Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/273

 REVIEWS 259

harmony early discovered between the twelve apostles and the twelve planets, it performed the valuable service of creating the constellations of the heavens. It constitutes a sort of animism, and its favorite amusement is to animate the inorganic world and to personify abstract ideas and relations. Many there are who are convinced that this world of ours is in very truth a great living beast with all the organs and functions of a huge animal, and that men are merely parasites upon it like fleas among the hairs of an animal's skin. To the stage of meta- physics or personification belong such analogies as Hobbes' conception of the state as a huge Leviathan, a conception reflected by Herder, Schelling, and Hegel, and Comte's idea of humanity as a Grand

Akin to these, and especially to the former, is the somewhat broader analogy of society to an organism, Bluntschli in his Allgemeines Staats- recht, 1852, furnishing a sort of connecting link between the animated state and the social organism. The question of priority in propound- ing the latter doctrine has arisen. By many it has been supposed that Schaffle's great work, Bau und Leben des socialen Korpers, which first appeared in 1875, should be regarded as its true starting point, but not only did the first volume of Lilienfeld's Gedanken uber die Social- wissenschaft der Zukunft, in which it is fully set forth, appear two years earlier, but, as we learn from the preface of M. Worms to the present work by that author, large parts of the other appeared in the Russian language somewhat earlier still. It has been supposed that Mr. Spencer's treatment of that subject was later, as the first volume of his Principles of Sociology did not appear till 1874, but his views are set forth in his Study of Sociology, 1873, an d much earlier in an article in the Westmin- ster Review for January i860. 1 Nor was this his earliest utterance on the social organism. There is a distinct adumbration of it in the original edition of his Social Statics, 1850, pp. 451-453, which is in advance of Bluntschli. But neither can we ascribe to Mr. Spencer the origination of the scientific conception of the analogy between society and an organism. In the fourth volume of Comte's PC Philosophy, that great neglected storehouse of original ideas, this anal- ogy is clearly pointed out in various passages. This volume originally appeared in 1838, and some of the passages may be found on pages 285 and 31 1 of the third edition.

We have now before us two works from the same press, written by

See this JOURNAL, Vol. I, pp. 317-322.