262 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
In any of these cases we have a remarkably heterogeneous lot of organ- isms, satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs, or beings still more inextricably mixed. Think of the number of German, Irish, African, and Chinese cells that have got into the American social organism ! For it cannot be objected that the process is analogous to that of the mingling of hereditary strains by the process of reproduction. We are not dealing with physiological units gemmules, micellae, biophores, plastidules, and what not that make up the stirp or germ plasm in heredity, but with the biological units, or cells, which are products of an entirely different order, vastly superior in size and complexity, and widely dif- ferentiated in all organic beings at all developed. No animal cell not even in reproduction except the spermatozoa ever passes entire from one organism to another. But these social cells stalk abroad at will and migrate singly or in droves, permanently or temporarily, from one organism to another.
If, on the other hand, there is only one social organism, embracing all individual men, is the picture at all relieved? Are not the hetero- geneity and incongruity still further increased? How is that part of the social nervous system which is located in China or Soudan related to the part that is located in Paris or St. Petersburg?
But if such questions are not serious there are others that are so. Mr. Spencer was frightened a long way out of the doctrine by the specter of centralization which its logical results so clearly presented. All are agreed that government is the analogue of the animal brain. But consider the autocratic power that the brain wields over the animal organism! Is society coming to this? Huxley asked this question of Spencer. It has never been answered. Our authors are far from being socialists, indeed both of them manifest grave apprehensions from that quarter. The social organism theory leads direct into the socialist camp. Already M. Pioger has taken up the line of march. A year and a half ago the present writer pointed out 1 that in so far as society can be said to represent an organism it must be one very low in the scale of development, one in which the parts are but feebly inte- grated and in which scarcely any controlling ganglion has as yet been formed. M. Pioger 1 had, it seems, a year earlier, taken the same view, and urged it, as well he might, in defense of socialism. To this com- plexion it must come if society is an organism and government is its brain.
'This JOURNAL, Vol. I, November 1895, P- 325-
