Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/337

Rh simply because it is unanswerable. Mr. Spencer's subsequent attempt to answer it must be regarded as an entire failure.

This discussion leads to the final aspect of the whole question and the one upon which I would especially insist. It is that the nervous system, instead of being the last to be considered in a comparison of society with an organism, is the first and only proper term of comparison. All the other terms, those upon which Mr. Spencer has laid the principal stress, furnish only "analogies," as he properly calls them. This, on the contrary, furnishes true homologies. Analogies are of little use except in arousing and satisfying curiosity, but homologies are valuable aids to the sociologist. The nervous system, as the reservoir of protoplasm and seat of life, sensibility, will, and ideas, is a fundamental factor. Everything in an organism depends upon it. It antedates and has alone made possible all the other systems of an organized body. It controls them all absolutely, and without it the rest would all instantly cease.

What, then, is the result of a comparison of society with an organism from this point of view? Where in the scale of animal development shall we find an organism at the same stage of integration as that which society now occupies? As Professor Huxley shows, the strongest advocate of state control, the most extreme socialist, would shrink from the contemplation of any such absolutism as that exercised by the central ganglion of even the lowest of the recognized Metazoa. In order to find a stage comparable to that occupied by society with respect to the central control of the functions of life it is necessary to go down among the Protozoa and study those peculiar groups of creatures that live in colonies so adapted that while the individuals are free to act as they please within certain limits, they are still imperfectly bound together by protoplasmic threads, to such an extent that they are in a measure subordinate to the mass thus combined, and really act as a unit or body. Between this stage and that of the more or less complete union of these individuals into something analogous to tissue, with a growing differentiation of organs and