a presentation they are in position to take it up and consider its claims.
The one truth with which scarcely anyone can help being impressed is the high degree of cooperation displayed among the several functions, which can only be due to the high degree of centralization that has been reached even in the least developed of the true organisms, such as are referable to any of the great groups recognized by zoologists. That is to say, all these organs perform their functions under one central control. Mr. Spencer seems to have been so much impressed by the harmonies he discovers in the details that he practically lost sight of this important truth. It was not that he was not fully aware of it, for it is more to him than any one else that we owe the formulation of the great law that organic development proceeds by differentiation and integration—that in proportion as the parts are multiplied they must be made subordinate to the whole. What he failed to see in his thorough comparison of an organism with society was that while the differentiations are often very similar there is very little resemblance in the degree of integration
Professor Huxley was quick to seize upon this omission, and in a lecture entitled "Administrative Nihilism"[1] he dealt him some very heavy blows. The vulnerable point, as he clearly saw, in Mr. Spencer's argument was that in which he undertook to institute comparisons with the nervous system of animals. Applying himself directly to this point, he said:
Mr. Spencer shows with what singular closeness a parallel between the development of a nervous system, which is the governing power of the body in the series of animal organisms, and that of government, in the series of social organisms, can be drawn:
"Strange as the assertion will be thought," says Mr. Spencer, "our Houses of Parliament discharge in the social economy functions that are, in sundry respects, comparable to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal. . . . . The cerebrum coördinates the countless heterogeneous considerations which affect the present and future welfare of the individual as a whole; and the legislature coördi-
- ↑ An Address to the Members of the Midland Institute, October 9, 1871. Fortnightly Review, New Series, Vol. X., November 1, 1871, pp. 525–543.
