Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/509

Rh The reason of municipal law must accord with the constitution of society. Even if law be supposed to be but the reflection of a higher legislating will external to society, and manifesting itself by divine revelation or otherwise, there must be either an accord or an opposition between the constitution of society and any such will. If there be an opposition, it follows that the will legislates society's ultimate destruction. Such a will, however, would defeat itself, and cannot be supposed. The assumption of jurisprudence, therefore, is that the reason of the law is in accord with the social constitution, and indeed the most superficial student would agree that that is the soundest jurisprudence which most closely harmonizes with the form of society.

The researches of scientists into the doctrines of evolution, and the wide diffusion of their results, have made the similarity be- tween the form of society and the form of living things in general a matter of common knowledge. Both are recognized as organic; but the full content of that term is by no means clearly understood. The discovery bears most important consequences, which cannot be appreciated, however, until the essential organic nature is more fully defined. It would be apart from my subject to enter into all the complicated analyses that are involved in the organic idea, but one fact, which bears immediately upon the nature of law, may be indicated at once, and that is, that within the organism there exists a most complete mutual dependence between part and part and between part and whole, between organ and organ and between organ and organism. If one organ fails to perform its functional office, the organism as a whole suffers, and likewise the other organs. On the other hand, if the organism as a whole fails in its general organic activities, the failure intimately affects every organ. Thus, if in the animal any one organ should fail in its functional activity, if the heart should cease to supply blood to the other organs and to the general system, the animal would languish and die, and in the general death would be involved the death of all the organs. Again, if the heart should fail to furnish blood to any one organ, like the limbs, it would become useless, and as a limb would die. So, too, if the whole animal should refuse to carry on its general activities, or should cease to provide sustenance for its several organs, they would become useless from lack of exercise or from inanition. In fine, the animal and its organs subsist only in a general relation of interdependence of part and