Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/454

 a task for the antiquarian, these three volumes will still be rich in reward for every student of society.

Nevertheless, the initial conception of the work is typical of Spencer's habit of rushing into generalizations. Society, he believes, is an organism, having organs of nutrition, circulation, coördination and reproduction, very much as in the case of individuals. It is true that in the individual, consciousness is localized, while in society each of the parts retains its own consciousness and its own will; but the centralization of government and authority tend to reduce the scope of this distinction. "A social organism is like an individual organism in these essential traits: that it grows; that while growing it becomes more complex; that while becoming more complex, its parts acquire increasing mutual dependence; that its life is immense in length compared with the lives of its component units;…that in both cases there is increasing integration accompanied by increasing heterogeneity." Thus the development of society liberally carries out the formula of evolution: the growing size of the political unit, from family to state and league, the growing size of the economic unit, from petty domestic industry to monopolies and cartels, the growing size of the population unit, from villages to towns and cities—surely these show a process of integration; while the division of labor, the multiplication of professions and trades, and the growing economic interdependence of city with country, and of nation with nation, amply illustrate the development of coherence and differentiation.

The same principle of the integration of the heterogeneous applies to every field of social phenomena, from religion and government to science and art. Religion is at first the worship of a multitude of gods and spirits, more or less alike in every nation; and the development of religion comes through the notion of a central and omnipotent deity subordinating