488 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



manufacture goods wMle those distribute them, it must be on 

 condition that in exchange for a special kind of service rendered 

 by each part to other parts, these other parts severally give 

 due proportions of their services. This division of labour, first 

 dwelt on by political economists as a social phenomenon, and 

 thereupon recognised by biologists as a phenomenon of Uving 

 bodies, which they called the physiological division of labour, 

 is that which in the society, as in the animal, makes it a living 

 whole." ^ The division of social labour requires a quantity of 

 life to be spent unremuneratively, from the social point of view, 

 in order that the higher spiritual interests of society may 

 continue to subsist. In order that science, whether theoretical 

 or appKed, in order that art and philosophy, in order that any 

 of the higher branches of human culture may be developed, 

 leisure is necessary ; it is necessary that the scientist or the 

 artist or the philosopher be supplied with the substances necessary 

 to physiological existence ; it is thus necessary that there exist 

 a number of persons who manufacture and distribute these 

 substances ; and, below these persons, it is necessary that there 

 exist a number of individuals to do the scavenger's work of 

 society, so to speak. We will not assert that the manufacturing 

 and distributing system as we know it to-day is a conditio sine 

 qua nan of higher social culture ; for the modern industrial system 

 was unknown to the Athenians, as it was unkno\m to the 

 Romans ; and yet the intellectual culture of Athens and Rome 

 was superior to that of our present-day civilisation. But it is 

 certain that the division of labour was as accentuated in Athens 

 and Rome as in our Western civiUsation. The Athenian Republic 

 produced immortal genius because the physiological requirements 

 of life were met by a vast army of slaves ; similarly, Rome was a 

 republic, and subsequently a world-empire, based on slavery. In 



* The Principles of Sociology, i. 440. It is scarcely necessary to recall 

 the fact that the first scientist to establish the principle of the physio- 

 logical division of labour on an empirical basis was MUne-Edwards. 



