Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/334

322 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.

Such are the main agreements and disagreements between society and an organism, as Mr. Spencer sees them, and it will be noticed that the greater part of the disagreements are virtually explained away. He goes much farther into the subject in the remaining portion of the article, and even attempts to find and enumerate the specific homologues in animal organisms of many of the economic functions of society. Thus, "profit answers to the excess of nutrition over waste in a living body;" "the distributing apparatus of a society answers to the distributing apparatus of a living body;" he points out the "analogy which exists between the blood of a living body and the circulating mass of commodities in the body politic," and likens money to the blood-corpuscles. The arteries and veins correspond to the great rivers, railroads, and wagon roads. He treats the nervous system last, and rightly correlates it with government, but he seems to lose himself in the less important aspects of this subject, so that one is led to suspect that he fears to face it in its main aspects. In a footnote on page 305 he makes the significant admission that "if any specific comparison were made, which it cannot rationally be, it would be to some much lower vertebrate form than the human." This admission, taken in connection with the one already quoted, that society corresponds to the stage of animal development represented by the Protococci, Nostoceæ, and Thalassicollæ, "the primitive form of all organization," are quite in line with the position which I have been compelled to take on the question of a social organism; but we are certainly indebted to Mr. Spencer for this masterly essay. No one else has set forth this important subject with any such an array of illustration as this, and only thus could it be rendered worthy of serious consideration on the part of sociologists. But with such