The concept that society is an organic form of life is not new to the world.

The popular mind, confronted with many conspicuous proofs of human solidarity, admitted the idea to one of those thought-tight compartments in which we keep such concepts as we are unable or unwilling to think through and hold in logical relation to our others. There it has remained, enlarging somewhat in course of time and loud events, and tending to modify such conduct as came its way to the social benefit. But since a much larger brain era was governed by the egoistic concept, and vital affairs far more directed by it, we still consciously act as individualists, and still construe Human life in terms of the individual. Let us now use the temporary power of the brain to think in defiance of its own previously held ideas; and study the organic nature of Society.

The proposition is that Society is the whole and we are the parts: that that degree of organic development known as human life is never found in isolated individuals, and that it progresses to higher development in proportion to the evolution of the social relation; that a man is, individually, a complete animal, with sufficient ability to attain the necessities of an animal existence; but that as a human being he is but a minute fraction of a great entity, the necessities of whose existence are only to be attained by the complex interdependent activities of many men.

That this relation is strictly organic, involving the high specialisation of the individual man to the social service in activities which are of no possible benefit to his separate animal life—(as the activities of a dentist or a teacher); but which are of visible benefit to his community, his community in turn supporting him.

That these common and composite activities have developed a life-form quite above and beyond that of its constituent men; with a structure and functions outside of and including theirs. That whereas the life processes of the constituent individuals must of course be insured and improved by the higher life inclosing them; yet that a greater or less sacrifice of individual interests may at any time be necessary—and is naturally made—the greater including the less.

That this Social Organisation tends to make safe and happy its constituent organisms in their separate animal lives, yet their greatest happiness lies in their recognition and fulfilment of the social life.

That an increasing social consciousness and social activity is the most healthful and happy growth for the human race; and further, that “the riddle of human life” is made quite simple by this purely natural and evolutionary position.

In proof and illustration let us consider certain facts, most of them commonly known to us all, but not commonly considered in this connection. We will observe in turn the organic nature of Society as shown in its nutritive processes, in its high and personally sacrificial specialisations, and in its patently collective mental life.

First, and most visible, come the physical life processes; those daily activities in which our energies find expression, by the products of which our lives are maintained. Among facts suitable for nursery education is the glaring one that in plainest economic relation “no man liveth to himself nor dieth to himself.”

Each man does not support himself by his own efforts, as an individual animal does, but pools his efforts with those of others and shares in the common good as a collective animal does; as the bee or ant. This does not refer to any consciously advocated plan of collectivism; but to the present fact that our coffee comes from one country and our tea from another; that the Californian gives us oranges and the Kansan beef; that the carpenter and mason build our houses and the tailor makes our coats.

The daily necessities of one man are met by the activities of countless other men. If they were gone, the one man could not supply himself with any of these things; but would, if he lived, sink to the level of the savage hunter,—who is indeed “self-supporting.” We have, it is true, a system of exchange in which it is endeavoured to make each man’s share in the common product proportionate to his personal efforts; but even if this system worked successfully it would not alter the fact that the supplies are really made by the others—and the one—alone—could not make them.

Lay aside for the moment the confusion of idea naturally arising from our system of interpersonal exchange and its convenient medium, money.

Suppose that money were entirely out of the world; or that we were so flooded with it that it lost its value as a medium of exchange. Great confusion as to how much of anything should be demanded for something else would of course ensue; but the most conspicuous result would be the unavoidable perception that it was the thing we needed to live on—not the money.

The purchasing power of money varies continually, but the nourishing power of wheat or the heat-retaining power of wool does not vary. We eat the bread and are kept warm by the coat; and the wheat and wool are prepared for us by many strangers. It may be for a moment supposed that an individual man could, if he chose, make his own bread and coat from his own wheat and wool, but follow back the evolution of these processes and see if he ever did.

The more nearly alone you find a man—as the Bushmen—the more nearly naked he is, the more absolutely a hunter and an eater of raw food. To raise wheat and bake bread requires a stationary group of long standing. It is a social process. So with the coat—the man who lives really alone wears at most the skin of another animal.

To keep sheep, to shear, and card, and spin, and weave, and cut, and sew—all these processes require a stationary group of still longer standing; they are social processes. A man alone can catch another animal, can “eat his fat and wear his hair”; but the baker and the tailor are slowly evolved social functionaries. Everywhere we see the present proof that the wants of man are not supplied by his own efforts and cannot be; that his life processes are essentially collective.

Now let us approach these facts from behind, watch their inception and growth, and see how unavoidable is the conclusion.

The life of any creature is primarily dependent on the regular renewal of its constituent particles. The process of living uses up the materials lived in. Living involves dying, and to postpone the dying the structure is continually supplied with fresh materials. This continuous supply of fresh materials we call nutrition. It is an increasingly elaborate process, with “many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip”; and the main line of organic evolution is in development of these nutritive processes.

Conditions of the environment modify a creature, as in hide and hair; conditions of inter-animal competition modify him, as in horns and stings; conditions of reproduction modify him, developing an elaborate physical mechanism and a more elaborate scheme of decoration; but the most distinctive modification of a creature is that produced by its nutritive conditions. “Order Mammalia,” with all its towering superiority, is founded merely on a new way of feeding the baby. The food supply of the world is subject to fluctuating influences—climatic, geographic, and other; and as we watch the widening panorama of animal forms changing and growing up the ages, we see the whole procession to be moving always in one line—in pursuit of its dinner. We think of our dinners as a pleasing series of events, but we do not appreciate their awful importance.

The life of any creature absolutely depends on getting together a certain group of chemical constituents and keeping them reinforced. While those constituents, massed in certain proportions, are cunningly poured through a certain small orifice called a mouth, the creature lives. A procession of dinners passing a given point—that is the physical condition of life. We are the given point. If the procession goes another way—or stops awhile—“we” cease to live.

And since there is no law of nature calling on the proper constituents to arise, to detach themselves from their undesirable comrades, to form into rightly proportioned groups, appear at proper intervals and to enter the “given point,”—therefore the principal machinery of every living form is developed to discover, pursue, seize, and gather in these constituents. To obtain what we want from the air, gills and lungs are invented; that supply is so instantly imperative and so plentiful and easy of access, that an unconscious organic motion sucks it in. If food were as simple and common as oxygen we should be spared much exertion.

But food is anything but this. In its crude forms it is thinly scattered in the water, and small early beast-lets float around and grab it as they can. “You get food when it drops and you die when it stops—you helpless free agent of sorrow!”

Food in vegetable forms is also widespread and thin. The creatures that live on grass have had to develop the most cumbrous and involved of alimentary canals; huge barrels filled with many stomachs, supported by sturdy legs, as of tables, to hold the eating machine up, and carry it eternally about after its plentiful but highly diluted dinner. A concentrated vegetable food, like the fruit, brings out quite other qualities; as seen in all light swift arboreal animals, as the monkey; and between ground and tree rises the long neck of the giraffe—stretching, ever stretching, after his ascending dinner.

The humming-bird has slowly acquired a very special tongue to get his dinner, so has the butterfly; the tooth of the squirrel is necessitated by the stubborn nut; and the poor thirsting camel has his private portable food-and-water supply to meet the demands of life between far-scattered oases.

But when it appeared that food in predigested ready-to-eat packages was specially desirable; when the carnivorous habit was developed, then indeed we find a wild variety of adaptation to one’s dinner. Food in this form was not only widely scattered and difficult of access, but actively reluctant, sometimes even contentious. But means were found to encompass it. Was it small and hidden like the ant, yet numerous enough to pay for eating? Lo! the ant-eater’s slender snout and slenderer tongue pursue and capture it. Is it a fat grub, deep boring in the bark? The ingenious Javan monkey develops a special finger for his extradition. Does the insect fly waveringly from flower to flower? The bird flies more accurately and swiftly from insect to insect, and the hawk swoops still more efficiently from bird to bird.

Whatever form the dinner took, wherever the dinner went, there followed the fluent, ever-changing animal organism, producing tooth or claw, tongue or proboscis, seven stomachs or a private fish-pole—whatever was necessary to lure, catch, hold, inclose, and assimilate, this ever-receding and sometimes actively resisting, but always indispensable dinner. The evolution of animal organisms is conditioned mainly upon the food supply.

How does humanity figure in this transformation scene?

Man alone, of the whole animal kingdom, has attained a complete new stage in this imperative process of nutrition. Where the most primitive ameboid cell can but receive food; where the whole machinery of later organisms can but seize food; man, and man alone, produces food. Through all the ages, through every conceivable modification of structure and function, the animal has pursued its dinner. Man has caught it.

Man alone has permanently mastered his food supply; instead of an endless chase it is a closed circle—he makes that which makes him. That is why physical evolution stops with man—and psychical evolution begins. No longer at the mercy of thin grass, man makes the fat-grained corn; no longer endlessly chasing the buffalo, he raises the big steer. His prairie in the garden, his prey in the barnyard, the animal can rest at last, and man can grow. By what strange new power is this immense step taken, which has enabled this one out of all created forms to apply productive force, instead of mere destructive force, to his food supply? By the power of organisation. By entering upon that new life, the social life, which raises us above all lower forms.

The cell groups with others into the organ, the organs group again and form organisms; the organisms, once more combined, form an organisation. Society is the fourth power of the cell.

A low and limited form of social life began with the temporary union of hunters; loose fluctuating hordes, like those of wild dogs or wolves.

When cattle were kept instead of killed, were milked and sheared and bred with care and forecast, there arose a higher group form, the family. With an insured food supply at hand man sat quiet, watching his cattle; and with food to spare and time to spare, he began to grow. The family, our physical nucleus, grew too; grew as it had never grown before.

The limits of cattle-fed life were sharp and clear. There was no permanent home, no village, no extra-familiar intercourse, only warfare over pasture and water between tribe and tribe. But the hour came when corn was planted and eaten; and then our human life was indeed established.

The conditions of permanent physical juxtaposition, so essential to social growth, were met for the first time. The Hunter, requiring forty square miles of land per capita to chase at hazard his laborious prey, had no chance for social growth. Any other man on his forty miles was a competitor and reduced the supply of food, so he killed him if possible; and this habit also did not conduce to social growth. Families, too, were small when each man “did his own work” as these did. When came the Shepherd and his plenteous food, came larger families; but there was still a need of some five square miles per capita to feed the beasts; as the family grew the miles increased; and on the “free land” with its “equal opportunities” the families met at the edges and warred with one another as competitors. This, again, was not conducive to social growth.

But the Farmer, with far more food on far less land, food more richly and rapidly reproductive, and taking far less time to mature; with the family growing faster than ever, but taking up less room for its food supply; the Farmer is the base of the true social structure. Surplus nutrition and surplus time meant accumulated energy and frequent opportunity which, with the permanent home, allowed the birth and nurture of the industries and arts. The physical nearness of the people—acres instead of miles for their nutritive base—allowed of larger growth of language; and so in and with and following these conditions the social life became possible.

Note the absolute collectivity of this productive food process. The lowest food-producing unit is a village; not a separate man, or even a family. Agriculture is not found below a certain human group form. Social life is born with agriculture. The distinctive food processes of humanity are collective.

A second field of proof of our organic relation, and one as patent as the first, is the complex specialisation of humanity.

If you find a lump of protoplasm you cannot tell whether it is a whole or a part; if you divide it, its parts make wholes and prosper as before. Very low life-forms may be cut into fragments, and each develops whatever it lacks and makes a new whole. There is little differentiation here. But if you find an eye, a tooth, a claw, you are at no loss as to whether it is a whole or a part.

If it were a whole, it would be able to maintain and reproduce itself. Being a part, it can do neither. The eye is a remote, highly developed special organ, of no use to itself; able only to serve the complex organism of which it is a part; and nourished and maintained only by that organism. This condition is absolute proof of organic life as distinguished from individual.

Apply this proof to society. Society consists of numbers of interrelated and highly specialised functions, the functionaries being individual human animals. Society develops them—they could never have been evolved in solitude. As easily conceive of independent eyes, rolling around and doing business by themselves, as of independent teachers, carpenters, dentists. Society maintains them, as the body does the eye; intricate labours of many others feeding, warming, housing, protecting the teacher, while he teaches.

Alone he might hunt, and “support himself” as a separate animal; as if, conceivably, the eye could return to a protoplasmic condition and soak up a living somehow; but as an eye it would cease to exist; and he would cease to exist as a teacher. The teacher, teaching, cannot support himself. His time, his strength, his enormously specialised skill, are spent in teaching, and the society which made him and which needs him, necessarily supports him. Teaching as an activity is not predicable of individuals. It is a power to transmit the social gain in intelligence and knowledge among the social constituents. No solitary individual could have attained this knowledge and experience; and, if he had it, he could not teach it to himself. Teaching is a social function; a very elaborate and long-developed social function. The teacher is an extreme instance of the social functionary. Other than as a social functionary he does not exist.

This test may be applied far and wide, in every trade, art, science, or business; no human occupation escapes it. Whatever a man can do separately for himself, an ape can imitate. Whatever a man does which is worth falling human is done collectively and for others, it is a social function. He may work alone at his business, but the tools he works with are the fruit of slow social evolution, and the work he does is done for others. He may retire to the forest and think alone, but he thinks on the problems of human life; no personal affairs can occupy the energies of a human brain; and the brain he thinks with is a slow social product too.

The evolution of the interdependence of social function is as clear as that of the interdependent physical functions of our separate bodies. As early animal forms have few and simple functions, gradually evolving those more delicate and complicated, so do early societies have few and simple arts or trades, and similarly evolve them. As society progresses the trades flow wider, dividing and subdividing as they go, until we have the exquisitely sublimated special skill of the modern worker; and at each step of the process the organic relation tightens as well as widens; the specialist is less able to “take care of himself,” and the others are less able to do without the specialist.

“Every man to his trade” voices our popular recognition of this law, and “Jack-of-all-trades and master of none” shows the true merit of the “all-around-man.”

We now come to a third, and in itself a fully sufficient proof of the organic nature of society—not of the social organism as a useful figure, an illustration, an analogy, but as a literal biological fact. Here are a number of separate animal bodies. Each is a group of interactive organs, each does business for itself with no need of combination with another, save in the temporary union of sex with sex, and of mother with child. These creatures are individuals. Here again is a number of apparently separate animal bodies. But each has in his head an organ which cannot perform its functions alone; an organ which for its healthful use requires contact and exchange with similar organs lodged in other bodies.

This organ is the brain. That degree of brain development which we call “human” is only found in creatures socially related; it is not individual brain power, but social. The human brain, for health and usefulness, for its normal life, requires a number of human beings with whom to feel, think, and act. We can, it is true, physically isolate a human animal, and maintain his animal life; but his human life—i. e., social life; his “feelings” and “thoughts,” the whole field of brain activity—is injured.

The human brain is the social organ; it is our medium of contact and exchange. Set a man in absolute solitude and his brain is affected at once. Cut off from the contact which enables it to freely receive and discharge its supply of social energy, its action becomes increasingly morbid. In proportion to the completeness and duration of the isolation the brain is injured, and ultimately ruined.

We know the effect of solitary imprisonment, or of being cast away alone on some remote island. Short of this we know the progressive effect of degrees of isolation. The lighthouse keeper knows—they put two men in lighthouses most removed from social touch; and even that is a dangerously “short circuit” for the social organ to act in. The solitary shepherd knows, on the wide waste plains of Australia or Texas. The hermit or recluse of any age, the separate dwellers in old houses in the country, any human creature who lives alone, is injuriously affected in brain action.

This is not saying that mere privacy is harmful—that is a necessity for the social brain; such temporary solitude as shall enable it to work out its special contribution to our common thought, and to rest from the forceful social currents. But however solitary the student or author, the product of his labour is for others, and must reach them; his brain must connect with the others, though at long range.

In this is another side of the proof of our mental collectivity. The poet feels for humanity, the student studies for humanity; the discoverer, inventor, all work for humanity. (This does not refer to the pay they expect, and their attitude toward it, but to the work itself.) All through our history we see the great-brained men who thought for the world, moved by a quenchless impulse to transmit this thought to the others, to pour out into the common stock the product of their brains. This they did because they must—even when loss and injury, ostracism or martyrdom followed. It is the compelling functional necessity of the brain to discharge into other brains, as well as to seek from them its vast and varied stimulus.

In more immediate and commonplace instances we see the same law. The difficulty of “keeping a secret,” i. e., of voluntarily retaining stimulus; the necessity of “relieving one’s mind”—a perfectly fit phrase, as much so as its familiar physiological analogue; the value of the confessional; and, commonest of all, the vivid interest of each human brain in the affairs of the others; all these show the collective nature of that organ.

The most ordinary woman, gossiping with her neighbours, manifests this social necessity for contact and exchange, however low. “Mind your own business!” we cry, and cry in vain. No brain advanced enough to be called human can possibly find full use and exercise in contemplation of one person’s business. It must concern itself in the business of the others, their common business.

The human brain is a social organ. Human thought is a social function.

Approach this fact along lines of evolution. The brain, like all other organs, is called for by conditions and developed by exercise. Simple conditions, simple exertions—low brain. Enlarge and elaborate the conditions—increase the exercises—and the brain develops. Observe here, within human history, how we have developed the brain of the dog by such change of condition and action.

In every form of animal life you find an exact relation between the range of activities of the creature and his degree of brain development. This is necessarily so, as the increase of activities is what produced that degree of development. The simple activities of the clam need no brain, and have none. The complex activities of the fox need a complex brain, and have it. Everywhere this exact proportion is found until you reach the human animal.

There is no relation whatever between the individual human being’s brain and his individual activities. But there is the same inexorable law of development by which alone to account for this highest of all brains, and the same relation is plainly to be seen between the social brain and its social activities. No conceivable activities of one biped, through however many generations, could have developed the brain of the architect, for instance. He has the power to think a church. He cannot build a church—never could—never could have even wanted one!

The growth of many men, for many ages, brought their common needs, their power of common action, and their brain power to co-ordinate it. You need no power of co-ordination to run one individual animal; the need for social activities developed the social brain. The single human animal could have only needed a single shelter; could have so only built a single shelter, and so have only thought a single shelter. The power of one man to think for many men to do, is a distinctly human power, and evolvable only by the common doing.

In our collective relation we have developed a capacity to think, focussed perforce in some individual brain, for the working point of Society is the individual; to think, to the advantage of thousands of people for thousands of years. This organic capacity cannot be accounted for on an individual basis.

The laws of natural evolution work to develop in each organism the powers which it most needs; steadily raising the efficient type. The human animal manifests powers of no earthly use to himself, relatable in no way to his personal needs, inexplicable on any individual hypothesis, but plainly useful to Society, relatable to the Social needs, perfectly explicable by the Social hypothesis.