COLLECTIVE TELESIS 805
commonwealth under Cromwell as an illustration. 1 He also admits that intelligence conduces to association, 2 and says that "the chief prompter is experience of the advantages derived from cooperation." 3 The same idea was also expressed much earlier by him in his Data of Ethics* and need not be further insisted upon. What specially concerns us here is the fact that even the rudest forms of government constitute a sort of collec- tive intelligence devoted to the object of protecting society and advancing its interests. The mere circumstance that the per- sonnel of government is made up of human beings, members of the same society, and possessing the imperfections of mankind in general, and the fact that these favored individuals often use the power which society has conferred upon them to further their own egoistic ends at the expense and to the injury of soci- ety, should not, as it so often does, cause us to lose sight of the principle and turn aside to combat the accident. Any other set of men would do the same thing, as our own political tergiver- sations have shown, and the only remedy is the general improve- ment of human character and the "eternal vigilance" of society. On any "social organism" theory government must be regarded as the brain or organ of consciousness of society, and the small amount of "brains" shown by government is simply in confirmation of the conclusion reached in the third paper that society represents an organism of low degree. Whatever pur- pose government attempts to accomplish, it has to deal with the social forces, to direct and control them on the same principles that the individual applies to the other natural forces. When treating of the latter in the last paper mention was made of the distinction between the exercise of the telic faculty on animate and on inanimate objects, and of the moral quality that enters in when the feelings, especially of men, arc the objects of egoistic
Westnn> <:<-. Vol. I. XXIII (new series. Vol. XVII), January I, 1860. p.
93. Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative, New York, 1891. p. 268. fhics. Vol. II, New Y.
'"The Great Political Superstition," in Social Statics, abridged and revised; together with The Man versus the State, New York, 1892, p. 401.
New York, 187
