Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/74

 processes. Again society can forthwith impose on new individuals any change of form without any change of substance, which is impossible for an animal body. Finally, the individuals who form society can, under circumstances, change the organs and organisation of society, while anything of that kind is quite impossible in an animal or vegetable organism.

If, therefore, society is an organism, it is no animal organism, and to attempt to explain any phenomena peculiar to society from the laws of the animal organism is not less absurd than when the attempt is made to deduce peculiarities of the animal organism and self-movement and consciousness from the laws of the vegetable being. Naturally this does not imply that there is not also something common to the various kinds of organisms.

As the animal so also the social organism survives so much the better in the struggle for existence the more unitary its movements, the stronger the binding forces, the greater the harmony of the parts. But society has no fixed skeleton which supports the weaker parts, no skin which covers in the whole, no circulation of the blood which nourishes all the parts, no heart which regulates it, no brain which makes a unity out of its knowing, its willing, and its movements. Its unity and harmony, as well as its coherence, can only arise from the actions and will of its members. This unitary will, however, will be so much the more assured the more it springs from a strong impulse.

Among species of animals, in whom the social bond becomes a weapon in the struggle for life, social impulses become encouraged which, in many species and many individuals, grow to an extraordinary strength, so that they can overcome the impulse of self-preservation and reproduction when they come in conflict with the same.

The commencement of the social impulse we can well look for in the interest which the simple fact of living together in society produces in the individual for his fellows, to whose society he is used from youth on.