Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/353

 THE SOCIAL WILL 337

ject and multiplication of its fundamental questions are treated by some as the limits of attainment for the investigations of men, I am going to venture upon answers to these two ques- tions, and at the close to suggest what may be the nature of the will of society and what the consequences in an understanding of human affairs.

What is society ? An organism. 1 But definitions in single words are always dangerous, involving, as they do and must, new meanings for the words employed. Thus society is not an organism exactly as anything else is ; the patient amceba, for example, or the elephant or the octopus or even the individual person. Was ever anything describable in literally the same way as anything else ? Some men, I know, have thought so and have fallen into the pits of wordy controversy for their mistake. Society, then, is an organism only if the word may have a reason- able enjoyment of the common right I do not say the license of all words the right of extended application, the right at once of deepened meaning and wider scope. Society is an organism, not because with growth it increases in mass and in complexity of structure and interdependence of parts, nor yet because the whole survives while the parts die ; for these at best are only analogies, and superficial at that, and they bring with them points of difference, equally superficial ; but because it is a group of beings whose nature is one nature and one with all nature. Do the members of society have constantly to adapt themselves to each other ? or, again, to a common environment that is subject in all its manifold phases to the same law, be this physical or psychical or spiritual, or all three together? Then is there a unity of the life of society, just as there is a unity of life in the special sense of biology and evolution ; and, in the light of its unity, of the singleness or indivisibility of the total life of its members, society is an organism.

Someone objects that this makes society too large, since one really must draw a line somewhere ; one cannot take in every- body. Theoretically a convenient word society may be one

1 Cf. a former article, "The Organic Theory of Society Passing of the Contract Theory," AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, March, 1901.