V 



MR. SPENCER AND THE SOCIAL AGGREGATE 41 



regarded as the result of different external circum- Book i 

 stances which press into different moulds one and 

 the same material. Thus when the single group 

 from which the nation originally springs undergoes, 

 as it becomes more numerous, what Mr. Spencer 

 calls the process of "fission," and spreads itself in 

 search of food over an ever -extending area, new 

 groups separate not because they have different 

 appetites, but because, having the same appetites, 

 they must satisfy them in different places by the 

 exercise of the same faculties. Division of labour, 

 as we have seen, he explains in the same way ; and 

 not its origin only, but its latest and most elaborate 

 developments. Of the manufacturing businesses of and differences 



.... .... between simi- 



to-day, for instance, with their promoters, managers, i ar men who 

 capitalists, and multitudes of various workmen, not 10 ] 



only is each business treated by him as a single dlfferentl y 

 unit, but each of these units, or ganglia, is a unit 

 which differs from the rest for accidental reasons 

 only, as a gardener who happens to be digging . 

 may differ from a gardener who happens to be 

 raking a walk; and he describes the whole as "a 

 plexus of ganglia connected by an intermmcial 

 system. " 



The use of this last phrase, and the physiological 

 analogy suggested by it, illustrate yet more clearly 

 the fact here insisted on namely, that for Mr. 

 Spencer the sociologist's true unit of interest is the 

 social aggregate, as a whole, to the exclusion of the 

 individual or of the class. The latter are merely 

 the ganglia, or veins, or nerves, which are nothing 



