THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 257

probable that in early days, the physical unity was
more prominent than later on, when, as in the case of
mixed racial groups, the psychical bond is practically
supreme. But genetic and environmental bonds do
not as physical facts constitute a society. Until there
is enough of correlated psychical unity for the group
to act, however imperfectly, as a group with a mind
of its own, controlling the egoism of the individual
members, there is no human society.

In short, if we continue to speak of a society as
a social organism, we must safeguard the analogy
by remembering that the character of society as
an organism exists in the thoughts, feelings, and
activities of the component members, and that the
social bonds are not those of sympathy and synergy
only, but that the rational life is intrinsically social.

As Green said, " Social life is to personality what
language is to thought/'

The chief difficulty that Spencer had with his
metaphor was that in the individual organism there is
a centred consciousness in the nervous system, where-
as the social group as a whole has no corporate con-
sciousness. Thus <c while in individual bodies the
welfare of all other parts is rightly subservient to the
welfare of the nervous system, whose pleasurable or
painful activities make up the good or ill of life 5 in
bodies politic the same thing does not hold, or holds
only to a very slight extent. It was well that the
lives of all parts of an animal should be merged in the
life of the whole, because the whole has a corporate
consciousness capable of happiness or misery. But it
is not so with a society, since its living units do not
and cannot lose individual consciousness, and since

Rike."