Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/613

Rh And yet metaphors are here more than metaphors in the ordinary sense. They are devices of speech hit upon to suggest a truth at first dimly perceived, but which grows clearer the more carefully the evidence is examined. That there is a real analogy between an individual organism and a social organism becomes undeniable, when certain necessities determining structure are seen to govern them in common.

Mutual dependence of parts is that which initiates and guides organization of every kind. So long as, in a mass of living matter, all parts are alike, and all pai'ts similarly live and grow without aid from one another, there is no organization: the undifferentiated aggregate of protoplasm thus characterized belongs to the lowest grade of living things. Without distinct faculties, and capable of but the feeblest movement, it cannot adjust itself to circumstances, and is at the mercy of environing destructive actions. The changes by which this structureless mass becomes a structured mass, having the characters and powers possessed by what we call an organism, are changes through which its parts lose their original likenesses, and do this while assuming the unlike kinds of activity for which their respective positions toward one another and surrounding things fit them. These differences of function, and consequent differences of structure, at first feebly marked, slight in degree, and few in kind, become, as organization progresses, definite and numerous; and in proportion as they do this the requirements are better met. Now, structural traits, expressible in the same language, distinguish lower and higher types of societies from one another; and distinguish the earlier stages of each society from the later. Primitive tribes show no established contrasts of parts. At first all men carry on the same kinds of activities, with no dependence on one another, or but occasional dependence. There is not even a settled chieftainship; and only in times of war is there a spontaneous and temporary subordination to those who show themselves the best leaders. From the small unformed social aggregates thus characterized, the progress is toward social aggregates of increased size, the parts of which acquire unlikenesses that become ever greater, more definite, and more multitudinous. The units of the society as it evolves fall into different orders of activities, determined by differences in their local conditions or their individual powers; and there slowly result permanent social structures, of which the primary ones become decided while they are being complicated by secondary ones, growing in their turns decided, and so on.

Even were this all, the analogy would be suggestive; but it is not all. These two metamorphoses have a cause in common. Beginning with an animal composed of like parts, severally living by and for themselves, on what condition only can there be established a change, such that one part comes to perform one kind of function, and another part another kind? Evidently each part can abandon that original state in which it fulfilled for itself all vital needs, and can assume a state in