Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/19

3 a higher view of man than the division into Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian. So, moreover, the fable of The Belly and the Limbs, excellently retold by Shakespeare, contains a social ideal more profound than the absolute antagonism of patrician and plebeian. Yet all these comparisons rest upon such a conception of a body as can be obtained merely by observation. There before our eyes is the object, manifestly made up of head, hands, and feet; and in the same way, so the argument runs, must there be head, hands, and feet to the body politic.

But recent observers have been impressed with the much more subtle conception of an organism as undergoing radical modifications, and yet at no time ceasing to be one single object. Just as the caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly, to make use of one phase of the pictorial symbol of the Synthetic Philosophy, are different stages in the life of one animal, so the organism called society may go through changes quite as remarkable without any real break in the course of its life: men may come, and men may go, but the state goes on forever. By this way of regarding society our attention is directed away from the actual static relations of individuals to one another, and fixed upon the path of the great leviathan, as Hobbes calls the commonwealth, while it makes its way through time. The state comes to be looked on as having a life of its own, as contrasted with the life of individuals; and, in comparison with this generic existence, the lives of separate individuals seem to be of minor importance. Thus, Mr. Spencer writes: "If the constitution of the species and its conditions of existence are such that sacrifices, partial or complete, of some of its individuals so subserve the welfare of the species that its numbers are better maintained than they would otherwise be, then there results a justification for such sacrifices"; and of nature Tennyson sings in the same strain:

" So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life."