Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/610

592 wonderful complication of the transformations wrought by the immense amount of internal mobility retained. These transformations are to us the mark, the distinguishing feature of life.

Having thus got the nature of the differences between the organic and inorganic worlds into a series of suggestive formulas, the next thing to be done was to inquire into the applicability of the law of evolution to the higher manifestations of vital activity—in other words, to psychical and social life. Here it was easy to point out analogies between the development of society and the development of an organism. Between a savage state of society and a civilized state it is easy to see the contrasts in complexity of life, in division of labor, in interdependence and coherence of operations and of interests. The difference resembles that between a vertebrate animal and a worm.

Snch analogies are instructive, because at the bottom of the phenomena there is a certain amount of real identity. But Mr. Spencer did not stop with analogies; he pursued his problem into much deeper regions. There is one manifest distinction between a society and an organism. In the organism the conscious life, the psychical life, is not in the parts but in the whole; but in a society there is no such thing as corporate consciousness: the psychical life is all in the individual men and women. The highest development of this psychical life is the end for which the world exists. The object of social life is the highest spiritual welfare of the individual members of society. The individual human soul thus comes to be as much the center of the Spencerian world as it was the center of the world of mediæval theology; and the history of the evolution of conscious intelligence becomes a theme of surpassing interest.

This is the part of his subject which Mr. Spencer has handled in the most masterly manner. Nothing in the literature of psychology is more remarkable than the long-sustained analysis in which he starts with complicated acts of quantitative reasoning and resolves them into their elementary processes, and then goes on to simpler acts of judgment and perception, and then down to sensation, and so on, resolving and resolving, until he gets down to the simple homogeneous psychical shocks or pulses in the manifold compounding and recompounding of which all mental action consists. Then, starting from that conception of life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations within the organism to outer relations in the environment—a conception of which he made such brilliant use in his Principles of Biology—he shows how the psychical life gradually becomes specialized in certain classes of adjustments or correspondences, and how the development of psychical life consists in a progressive differentiation and integration of such correspondences. Intellectual life is shown to have arisen