. 



CHAP. XIV.] PSYCHOPHYSIK. 459 



founded on an analogy between the body politic and the 

 individual man. 



Herbert Spencer has pushed the analogy both upwards 

 and downwards as far as it will go, and further than it can 

 go on all fours. He shows us how a society is an organism, 

 and how an organism is a society, how the lower forms of 

 societies and organisms consist of a multitude of homogeneous 

 parts, the functions of which are imperfectly differentiated, 

 so that each can at a pinch undertake the office of. any 

 other ; whereas the parts of higher forms of organisms and 

 societies are exceedingly heterogeneous, and discharge more 

 perfectly differentiated functions. Hence to the lower 

 forms a breaking up may be a multiplication of the species, 

 whereas to the higher forms it is death. 



In a society, as in an organism, both the working and 

 the thinking will be better done if undertaken by different 

 members, provided that the thinking members can guide the 

 working members, while the working members support the 

 thinking members, the workers retaining just enough intel- 

 ligence to enable them to receive the guidance, and the 

 thinkers retaining just enough working power to enable 

 them to appropriate the pabulum presented to them by the 

 workers. 



Hence in the more highly developed systems the 

 guiding powers may be concentrated into a smaller por- 

 tion of the whole system, and may exercise a more un- 

 disputed power of guiding the rest, till in the highest 

 organism we arrive at what is called Personal Government, 

 and the organism may bear without abuse the grand old 

 name of Individual. This result is brought about by all the 

 members except one bartering their right of guiding them- 

 selves for the privilege of being guided, and so delegating to 

 the one ruling member the functions of government. When 

 the human society has lapsed into the condition of personal 

 government, the consciousness of the head of the state may 

 be expressed by him in the phrase, " L'etat c'est moi ; " but 

 though the other members of the society may delegate to 

 the head all their political powers, they cannot delegate their 



