This interrelating holds good of society when we view it externally. Society too can be understood only by the study of its flux of relations, of all the intricate reciprocities which go to make the unifying. Reciprocal ordering—subordinating, superordinating, coördinating—purposeful self-unifyings, best describe the social process. Led by James, who has shown us the individual as a self-unifying centre, we now find the same kind of activity going on in society, in the social mind. And this interrelating, this unity as unity, is what gives to society its authority and power. Thus the term organism is valuable as a metaphor, but it has not strict psychological accuracy. There is this world-wide difference between the self-interrelatings of society and of the bodily organism: the social bond is a psychic relation and we cannot express it in biological terms or in any terms of physical force. If we could, if “functional combination” could mean a psychological relation as well as a physiological, then the terms “functional” and “organic” might be accepted. But they denote a different universe from that of thought. For psychical self-unitings knit infinitely more closely and in a wholly different way. They are freed from the limitations of time and space. Minds can blend, yet in the blending preserve each its own identity. They transfuse one another while being each its own essential and unique self. It follows that while the cell of the organism has only one function, the individual may have manifold and multiform functions: he enters with one function into a certain group of people this morning and with another function into another group this afternoon, because his free soul can freely knit itself with a new group at any moment.[25] This self-detaching, self-attaching freedom of the individual saves us from the danger to democracy which lurks in the organic theory. No man is forced to serve as the running foot or the lifting hand. Each at any moment can place himself where his nature calls. Certain continental sociologists are wholly unjustified in building their hierarchy where one man or group of men is the sensorium, others the hewers and carriers, etc. It is exactly this despotic and hopeless system of caste from which the true democracy frees man. He follows the call of his spirit and relates himself where he belongs to-day, and through this relating gains the increment of power which knits him anew where he now belongs and so continually as the wind of spirit blows.