Herbert Spencer

by J. Arthur Thomson

Parallelisms between a Society and an Individual Organism.—Spencer indicated four chief parallelisms between a society and an individual organism:—

(1) Starting as small aggregates both grow in size.

(2) As they grow their initial relative simplicity is replaced by increasing complexity of structure.

(3) With increasing differentiation there comes about an increasing mutual dependence of the component parts, until the life and normal functioning of each becomes dependent on the life of the whole.

(4) The life of the whole becomes independent of and far more prolonged than the life of the component units.

It is obvious that this pleasing analogy may be pursued far. Thus a society may be compared to an organism as regards the genetic kinship of the component units (the cells being compared to individuals); in the fact that continued existence depends on continued functioning; in the power of retaining integrity or viable equilibrium in spite of ceaseless changes both internal and external; in the internal struggle of parts which co-exists with some measure of mutual subordination; in owing its peculiar virtue to the subtle inter-relations between its unified elements; in its power of coalescing with another form or of giving birth to another form; in its power of varying as a whole; in its habit of competing with other forms, as the result of which adaptation or elimination may ensue; and so on. In fact the analogy is far-reaching and persuasive and it is helped over some of its difficulties by the consideration that just as there are many grades of social-group, from the nomad herd to the French Republic, so there are many grades of organism from sponge to eagle.

Schäffle, in his famous work on the Structure and Life of the Social Body (1875), carried the metaphor of the social organism to an extreme which has induced many to recoil from it altogether. The family is the cell, and the body consists of simple connective tissue (expressed in unity of speech, etc.), and of various differentiated tissues, such as sensory and motor apparatus. The comparison is as interesting as a game, but when we find writers speaking of the social ectoderm and endoderm, and so forth, we cannot but feel that the metaphor is being stretched to the breaking-point.

Spencer was himself quite conscious that the metaphor had its limitations, for he indicates four contrasts between a society and an individual organism.

(1) Societies have no specific external forms.

(2) The units of an organism are physically continuous, but the units of a society are dispersed persons.

(3) The elements of an organism are mostly fixed in their relative positions; while units of a society are capable of moving from place to place.

(4) In the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with feeling; in a society all the members are so endowed. The social nervous system is happily wider than the government.

There are other limitations, e.g., that the social organism does not seem to pass necessarily through a curve of life ending in senility and death; that when a particular form disappears it is usually by being incorporated into another in whose life it shares.

As it appears to us the real analogy is between a human societary form and an animal societary form, such as an ant-hill or a bee-hive or a beaver-village, and not between a society and an individual organism. Moreover, since the biologist has not yet arrived at a clear conception of the innermost secret of the individual organism, notably the secret of its unity, the comparison implied in the metaphor of the social organism is an attempt to interpret obscurum per obscurius. The analogy, such as it is, is probably destined to be of more use to the biologist than to the sociologist.

In thinking of the unity of the individual organism—which remains in great measure an enigma to Biology—we have to distinguish (a) the physical unity, which rests on the fact that all the component units are closely akin, being lineal descendants of the fertilised ovum, and on the fact that they are subtly connected with each other in mutual dependence and co-operation, whether by intercellular bridges, or by the commonalty established by the vascular and nervous systems; and (b) the correlated psychical unity, the esprit de corps, which in a manner inconceivable to us makes the whole body one. That there are organisms, like sponges, in which the psychical unity is quite unverifiable is probably only a passing difficulty, greatly lessened by our increasing knowledge of the life of the simplest unicellular organisms whose behaviour is now seen to include trial by error and other traits which we cannot interpret without using psychical terms.

The same is true in regard to the social organism; we have here to distinguish (a) the physical unity which rests on hereditary kinship and on similar environmental conditions, and (b) the psychical unity, the "social mind," developed with relation to certain ends—"a unity which is the end of its parts." It seems probable that in early days, the physical unity was more prominent than later on, when, as in the case of mixed racial groups, the psychical bond is practically supreme. But genetic and environmental bonds do not as physical facts constitute a society. Until there is enough of correlated psychical unity for the group to act, however imperfectly, as a group with a mind of its own, controlling the egoism of the individual members, there is no human society.