When, now, we test the analogy of the organism by its competency to express the full meaning of the social consciousness, as it has been defined, we must say that the analogy but feebly expresses the likeness of men; it best expresses the inevitableness of mutual influence, though even here there is no understandable ultimate explanation; it fairly expresses the desirableness and indispensableness of mutual influence, but, of course, with entire lack of ethical meaning; and it quite fails to express the sense of the value and the sacredness of the person, the sense of obligation, and the sense of love. We need to see and feel exactly these shortcomings, if we are not to abuse the analogy. There is no social consciousness that will hold water that does not rest on what Phillips Brooks called "a healthy and ineradicable individualism," in the sense of the recognition of the fully personal. We are spirits, not organisms, and society is a society of persons, not an organism, in a strict sense. Why should we wish to make society less significant than it is? [12] Cf. King, _Op. cit._, pp. 92 ff., 179. [13] _Introduction to Philosophy_, p. 373. [14] _The Microcosmus_, Vol. I, p. 262. [15] Lotze, _The Microcosmus_, Vol. II, pp. 649 ff. CHAPTER III _THE NECESSITY OF THE FACTS, OF WHICH THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE REFLECTION, IF IDEAL INTERESTS ARE TO BE SUPREME_ I. THE QUESTION With this positive and negative definition of the social consciousness in our minds, a third question immediately suggests itself to one who wishes to go to the bottom of our theme. Why must the facts, of which the social consciousness is the reflection, be as they are if ideal interests are to be supreme? What has a theodicy to say as to these facts? Why, that is, from the point of view of the ideal--of religion and theology--why are we constituted so alike? so that we must influence one another? so that the results of our actions necessarily go over into the lives of others? so that the innocent suffer with the guilty and the guilty profit with the righteous? so that we must recognize everywhere the claim of others? so that we must respect their personality? and so that we must love them? II. OTHERWISE NO MORAL WORLD AT ALL The answer to all these world-old questions may perhaps be contained in the single statement, that otherwise we should have no moral world at all. There would be no thinkable moral universe, but rather as many worlds as there are individuals, having no more to do with one another than the chemical reactions going on in a set of test-tubes.