But this organic treatment of Society is, of course, still more essential, if we consider society not merely as a number of men and women with social instincts and social aspects of their individual lives, but as a group-life with a collective body, a collective consciousness and will, and capable of realising a collective vital end.The disposition to convert sociology into a study, on the one hand, of social feelings in the individual man, on the other of social institutions that are only forms through which these feelings express themselves, is to my mind a wholly inadequate conception of the science of Society.The study of the social value of individual men no more constitutes sociology than the study of cell life constitutes human physiology.A recognition of the independent value of the good life of a society is essential to any science or art of Society.
To a Greek or a Roman, the idea that the city existed merely for the production of good citizens, and without an end or self of its own, would never have seemed plausible.Nor to any Christian, familiar with the idea and the sentiment of the Church as a society of religious men and women, would it occur that such Society had no life or purpose other than that contained in its individual members.Society must then be conceived, not as a set of social relations, but as a collective organism, with life, will, purpose, meaning of its own, as distinguished from the life, will, purpose, meaning, of the individual members of it.To those who boggle at the extension of the biological term 'organism' to society, asking awkward questions as to the whereabouts of the social sensorium, and the integument of a society, Or whether a political, a religious, an industrial Society do not conflict and overlap, I would reply that these difficulties are such as arise whenever an extension of boundaries occurs in the intellectual world.The concept 'organism' as applied to the life of animals and vegetables, is not wholly appropriate to describe the life of a society, but it is more appropriate than any other concept, and some concept must be applied.
If some qualification is desired, no objection can be raised against the term super-organism except its length.What is necessary is that some term should be used to assist the mind in realising clearly that all life proceeds by the cooperation of units working, not each for its separate self, but for a whole, and attaining their separate well-being in the proper functioning of that whole.As the structure of the organic cell, the organ, and the organism illustrate this cooperative and composite life, so with the larger groupings which we call societies.An animal organism is a society of cells.
§9.So far as the difficulty arising from the narrowly biological use of the term organism is concerned, that is rapidly disappearing before the advance of psychology.For modern biology is coming more and more to realise its early error in seeking to confine itself to the study of life as a merely physical phenomenon.Biology and psychology are constantly drawing into closer relations, with the result that a new science of psycho-biology is already coming into being.In building, thus far, upon a foundation of organic concepts, one is no longer properly exposed to the suspicion of ignoring or disparaging the psychical phenomena which constitute man's spiritual nature.
