with this presumption against it, that it is at variance with such knowledge as we possess of the past history of mankind; and the doubt as to its soundness, which this circumstance cannot but suggest, will, I think, find confirmation, when we look closely into that analogy between the social and the animal organisms on which the whole speculation is built up. In the striking and ingenious essay in which Mr. Spencer first traced this analogy he frankly admits that it does not run on all-fours, and he enumerates no less than four points in which the analogy fails. There will be no need at present to refer to more than one of these: it is to the effect that, unlike the sentient life of animals, which is concentrated in the brain, the sentient life of societies is diffused equally over the entire surface—
"A fact," says Mr. Spencer, "which reminds us that, while in individual bodies the welfare of all other parts is rightly subservient to the nervous system, whose pleasurable or painful activities make up the good or evil of life, in bodies politic the same thing does not hold, or holds but to a very slight extent. It is well that the lives of all parts of an animal should be merged in the life of the whole; because the whole has a corporate consciousness capable of happiness or misery. But it is not so with a society; since its living units do not and cannot lose individual consciousness, and since the community as a whole has no corporate consciousness. And this is an everlasting reason why the welfare of citizens cannot rightly be sacrificed to some supposed benefit of the state, but why, on the other hand, the state is to be maintained solely for the benefit of citizens. The corporate life must here be subservient to the lives of the parts, instead of the lives of the parts being subservient to the corporate life."
I have called attention to this admission because it appears to me to involve very much larger consequences than Mr. Spencer seems disposed to allow—consequences, if I mistake not, fatal to this theory. For what does it amount to? To this, that, however closely the two organisms he has been comparing may correspond in certain details of structure and function, the main purposes of the two schemes—the ends for which alone all the contrivances exist, and with reference to which their goodness or badness must be judged—are essentially different; the aim of the one being to sustain the corporate existence, and to contribute to the corporate happiness; while that of the other can properly have regard only to the existence and happiness of the individual elements which compose it. This being so, what can be more preposterous than to erect the modes of organization furnished by the animal kingdom into patterns and exemplars by which to regulate the relations of social life? What does such doctrine come to but a proposal deliberately to sacrifice the substance to the shadow the ends of social existence to the establishment of a fanciful analogy? The reader of Prof. Huxley's essay on "Administrative Nihilism" will probably remember the passage in which he turns the analogy in question against Mr. Spencer, and converts it into an argument in favor of extending the functions of the state, or rather shows how it might be thus converted:
