226 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. ii. 



Tliese four generalizations, expressing the points in wliicli 

 social and organic development coincide, were summed up in 

 tlie two first clauses of our law of progress. They are imme- 

 diate corollaries of the law of universal evolution and of the 

 definition of life as adjustment. They are not to be under- 

 stood as mere expressions of striking analogies. They are 

 to be understood as implying tb.at the evolution of life and 

 the evolution of society are, to a certain extent and in 

 the most abstract sense, identical processes. Such a con- 

 clusion, indeed, became inevitable the moment we wero 

 brought to admit that the phenomena of society constitute 

 but a specialized division of the phenomena of psychical life. 



Nevertheless it would be a grave error to infer, from this 

 necessary coincidence in development, that a community is 

 nothing more than a kind of organism, as Plato imagined in 

 his " Eepublic," and Hobbes in his " Leviathan." When we 

 go so far as to comj>are the metropolis of a community to 

 the heart of an organism, its roads to blood-vessels, its cir- 

 culating 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 physiologic units ; we are instituting a series of 

 analogies, which are no doubt of considerable value in the 

 study both of history and of political economy. In his essay 

 on the " Social Organism," 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. Littr^ 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 philoso- 

 phical 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. 



