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took for definitions have arrived at wild conclusions and still wilder systems. One of our younger scholars, Paul Earth, has even gone so far as to cite this analogy as a scientific authority to refute Marx. His reply to Marx's claim that industry is the "foundation" upon which law rises as a superstructure is that this cannot be "because it is incongruous with the o?ily correct con- ception of society as an organism" (p. 137). He declares that Spencer is authorized in regarding his principle "society is an organism"- as a parallelism existing not in thought merely, but also in reality, and that he is entitled to draw from it con- clusions about reality. However that may be, the organic analogy has been made the basis of a science, and thereby its evolution has been nipped in the bud. From the fruitless efforts of Comte to Paul von Lilienfeld enough discussion of this sub- ject has been contained in sociological literature. I may here select only one of the most eminent German representatives of this theory in order to show from his works the unfruitfulness of this lame analogy. In his colossal work in four volumes Fr. Albert Schaeffle has attempted, from the view point that society is comparable with an organism, to understand society and to describe its life and development. 1 I shall not inquire how far he has been led by Comte and Spencer. Schaeffle himself admits only a very slight measure of influence from them.
Schaeffle takes his departure from the conviction that the social " body " differs in degree, not in kind, from every other individual organism. He announces this frequently. Thus : "The psychical life of the social body is a higher potency of the psychical life of the individual. It would not be hard to show what there is added to this, in a given grade of social development, as peculiar social reinforcement, language, sym- bols, institutions for communication of ideas, division and com- bination of psychical labor, though it must be admitted that
1 Bau und Leben des socialen Korpers. Encyklopadischer Versuch einer realen Anatomic, Physiologic und Psychologic der menschlicher Gesellschaft mit besonderer Riicksicht auf die Volkswirtschaft als socialer Stoffwechsel. 4 Bande. Tubingen, 1875-78. (For a notice of the second edition, in two volumes, and a different estimate of SCHAEFFLE, vide AM. JOUR. OF SOCIOL., September 1896, p. 310.)
