384 THE SOCIAX ORGANISM. 



respects the j^l^ces where they discharge then- duties and 

 obtain their sustenance. And hence the power of indivi- 

 dual locomotion does not practically affect the analogy. 



4. The last and perhaps the most important distinction, 

 is, that while in the body of an animal, only a special tissue 

 is endowed with feeling ; in a society, all the members are 

 endowed with feeling. Even this distinction, however, is 

 by no means a complete one. For in some of the lowest 

 animals, characterized by the absence of a nervous system, 

 such sensitiveness as exists is possessed by all parts. It is 

 only in the more organized forms that feeling is monopo- 

 lized by one class of the vital elements. Moreover, we 

 must remember that societies, too, are not without a cer- 

 tain differentiation of this kind. Though the units of a 

 community are all sensitive, yet they are so in unequal de- 

 grees. The classes engaged in agriculture and laborious 

 occupations in general, are much less susceptible, intellec- 

 tually and emotionally, than the rest ; and especially less so 

 than the classes of highest mental culture. Still, we have 

 here a tolerably decided contrast between bodies politic 

 and individual bodies. And it is one which we should 

 keep constantly in view. For it reminds us that while in 

 individual bodies, the welfare of all other parts is rightly 

 subservient to the welfare of the nervous system, whose 

 pleasurable or painful activities make up the good or evil 

 of life ; in bodies politic, the same thing does not hold, or 

 holds to but a very slight extent. It is well that the lives 

 of all parts of an animal should be merged in the life of the 

 whole ; because the w^hole has a corporate consciousness 

 capable of happiness or misery. But it is not so with a 

 society ; since its living units do not and cannot lose indi- 

 vidual consciousness ; and since the community as a whole 

 has no corporate consciousness. And this is an everlast- 

 ing reason -why the welfare of citizens cannot rightly be 

 sacrificed to some supposed benefit of the State; bul 



