258 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



energy, that is to say, loss — is incontestable ; and its corollary, 

 that the movement of the social organism — ^in a word, social 

 evolution — cannot occur without the destruction of life, is 

 equally obvious. But to deduce from this law, prevailing in 

 both the inorganic and the organic world, that all loss occasioned 

 in the social organism by the prevailing social conditions is 

 necessary loss ; to argue from this basis that there is no wastage 

 of social force, and consequently no weakening of the social 

 organism, nor incoherence of social life ; is equivalent to con- 

 tending that organic pathology does not imply a wastage of vital 

 energies, because all organic life implies expenditure, and there- 

 fore loss of something. 



Whenever movement takes place within the organism, when 

 the muscle contracts, when the will manifests itself, when 

 thought is active, when the gland secretes, the substance of the 

 muscle, nerves, brain, and glandular tissue is disorganised and 

 consumed ; every phenomenon in the life of an organism is 

 necessarily bound up with organic destruction. All nourish- 

 ment, in a normal organism, undergoes digestion and absorption 

 by the tissues ; this digestion consists in a simplification of the 

 chemical substance introduced as nourishment ; and this simplifi- 

 cation implies the liberation of the surplus quantity of energy 

 contained in the nutritive matter before its introduction into 

 the organism, when it existed in a more complex condition. 

 The energy thus liberated by the act of digestion becomes the 

 source of the vital energy of the organism ; whereas the digested 

 substance is finally incorporated into the living tissue, where 

 it exists as a reserve substance of that tissue. Whenever a tissue 

 enters into activity, a disassimilation of its reserve substance 

 takes place. Activity and destruction of tissue, elementary 

 life and elementary death, are thus correlated phenomena, 

 which imply each other. 



The organism makes good the functional destruction of its 

 reserves by nourishment, by borrowing from its environment 



