The enduring reflex and instinctive dispositions of the individual mind we may liken to the established institutions of a nation, such as the army and navy, the post office, the judicial and the administrative systems of officials. These, like the instincts, are specialised executive organisations working in relative independence of one another, each discharging some specialised function adapted to satisfy some constantly recurring need of the whole organism. In both cases such semi-independent organisations, the instincts or the institutions, are relatively fixed and stable, and they work, if left to themselves, quasi-mechanically along old established lines, without intelligent adaptation to new circumstances; and they are incapable of self-adaptation. In both cases, the mental organisation is in part materialised, the instinct in the form of specialised nervous structure, the institution in the form of the material organisation essential to its efficient action, the buildings, the printed codes, the whole material apparatus of complex national administration. In both cases, the actions in which they play their part are not purely mechanical but to some extent truly psychical—though of a low order. If we accept the view, which is held by many, that instincts and reflexes are the semi-mechanised results of successive mental adaptations effected by the mental efforts of successive generations, then the analogy is still closer; for the permanent national institutions are also the accumulated semi-mechanised products of the efforts at adaptation of many generations. The organisation of some nations resembles that of the minds of those animals whose behaviour is purely instinctive. Such is a nation whose organisation takes the form of a rigid caste system. Each caste performs its special functions in the prescribed manner in relative independence of all the others. And, in both cases, the organisation of the mind includes no means of bringing the different fixed tendencies or dispositions into harmonious co-operation in the face of unusual circumstances. The whole system lacks plasticity and adaptability; for it is relatively mechanical and of a low degree of integration. Any true adaptation of the whole organism by mental effort is impossible in both cases.