THE BASIS OF SOCIALITY.
To JOIN the hue and cry against Spencer's analogical com- parison of society with an organism, though popular in certain sociological circles, is paying but scant respect to the real value of one of the pioneer attempts to secure a scientific basis for that foundling science sociology. As a heuristisches Princip its most perdurable value lies in the fact that it has materially aided in the consideration of the sociological as a continuation of the biological. Strictly speaking, the biological probably includes human interaction or the social phenomena of human life, but for the purposes of a division of labor in the scientific world there has been a strong unconscious, though some unkind critic will say all too conscious, current in favor of founding a new dis- cipline and department of human knowledge. Certainly the problems are ample enough to justify the division, and despite the similarity of laws the differences are sufficient to mark the boundaries of a new province of scientific research. Darwin's Origin of Species was really a description of organic technology, and the extra-organic sense and motor organs of social evolu- tion are but the extensions of the tools and instruments which were so successful in the organic conflict. Organic heredity is continued in social heredity, the instinctive giving way, as second in importance, to oral and written tradition and the transmission of institutional life. The organic gains of the individual become objectified and perpetuated for all time in the environment, and an attainable object of possession for all socially minded people. The language of gestures of organic biology becomes the lan- guage of symbols with its priceless economy of time and labor. These laws and many others provide ample scope for the most untiring laborer and the most brilliant genius in the field of research. Spencer's analogy, therefore, is insufficient, and the attempt to base sociology on the specifications laid down for an organism is but little superior to the attempts of certain other sociologists who find all sociology bound up in the consciousness
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