But we may find a key to Spencer’s chariness in the matter of drawing conclusions in the rather surprising fact, which will appear presently, that the one legitimate conclusion which the analogy will thoroughly sustain, is an exact contradiction to all that Spencer had ever proclaimed on social questions.
The essay itself, like a great deal of Spencer’s writing, is prolix and wearisome, so we shall select only his most important and striking comparisons.
The introduction is excellent and has for its text Sir James Mackintosh’s great saying—great in his non-evolutionary age though very common-place today—“Constitutions are not made, but grow.” He then declares “the central idea of Plato’s model republic” to be “the correspondence between the parts of a society and the faculties of the human mind.”
Hobbes, the philosopher of Malmesbury, comes next with his celebrated “Leviathan.” Hobbes sought to establish a still more definite parallelism; not, however between a society and the mind, but between a society and the human body. Hobbes’ “Leviathan” was the Commonwealth and he “carries this comparison so far as to actually give a drawing of the Leviathan—a vast human-shaped figure, whose body and limbs are made up of multitudes of men.”
Spencer criticizes these analogies of Plato and Hobbes in detail, but finds the chief error of both writers to consist in the assumption by both “that the organization of a society is comparable, not simply to the organization of a living body in general, but to the organization of a human body in particular. There is no warrant whatever for assuming this. It is in no way implied by the evidence; and is simply one of those fancies which we commonly find mixed up with the truths of early speculation.” But, insists Spencer: “The untenableness of the particular parallelisms above instanced, is no ground for denying an essential parallelism; since early ideas are usually but vague adumbrations of the truth.”
Lacking the great generalizations of biology, it was, as we have said, “impossible to trace out the real relations of special organizations to organizations of another order.” Therefore he proposes “to show what are the analogies which modern science discloses.”
Spencer then discovers four points in which an individual organism and a society agree, and four in which they differ. The points of agreement are:
(1.) “That commencing as small aggregations, they insensibly augment in mass; some of them eventually reaching ten thousand times what they originally were.”
(2.) “That while at first so simple in structure as to be considered structureless, they assume in the course of their growth a continually increasing complexity of structure.”
(3.) “That though in their early, undeveloped states, there exists in them scarcely any mutual dependence of parts, their parts gradually acquire a mutual dependence; which becomes at last so great, that the activity and life of each part is made possible only by the activity and life of the rest.”