Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/629

Rh

And Prof. Huxley proceeds to point out one of those profound and essential differences, which, if the reader will refer to his argument, will be seen to come, in effect, to very much what Mr. Spencer himself had admitted, in his original essay, in the passage which I have quoted. As the reader is probably aware, Mr. Spencer replied to Prof. Huxley's attack in an elaborate article, now printed in the third series of his collected essays; but, though he might have claimed to have anticipated the objection urged against him by pointing to the passage in which the failure of the analogy in the circumstance in question was admitted and even insisted on, he did not take this course. In truth, though he might thus have avoided the reductio ad absurdum with which he was pressed by Prof. Huxley, and might also have saved his own consistency, he could only have done so by the entire surrender of his main position; for he must have admitted that the all-sufficing analogy, "curious, interesting, and in many respects close" as no doubt it is, was yet, for the purpose of political argument, entirely destitute of cogency; and this was an admission which Mr. Spencer did not see his way to make.

It may still, however, be contended that, though of small account as a criterion in practical politics—in the sphere of what we may call the statics of sociology—this analogy between the individual and social organisms may nevertheless possess value in reference to the dynamical aspects of the social problem, as throwing light, that is to say, on the course of social evolution. And such, it appears to me, is the case so long as we confine ourselves to a very primitive stage in the social history of man. In that primitive stage (as Mr. Darwin has taught us), while man remains still a savage, and even perhaps for some time after he has emerged from the savage condition, the influences which mould his social development are substantially the same with those which govern the development of a species. It is not strange, therefore, that evolution in the human and in the animal kingdom should, during this period, follow a very similar course. But a time arrives in the progress of social development when societies of men become conscious of a corporate existence, and when the improvement of the conditions of this existence becomes for them an object of conscious and deliberate effort. At what particular stage in