Regarded, however, in the purely external way which a study of its mere structure involves, society appears as a machine--that is to say, appears as the work of intelligence indeed, but not as itself instinct with intelligence. In what follows we shall set the social machine moving. We shall then have a better chance of obtaining an inner view of the driving power. We shall find that we have to abandon the notion that society is a machine. It is more, even, than an organism. It is a communion of souls--souls that, as so many independent, yet interdependent, manifestations of the life-force, are pressing forward in the search for individuality and freedom. CHAPTER VII LAW The general plan of this little book being to start from the influences that determine man's destiny in a physical, external, necessary sort of way, and to work up gradually to the spiritual, internal, voluntary factors in human nature--that strange "compound of clay and flame"--it seems advisable to consider law before religion, and religion before morality, whether in its collective or individual aspect, for the following reason. There is more sheer constraint to be discerned in law than in religion, whilst religion, in the historical sense which identifies it with organized cult, is more coercive in its mode of regulating life than the moral reason, which compels by force of persuasion. To one who lives under civilized conditions the phrase "the strong arm of the law" inevitably suggests the policeman. Apart from policemen, magistrates, and the soldiers who in the last resort must be called out to enforce the decrees of the community, it might appear that law could not exist. And certainly it is hard to admit that what is known as mob-law is any law at all. For historical purposes, however, we must be prepared to use the expression "law" rather widely. We must be ready to say that there is law wherever there is punishment on the part of a human society, whether acting in the mass, or through its representatives. Punishment means the infliction of pain on one who is judged to have broken a social rule. Conversely, then, a law is any social rule to the infringement of which punishment is by usage attached. So long as it is recognized that a man breaks a social rule at the risk of pain, and that it is the business of everybody, or of somebody armed with the common authority, to make that risk a reality for the offender, there is law within the meaning of the term as it exists for anthropology. Punishment, however, is by its very nature an exceptional measure. It is only because the majority are content to follow a social rule, that law and punishment are possible at all. If, again, every one habitually obeys the social rules, law ceases to exist, because it is unnecessary. Now, one reason why it is hard to find any law in primitive society is because, in a general way of speaking, no one dreams of breaking the social rules.