Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/20

4 To accept these statements as true when applied to society is plainly to make little of the 'dashes and dots,' known as human beings, and to give the first place to the welfare of the state. It thus becomes small praise to say of the state that time writes no wrinkle on its brow. Time not only makes no attempt to conduct the state, or at least the race, to decrepitude, but is on the contrary needed, in order to reveal the full measure of man's social reality. Such is, briefly and roughly drawn, an outline of what is meant by the evolution of the social organism.

Even though the idea that society is an organism be not accepted as completely satisfying, it has worked well. It has laid several ghosts that had long walked abroad in the obscurities of philosophy, one of these ghosts being the doctrine that the state comes into existence precisely when several human beings decide to fabricate it. Yet let us say of the dead nothing but good, at least nothing but the whole truth. As a matter of fact, the view that society is founded on a voluntary compact was in its day a splendid manifesto in favor of the principle that the state was made for man, and not man for the state; it materially assisted in spreading the idea that there is no absolute barrier between prince and subject. It was not a mere coincidence that within a year or two after the execution of Charles I the theory of compact came into being in England. Across a political chasm thought at the time and by many since to be beyond the skill of any engineer to bridge, Milton and Hobbes, the Puritan and the Royalist, unwittingly shook hands in the enunciation of this conception. And yet the view that society is based on a compact or contract has been given its quietus by a conception in accordance with which the state is not suddenly manufactured, but continually assumes new forms.

There are indications, however, that the conception of society as an organism is now in some places losing its hold. One practical issue of the doctrine is, as was said, that we become