may be spoken of (as we style it in German) as “national” economy. But even if this be allowed, the organic analogy does not hold other than in a rather indefinite way. Where is the one “social body,” which thus evolves its organs and members, being in its early stage like a single household or a village community, and growing to be a complex ensemble of manors and municipalities and great cities, some of which have their manufactures working for foreign export, some for inland consumption? Is it England that has taken a development of this kind? Or is England and Wales? Or are Scotland, and even poor conquered Ireland, to be included?
The more we should try to follow out the admirable attempt which Herbert Spencer has made in this direction of employing the organicist view as a working hypothesis, the more we should become convinced that our real insight into the lines along which social evolution travels is more hampered than promoted by that method of biological analogies.
III
But did I not say there was truth in the biological conception of social life? Indeed I did, and I say so again, if social life is considered externally, and if we speak of a group as a living whole, where life is understood in its genuine sense, that is to say, biologically. And from this point of view, as that famous term, “physiological division of labor,” is borrowed from economical fact and theory, we may vice versa apply physiological terms to social life, considered externally. We may speak of organs and functions in a nation or society, or even with respect to mankind at large. We may metaphorically call the civilized nations the “brain” of humanity, and we may say that the United States has become an independent lobe of the cortex in the course of the last forty years. In the same way it was only lately, I understand, that your President spoke of railways as the arteries through which the blood of trade is circulating. The force of this metaphor will, I believe, not be impaired by the fact that several theorists point in more than a figurative sense to money, or credit, as the social fluid into which all substances of com-
