Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/80

68 In the system of Spencer, as in that of Comte, sociology appears at the top of the scientific series, but with him this pinnacle of knowledge is really and solidly connected with the building itself. In spite of their much greater complexity, social phenomena are essentially identical with those of inferior cosmic life. Sociology for Herbert Spencer is a physical science like others, requiring no peculiar synthetic or subjective methods, and its aim with him can not be any other than the reduction of the specific laws of social life to the universal laws of motion.

Passing to the delimitation of the sociological domain and to the definition of the object of that science by Herbert Spencer, I must observe that those matters, in modern evolutionism, present a degree of complication which Comte avoided by the artificial isolation he created for sociology in his philosophical system. Natural science teaches us that association is the law of every existence. What we usually call society in common speech is only a particular case of that general law. A being, whether social or not, is never absolute, indivisible; but essentially comparative and multiple, resulting from the action of a number of forces converging on one point.

Political and social systems speak a good deal about "individual" and "society"; but the very point where the individual ends and society begins has never yet been fixed with any accuracy. The most prominent botanists and zoologists, who have to deal with this matter for their own technical purposes, have been led to acknowledge several degrees of individuality: we can consider each individual as a whole, or a person, in comparison with the individuals of a degree beneath it; but when we compare it with the individuality of a superior degree, it soon loses its personality and appears as a part, a member, or an organ. There are myriads of plants (algæ) and animals (infusoriæ), which are styled mononocellules, and which, indeed, are considered as consisting of one single organic element or cell, although their anatomical structure appears, sometimes, very complex and perfect in its peculiar style. But organic cells quite identical with these form also aggregations, or associations, more or less compound; and such groups of cells either live independently, unfolding their own botanical or zoloogical individuality, or enter, in the shape of textures and organs, into the composition of other still superior individual beings. Men, like other mammalia, are, in fact, associations of such colonies of cells. Our inveterate tendency to consider ourselves as an end and a center of the creation makes us prone to prejudge that our own individuality is the only genuine one.

It would be hardly possible to review in a few lines the remarkable researches into the various degrees of vegetable and animal individuality of Nägeli, Virchow, Huxley, Haeckel, and many others; and it is beyond my competence to settle whether absolute individuality, i. e., morphological indivisibility, ought to be granted to cells—as was