CHAPTEK IIL 



POLITICAL INTEGRATION. 



448. THE analogy between individual organisms and 

 social organisms, which holds in so many respects, holds ill 

 respect to the actions which cause growth. We shall find it 

 instructive to glance at political integration in the light of 

 this analogy. 



Every animal sustains itself and grows by incorporating 

 either the materials composing other animals or those com 

 posing plants ; and from microscopic protozoa upwards, it has 

 been through success in the struggle thus to incorporate., that 

 animals of the greatest sizes and highest structures have been 

 evolved. This process is carried on by creatures of the lowest 

 kinds in a purely physical or insentient way. Without 

 nervous system or fixed distribution of parts, the rhizopod 

 draws in fragments of nutritive matter by actions which we 

 are obliged to regard as unconscious. So is it, too, with 

 simple aggregates formed by the massing of such minute 

 creatures. The sponge, for example, in that framework of 

 fibres familiar to us in its dead state, holds together, when 

 li ving, a multitude of separate monads ; and the activities 

 which go on in the sponge, are such as directly further the 

 separate lives of these monads, and indirectjv further the 

 life of the whole: the whole having neither sentiency nor 

 power of movement. At a higher stage, however, the process 

 of taking in nutritive materials by a composite organism. 



