Spencer uses his analogies very extensively and vigorously, and later refers to them as merely a scaffolding for building a structure of deductions. This conclusion contains contradictory elements. When the scaffolding is removed, society is left standing as a more or less intangible affair. If a society is like an organism, it experiences a natural cycle of birth, maturity, old age, and death. But according to the telic concept of progress that was advanced by Lester F. Ward and developed by later writers, the death of society does not come with organic inevitableness, but depends on the vision, plans, courage, and activities of that society’s members. A society need never die. For many years it has been popular to criticise Spencer. Nearly all the criticisms are justified. Moreover, they have been so numerous that little of worth seems to be left in Spencer’s writings. However, Spencer’s contributions to social thought are not negligible for several reasons. (1) He emphasized the laws of evolution and natural causation. (2) He described social evolution as a phase of natural evolution. (3) He pointed out the likenesses between biological organisms and human society. (4) He made the rôle of social structures, or institutions, to stand out distinctly. (5) He stressed the importance of individuality. (6) He undermined the idea that the State is a master machine to which all the individual citizens must submit automatically. In the United States, Spencer possessed an able and loyal friend in John Fiske (1842–1901). Fiske built his social thought upon the evolutionarily formulae of Darwin and Spencer. In his _Cosmic Philosophy_, or philosophy of the universe, Fiske contended that the evolution of man produced fundamental changes in the nature of cosmic evolution. With the development of man there appears a new force in the universe, the human spirit, or soul. The advent of this psychical entity has produced a subordination of the purely bodily, physical, material forces and established a control by spiritual forces. Moreover, in human evolution there has been a slowly increasing subordination of the selfish phases of spiritual life to the altruistic. With the apparent cessation in important bodily changes there have come unheralded and unanticipated psychical inventions, which have released man from the passive adaptation to environment which animals manifest, and given to him an increasingly positive control over the processes of adaptation. Humanity as the highest product of the evolutionary processes has the power to change the whole course of cosmic development. Fiske distinctly emphasized the psychical forces in evolution and the part which they are playing in making mankind purposeful and in organizing groups on social principles. Humanity is not a mere incident in evolution; it is the supreme factor.[XVI-9] The main purpose of man is not the perpetuation of the species, but the development of increasingly higher and more social purposes.