Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/492

480 the most detailed statements of the organic theory. He speaks of society as a super-organism. Ward, DeGreef, Giddings, and Schaffle also use the terms super-organic and super-psychical.

1. Summary of Spencer's position. Society is said to be like an individual organism in the following points:

a) Growth is attended by augmentation of mass,

b) Increasing complexity of structure, and

c) Increasing interdependence of parts.

d) The life and development of society is independent of and far more prolonged than the life and development of any of its component units.

Societies are declared to differ from individual organisms in the following respects:

a) Societies have no specific external forms.

b) Elements of societies do not form a continuous mass. (Analogy with certain forms of organisms, however, very striking.)

c) Units of societies are not stationary and fixed in their positions. (Difference not so great as at first appears.)

d) Capacity for pleasurable feeling is diffused in society not confined to a special tissue as in an organism.

2. Mackenzie in his Introduction to Social Philosophy attempts to abstract the idea organism and so to generalize it as to include all vital combinations of units from the lowest plant to society itself. This abstracted conception includes:

a) An intrinsic relation between the parts and the whole.

b) Development from within.

c) With reference to an end which is involved in its own nature.

3. Fundamental distinction between the positions represented by Spencer and Mackenzie. It is most important to note that Spencer asserts analogies, Mackenzie, homologies. In the one case societies are said to be like individual organisms, in the