts, joined with a 

 continued integrity of the whole. 



