serted till the last few years by the most authoritative scholars—or whether organic cells themselves consist of individualized elements (plastids) still more primordial. But that is not intimately connected with the main object of the present essay, and the biologists are now somewhat at variance on the point. I shall only observe that the great De Candolle distinguished six degrees of individuality in plants alone; Schleiden reduced that number to three (the cell, the shoot, the cormus or stock); while Haeckel, again, doubled that number. For shortness' sake, we may admit the classification very recently (in 1883) proposed by a young Italian scholar, M.Cattaneo,[1] who, considering the question from a zoölogical point of view, fixed the number of such degrees of individuality at four, as follows: 1. Plastids i.e., cells or any other primordial elements, after dividing which we should get not a being of any kind, but mere amorphic organic matter; 2. Merids, i.e., colonies of such plastids; 3. Zoïds, i.e., such individuals as are autonomous so far as their individual preservation is concerned, but which are obliged to unite with other individuals of the same series for preservation of species (like superior animals and men); and, 4. Dems, i.e., colonies of zoïds: conjugal couples or pairs, families, tribes, societies.
Assuming that the proper aim of sociology is the investigation of the natural laws regulating the connections between individuals and society, it is obvious that, before we approach sociological studies themselves, we must answer the preliminary question, Which of the various degrees of individuality above mentioned we accept as the starting-point of our researches; or, in other terms, where ought the domain of social science properly to begin?
For Comte social life begins as soon as two individuals of the series of zoïds (he explicitly says, man and woman) unite themselves in a conjugal pair, the result of which union is the arising of a dem, i.e., a compound individual of a superior species. Thus he asks us to look for the object of sociology, not in the material fact of an aggregation, but in the consensus or convergence of forces represented by the uniting individuals, aiming at an end which is personal to none of them. In that sense his teaching seems to be of capital significance for the progress of the real social science. But that meaning can be only obtained from the spirit of his doctrine, not from its letter; and the great philosopher himself was more than once false to his own premises. It seems that Comte was not fully aware of the extreme difficulty of settling in a scientific sense the point where individual life becomes social, and we hasten to see how the far more learned English evolutionist—I mean Herbert Spencer—gets out of the whirlpool where the ship of the French positive philosophy foundered with all hands on board.
In his "Principles of Sociology" Herbert Spencer pays but little
- ↑ "Le colonie lineari e la morfologia dei molluschi."
