Humanity, if a living creature, has a soul and a body. The soul we all know; we call it rightly the human soul. Where is the body of that soul? Not in our little bundle of arms and legs—we had that in full career before the human soul was possible. That is the body of an animal, capable of expressing as much spirit as any animal, perhaps a little more than a large ape. If we had no medium of expression but these physical bodies there could be no Society, no Humanity, and no social soul. That last and best expression of creative force finds its material form in the things we make in the manufactured world. Take from a society its body, the structure of brick, stone, and iron, wood, cloth, leather, glass, paper,—all that elaborate compound of materials in which we live,—reduce it to a mere congregation of naked animals, and what would ensue? Those animals would either rebuild in desperate haste the material forms in which alone Society exists, or they would relapse into individual savagery. If too small a group, or too highly specialised to reproduce the social body to live in, they would be unable even to revert to savagery and would simply die. The Social Soul we have seen to be a common consciousness developed by common activities. The Social Body is a common material form, also developed by common activities. Both appear in proportion to the extent and development of those activities. As house and vehicle for the spirit of an animal has been slowly evolved the cunning mechanism of bone and muscle, with all its constituent organs, in which a man lives. It is but a combination of chemicals and minerals, and when the soul is out of it they disintegrate and revert to lower combinations. As house and vehicle for the spirit of society has been slowly evolved the more cunning and elaborate mechanism of wood and cloth, brick, stone, metal—in which Humanity lives. It too is but a combination of chemicals and minerals, and when its inhabiting humanity is gone, it too disintegrates and reverts, though more slowly. The bones of dead societies remain to us in stone and glass and pottery, as do the bones of extinct animals. An animal life, once started in the germ, goes on growing, _i. e._, making to itself a body suitable to its soul. If you arrest the growth of the body,—if, for instance, a baby’s head were cased in iron,—you would arrest the growth of the soul. It would have one, potentially; that is, it would if its brain had room for it, but actually you would have checked it. So the social life, once started, goes on assimilating material particles and recombining them in mechanical form, enlarging its functions as it enlarges the structure through which alone they become possible. Society builds its body for good or ill.