In short, if we continue to speak of a society as a social organism, we must safeguard the analogy by remembering that the character of society as an organism exists in the thoughts, feelings, and activities of the component members, and that the social bonds are not those of sympathy and synergy only, but that the rational life is intrinsically social.
As Green said, "Social life is to personality what language is to thought."
The chief difficulty that Spencer had with his metaphor was that in the individual organism there is a centred consciousness in the nervous system, whereas the social group as a whole has no corporate consciousness. Thus "while in individual bodies the welfare of all other parts is rightly subservient to the welfare of the nervous system, whose pleasurable or painful activities make up the good or ill of life; in bodies politic the same thing does not hold, or holds only to a very slight extent. It was well that the lives of all parts of an animal should be merged in the life of the whole, because the whole has a corporate consciousness capable of happiness or misery. But it is not so with a society, since its living units do not and cannot lose individual consciousness, and since the community as a whole has no corporate consciousness. And this is an everlasting reason why the welfare of citizens cannot rightly be sacrificed to some supposed benefit of the State: but why, on the other hand, the State is to be maintained solely for the benefit of citizens. The corporate life must here be subservient to the lives of the parts, instead of the lives of the parts being subservient to the corporate life" ("The Social Organism," Essays, vol. i.). In other words, Spencer found the metaphor useful even when it broke down, for it enabled him to corroborate his doctrine of individualism. If he had pursued the analogy between the human social group and the animal social group, such as that of bees or beavers, the corroboration would not have been so easy, though Spencer would doubtless have arrived at the same result.
[CHAPTER XVI]
THE POPULATION QUESTION
We have not in this volume discussed any of Spencer's contributions to practical life, for the task of indicating his scientific position was more than enough. Furthermore, his Education is the best known of all his works, and many of its suggestions are now realised in everyday practice; his political recommendations are too debatable; and as to ethical advice he has himself said: "The doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent I had hoped. Most of the conclusions drawn empirically are such as right feelings, enlightened by cultivated intelligence, have already sufficed to establish." But there is one practical suggestion to which we must refer, namely Spencer's contribution to the population question.
"The Abundance of Life"—the title of a very suggestive essay by Prof. Joly—is one of the great facts of Nature. The river of life is always tending to overflow its banks. Hence, in part, the "Struggle for Existence."
There are great differences in the number of offspring produced by different kinds of organisms, and great differences in the mortality-rate among the crowds of those produced. The rate of reproduction depends primarily on the constitution of the organism, but it also varies in response to external conditions, notably in relation to the food-supply. Some organisms are intrinsically more reproductive than others, thus the unicellular organisms, such as Bacteria and Infusorians, which multiply by dividing into two or many units, head the list; and, on the whole, it may be said that relatively simple creatures multiply most rapidly, especially if their mode of reproduction, e.g., the equipment of the germ-cells, is relatively simple and inexpensive, and if the period required for reaching reproductive maturity is short. But as we find very different reproductivity in animals and plants which occupy the same grade of organisation, we are led to the conclusion, which Weismann, for instance, has worked out, that the constitutional capacity of producing many or few offspring has been regulated by selection working throughout the ages, and is adapted to the particular conditions of life. As the continuance of the race is an ideal aim, which could not be present to the animal consciousness—not to speak of the slumbering analogue of this in plants—all that we can say is that in certain conditions variations towards greater fertility would be relatively more successful because there were more of them to survive, and that variations towards relative sterility would seal their own doom. The survivors survived because they were many and capable of producing many. Moreover it is possible in certain conditions that a variation towards greater fertility may have been correlated with some other variation, such as greater vigour on which the process of selection could immediately operate. In any case, however, we may work out the theory, the rate of reproductivity cannot be satisfactorily interpreted without regarding it as in great part an adaptive character.