Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
These four parallelisms will appear the more significant the more we
contemplate them. While the points specified, are points in which
societies agree with individual organisms, they are also points in which
individual organisms agree with one another, and disagree with all
things else. In the course of its existence, every plant and animal
increases in mass, in a way not paralleled by inorganic objects: even
such inorganic objects as crystals, which arise by growth, show us no
such definite relation between growth and existence as organisms do. The
orderly progress from simplicity to complexity, displayed by
bodies-politic in common with living bodies, is a characteristic which
distinguishes living bodies from the inanimate bodies amid which they
move. That functional dependence of parts, which is scarcely more
manifest in animals than in nations, has no counterpart elsewhere. And
in no aggregate except an organic or a social one, is there a perpetual
removal and replacement of parts, joined with a continued integrity of
the whole. Moreover, societies and organisms are not only alike in these
peculiarities, in which they are unlike all other things; but the
highest societies, like the highest organisms, exhibit them in the
greatest degree. We see that the lowest animals do not increase to
anything like the sizes of the higher ones; and, similarly, we see that
aboriginal societies are comparatively limited in their growths. In
complexity, our large civilized nations as much exceed primitive savage
tribes, as a mammal does a zoophyte. Simple communities, like simple
creatures, have so little mutual dependence of parts, that mutilation or
subdivision causes but little inconvenience; but from complex
communities, as from complex creatures, you cannot remove any
considerable organ without producing great disturbance or death of the
rest. And in societies of low type, as in inferior animals, the life of
the aggregate, often cut short by division or dissolution, exceeds in
length the lives of the component units, very far less than in civilized
communities and superior animals; which outlive many generations of
their component units.
On the other hand, the leading differences between societies and
individual organisms are these:--
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