THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 255

largely responsible for popularising the conception
expressed in the phrase "The Social Organism*9—
that a society or societary form is in many ways com-
parable to an individual organism, e.g. in growing, in
differentiating, in showing increased mutual depend-
ence of its parts, and so on. It is true that the com-
parison of society to an organism is at least as old as
the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, but Spencer
•was one of the first to fill in the analogy with bio-
logical details. The idea was briefly expressed in
Social Statics, and was elaborated in an essay which ap-
peared in the " Westminster Review" in January 1860.
There he likened government to the central nervous
system, agriculture and industry to the alimentary
tract, transport and exchange to the vascular system
of an animal, and pointed out that like an individual
organism a society grows, becomes more complex,
shows increasing inter-relations, division of labour,
and mutual dependence among its parts, and has a
life immense in length when compared with the lives
of the component units. At the same time, it should
be carefully noted that it was Spencer who intro-
duced the term super-organic as descriptive of social
phenomena, indicating thereby that the biological
categories may require considerable modification be-
fore they can be safely used in Sociology.

Parallelisms between a Society and an Individual
Organism.—Spencer indicated four chief parallelisms
between a society and an individual organism:—

(1) Starting as small aggregates both grow in size.

(2) As they grow their initial relative simplicity

is replaced by increasing complexity of
structure. nature by all others doing the like."