(4.) “That the life of a society is independent of, and far more prolonged than the lives of any of its component units; who are severally born, grow, work, reproduce, and die, while the body politic composed of them survives generation after generation, increasing in mass, in completeness of structure, and in functional activity.”
The four points of difference are:
(1.) “That societies have no specific external forms.”
(2.) “That though the living tissue whereof an individual organism consists, forms a continuous mass, the living elements of a society do not form a continuous mass; but are more or less widely dispersed over some portion of the earth’s surface.”
(3.) “That while the ultimate living elements of an individual organism are mostly fixed in their relative positions, those of the social organism are capable of moving from place to place.”
(4.) “The last and perhaps the most important distinction is, that while in the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with feeling, in a society all the members are endowed with feeling.”
It is worthy of note that, while Spencer finds the parallelisms to increase in significance the more they are examined, the differences tend to break down when they are worked out in detail.
The advantage which Spencer had over Plato and Hobbes is very clearly seen in the first and fourth parallelisms, neither of which could have been made until twenty-one years before, when in 1839, Theodore Schwann developed his great theory that the body is an organized society of interconnected cells. “The importance of this theory,” says Professor Thatcher, “can hardly be estimated. It gave an entirely new view to animal and vegetable life.” At any rate, it served Spencer greatly in this essay.
The next ten pages are devoted to organic development from the protozoa, the lowest tiny animal forms, to crustacea—crabs etc.,—which are materially higher in the animal scale. This development is marked by increasing mutual dependence of parts and a growing division of labor. It is compared to the development of society from primitive Bushmen to the early Anglo-Saxons, during which corresponding phenomena are traced.
He escapes Haeckel’s blunder at least to the extent of calling the two divisions of labor by their proper names. Among animals it is the “physiological” division of labor; in society, the “economical” division of labor. Whether he would have been able to still perceive that distinction in dealing with those ant and bee communities where Haeckel got lost, there is nothing to show.