COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



commodities to circulating nutritive materials, 

 its money to blood corpuscles, its channels for 

 transmitting intelligence to nerve axes, and the 

 individuals of which it is composed to physio- 

 logic units ; we are instituting a series of analo- 

 gies, which are no doubt of considerable value 

 in the study both of history and of political 

 economy. In his essay on the "Social Organ- 

 ism," Mr. Spencer has traced a great number 

 of such analogies, which are no less instructive 

 than curious, but they are after all analogies and 

 not homologies. So when M. Littre points out 

 that the study of political economy stands in the 

 same relation to the science of sociology as the 

 study of the nutritive functions to the science 

 of biology, he reveals an analogy of great philo- 

 sophical value. But we nevertheless feel that 

 there is a wide distinction between an organism 

 and a community, which it would be absurd to 

 ignore; and Hobbes's conception of society as a 

 vast Leviathan strikes us as grotesque. 



This insuperable distinction is the fact that 

 in a community the psychical life is all in the 

 parts, while in an organism the psychical life is 

 all in the whole. The living units of society 

 " do not and cannot lose individual conscious- 

 ness,'* while " the community as a whole has 

 no corporate consciousness." " The corporate 

 life must here be subservient to the lives of the 

 parts, instead of the lives of the parts being 

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