The Social Organism is as natural a life-form as fish, flesh, or fowl. It has been naturally evolved, its processes and appearances are as natural as those of any other part of creation. We do not recognise it because of the interference of that ancestral brain; and we are further confused in looking at it by our arbitrary classification, resting on old and false ideas.

As physical geography is confused to a child’s mind by the demarcations and contrasted colours of the map of political geography; so is the natural organic relation of Society confused in our minds by our superficial and artificial “social distinctions.” We have established social distinctions and relations on lines of physical connection, such as birth; whereas physical relationship has no similitude with social relationship; or of political connection, as nation or party; whereas, again, there is no resemblance; or on even more fantastic lines of sex, of caste, of creed, or of the amount of money possessed.

These arbitrary distinctions are no more social and legitimately organic than Indiana is yellow and Ohio blue. Legitimate social relationship is functional. It is that relation in which we serve each other. Its classification is on lines of industrial evolution, together with the gradual development of those later functions of government, education, art, and science which follow the industrial. In the evolution of government the king was a normal functionary; his kingship being his power to act as general chairman of his assemblage of people, and, in very early days, as leader in battle. To make kingship hereditary was an arbitrary classification; social functions not developing in lines of physical heredity. You can no more make “a line of kings” than a line of poets or surgeons. If you do it, arbitrarily, you injure society by inferior service. That was the conspicuous result in the king line.

In pre-social times there was merely the protoplasmic mass of undifferentiated human stock. Arising from this we have first the sporadic growth of villages, resting on their common food activities, and then the appearance of larger groups, and more and more diverse functions, elaborating in mutual dependence.

The natural limits of an organic social relation are the limits of its essential functions. These were once quite narrow—each little community being self-supporting. To-day we are rapidly approaching a social organism limited only by the earth. Our interdependent functions are now international; and natural development on those lines is only prevented by our false classification on unnatural lines, with the resultant endeavour to maintain the self-supporting independence of the smaller unit.

The more highly organised a society, the more range and force have its component individuals. America is in the American. Athens was in the Athenian. Where else? A member of some tiny social unit on a remote island does not carry the same amount of social efficiency as a member of a larger unit. This is the underlying natural law which makes for general human unity, but which finds its misguided and injurious expression in our doctrine of “imperialism.”

The normal line of enlargement is simply an extension of functional exchange, a sharing of the highly specialised activities and advantages of the larger society by the smaller. Every step of this really beneficent process has been accompanied throughout history with the utmost injury to all parties, by conquest and carnage, by insane pride and cruelty; because we did not understand the process in which we were the actors, but governed our conduct from ideals of egoism, localism, and rapacity. This is especially plain in our time, because of the enormous growth of industrial functions, and their inevitable spread around the world.

The process is natural and in itself means increasing benefit to all society; but, being grossly misunderstood by the highly specialised individuals who carry out these processes, the beneficent results are mingled with terrible evils. The social functionary who is evolved to distribute some food, oil, or other necessity to a larger radius of consumers than ever before, takes advantage of his position to sequestrate a larger share for himself than was ever before possible. The “master minds” who are able to manage these giant industries are social products, called for and produced to meet the larger social needs of our times, but they are still governed by economic theories suitable to a South Sea Islander, and so we have that “malfeasance in office,” in social office, which so shamefully blackens the face of nations to-day.

It is a fair inquiry to demand of the organic theory of Society a reason for its development. Why should independent individuals have been led into a combination which inevitably involves some personal loss and injury, and has been made to involve such an enormous amount?

How are we to account for this higher life-form, in the iron economy of nature? Many have seen the visible benefit to individuals which comes of the Social relation. The fact that we help one another is plain enough; but even that sum of benefit does not seem sufficient to justify the social sacrifice; the loss of individual liberty, the life-long labour at one thing; the growing distance between social man and the free, simple, contented individual animal.

“I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained.

“I stand and look at them long and long.

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition.

“They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.

“They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.

“Not one is dissatisfied; not one is demented with the mania for owning things.

“Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived a thousand years ago.

“Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.”

This reversionary tendency is strong in us all, the easy backsliding to the physical freedom and independence of the hunter and fisher. The immediate stimulus, the immediate action, the supply of one’s own needs by one’s own efforts,—this is a delight to almost all of us; and some are constantly straggling and dropping behind the procession, to revert to the wood life of primitive man and his pre-primitive forbears, to “turn and live with the animals.” Current literature is full of this social reversion to-day, this “call of the wild,” this tempting invitation to give it all up and go back to the beginning.

It is so much harder to pour your life’s energies a life long into the Social pool, and perhaps get very little out—and then not what you want. What deep inevitable gain has been at work for which relentless nature has slowly driven us up the path of Social Evolution—a steeper, bloodier, more agonising road than any other creature has had to tread?

The gain is this (and observe that it is precisely of the same nature as that which has driven the contented annelid up to all the excitement, difficulties, and perils of the higher mammalian): the Social Organism manifests a wider range of consciousness and activity than any other life-form. The human animal, alone, is but a beast; and has but the narrow egoistic range of consciousness and activity. As part of Society the human animal becomes the organ of a consciousness and an activity so vast that in its limitless expansion we have been able to conceive of Life, Death, and Immortality, of Time and Eternity, of Humanity, of Liberty, Justice, and Love. What we call the human soul is developed in the social relation. It is Human indeed, i. e., Social. It is Ours.

In the organic division of labour of a physical body, the life processes are so developed that more exertion can be made and more sensation received, than in the same amount of living matter in lower forms. A hand, taken separately, would have a certain contractile power; but as connected with the arm it has far more, as connected with the general nervous system more yet.

In that transmission of energy which seems to be the business of the universe an increasing complexity of mechanism is evidently called for because it has been produced and maintained. Society is the most complex mechanism of all. It can receive, store, and discharge more energy than could its constituents in equal number, but unorganised.

The social consciousness is the widest and most sensitive receiver and transmitter so far produced. “We look before and after, and pine for what is not.” This is a social quality. As man grouped and grew together came that development of race memory which gives to family, to nation, to Humanity itself, its dignity and power. It is “Our” past, “Our” present, “Our” future. The life of Humanity is one, and it is that life which we as individuals feel; which makes us able to suffer more, enjoy more, and do more than any other kind of living thing.

In failing to recognise the real nature of society and put ourselves in right relation to it, we have largely checked the flow of social energy and perverted the social instincts and social processes; therefore, to our morbid egos, social relation often seems to bring us more pain than pleasure. We admit that we cannot live out of it—the sufferings of the hermit are greater than those of the misplaced social constituent; but we live in it blindly, in cramped and distorted positions, rendering our social service under the crushing pressure of the egoistic concept, and getting but a faint and occasional sense of the potent joy of true social relation.

The transcendent happiness possible to Humanity, to all humanity, by virtue of its humanness, is a thing of which we practically know nothing. Consider the range of sensation in an individual animal. This is most strictly limited to his physical activities and such psychic impressions and expressions as pertain to his narrow field of being. The female animal has the joy of the maternal function, that great first step beyond the Ego-consciousness; a pleasure and a pride partly physical and partly psychic, but limited forever to the individual young. The male animal sometimes shares a fraction of this parental feeling. In certain creatures which live in groups or herds there seems to be a very vivid common consciousness on some lines, as shown by the instantaneous nervous transmission in a stampede; and in the highly socialised bee and ant there appears as highly developed a collective sensorium. But, though collective, it is on a low plane; the impressions it receives and the expressions resultant all pertain to the physical wants of the individual constituents, however elaborately these wants are met.

With us, in our social relation, there is an enlargement of the sensorium past any measurement we can yet make. The size of our sensations increases as more and more individuals are tuned to respond to the same stimulus. There is room in what we call “the human heart” for a passionate exaltation of feeling that finds no parallel below us. This immense influx of stimulus prompts us, yes, forces us, to a commensurate expression; and if this expression be true, it puts in concrete form the intense feeling and then continually transmits it to as many people as are sensitive to that form of expression.

Take an illustration on a very early and simple plane. A happy, primeval squaw, not hungry, not cold, not afraid, and feeling in her already growing social consciousness both the pleasant memory of these conditions and the pleasant assurance of more, has more stimulus coming in than her body can sit quiet under. No human being can ever be as stationarily contented as a ruminating cow, his income of sensation is too great. That small, perfect circle of life of the individual beast,—hunger, effort, gratification, rest,—is changed to an endless upreaching spiral in our social relation.

It is not only that our hunger is greater because one can hunger for all; because no human being can be really satisfied till all are satisfied; but that our stimulus is greater, and calls for endless discharge. So our happy squaw is moved to transmit her press of feeling; she must discharge it in action; and she does so in some decoration of her jar or basket. This decoration is an embodied joy, and, being fixed in visible form, it then transmits that joy to as many as behold it. It is a little fountain of social energy.

A society, from its inception, multiplies the range and depth of sensation, and commensurately, the working expression of its members. From age to age, as this great common fund increases, is the power to feel and the power to do increased. More and more people thrill to a common impression; the rising wave of force prompts to ever greater expression, reaching more and more people.

Thus, in a normal society, the individual life increases in sensation, in power, and in joy in an ascending line that as yet suggests no limit. In pain and degradation also, the pessimist will protest. Of course, as an accompanying possibility. But not as an essential condition. Such as exists is merely owing to our wholly unnecessary and mistaken action. The pain is a transient and needless thing; the immense joy is in the real nature of society.

The young human creature, as he begins to grow from the individual animal period into social life, feels this intense current of force, the vast and varied desires, the vaster energies; but he does not know what it is, nor do his teachers. Ego-bound systems have cradled and nurtured him, an egoistic family, an egoistic economy, an egoistic religion cut off every avenue of growth; and the stimulus of the whole world throbs and beats in vain, forced finally into some dog-trot routine, wherein he thinks to “earn his own living,” to “support his own family,” to “save his own soul.”

The tremendous thirst for happiness which the young human being feels is perfectly natural. Young individual animals show no signs of such disproportionate desires. The tremendous ambitions of young people are equally natural. Human life is in them the multiplied and accumulated life of all humanity for all time, and all it needs for the same peace and poise which is the portion of “the lower animals” is free expression.

The nature of Society is no mystery. Our relation to it is no mystery. It is simple, orderly, healthy, and in its largest manifestations either peacefully unconscious or sublimely happy. Every person who has by blessed chance found his right place in social service, who has the range of contact with his kind which he needs, and the range of activity which he needs, may be as calmly happy as any browsing cow, as ecstatically happy as any soaring lark.

What does any creature need for right growth?—nourishment, rest, exercise. Society needs these too. We, in social relation as social beings, need the social nourishment, rest, and exercise. Social nourishment comes through contact with the world’s supplies, permanent and current. We need to “stock up” in our common heritage of information, of beauty and use and power. Whatever we need which lower animals do not need is social nourishment. The desire to know of the healthy young mind, the desire to travel, the desire to see people, these are forms of our undying hunger for that which belongs to us as human beings. When all of us, from our youth up, are put in easy connection with the unlimited supplies of Society, we shall all be socially nourished. Observe that these things are not consumed while they nourish, but remain continually refreshing as many as can partake of them. Every member of Society should have free access to all social products: art, music, literature, facilities of travel, and education; and would so absorb his preferred nourishment as unerringly as do the cells of the body from the whirling profusion offered by the blood.

Social rest is another imperative need of human beings, in proportion to their humanness. The more highly specialised and intense the service of the individual the more he needs to break off the connection and rest; rest from being social; go back and be animal awhile; find in pure ease and relaxation, in irrelative physical exercise, and in the beautiful family relation (one of the safest and loveliest life-forms sheltered by society), that complete rest which will enable him to return to his social relation with renewed vigour.

Vacations of all sorts—the country home, the hunting trip—tell of this need, and the nervous collapse of highly socialised types when denied it is a common occurrence. Simple and primitive trades, if not excessive in hours of labour, are far less exhausting. Breathing goes on continuously, digesting with regular frequency, but thinking has to rest. A healthy social life will allow for the natural periods of rest for all its members.

Social exercise is but the use of our best and highest faculties to the largest end. A Gladstone confined to directing envelopes would not be exercising his social faculties to their full extent. Napoleon as a chauffeur might have killed quite a number of people, but would not have been really satisfied. Exercise is life’s first law, and full exercise is required for full development.

This is where in our imperfect degree of socialisation we suffer most, for lack of this full use of our social powers, especially women. We are frequently overworked as individuals while underworked socially, another condition accounting for morbid, nervous states. A man with capacity for managing a high-grade department store would lack exercise to a most injurious degree if he were kept as a country grocer’s clerk, though he might ruin his eyes with bookkeeping and his back with lifting barrels. The full use of our largest faculties in the largest relation—that is social exercise.

Another thing which prevents us from recognising the nature of Society is our almost unavoidable mental limitation to the perception of the stage of development represented by the animal organism.

“If Society is an organism,” we say, “where are its feet and hands, its eyes, nose, and mouth? Where is its skin? Where does it begin and leave off?” And not seeing any large beast stuffed with persons like the Trojan horse, or some vast man-filled man like the wicker-built sacrificial cage of the Druids, we deny the existence of the alleged organism.

Organic life is not limited to existing forms. As it has developed so far, it has been in the line of increasing freedom and fluency of relation. The constituent cells of vegetable matter are held together less rigidly than in the pre-organic mineral formation. In animal matter the relation is more fluent yet. And in social matter, so to speak, it is yet more free and movable. Yet, if you look down upon the earth as one with some vast microscope studying the life of mould, or monads, you will find that the human particles are connected inexorably. Remember that even in minerals—if you can see largely enough—the atoms whirl alone. They are held in relation by laws of attraction and repulsion, and that relation is close enough to form to our senses a solid body.

Human beings are not webbed together like frogs’ eggs, but they are held together in definite relation by laws of attraction and repulsion, like the constituents of any other material body. The stuff that Society is made of is thickest in great cities, and as it develops these dense and throbbing social ganglia grow and grow. In wide, rural areas the stuff is thin—very thin. But watch the lines of connection form and grow, ever thicker and faster as the Society progresses. The trail, the path, the road, the railroad, the telegraph wire, the trolley car; from monthly journeys to remote post-offices to the daily rural delivery; thus Society is held together. Save for the wilful hermit losing himself in the wilderness, every man has his lines of connection with the others; the psychic connection, such as “family ties,” “the bonds of affection,” and physical connection in the path from his doorstep to the Capital city.

The social organism does not walk about on legs. It spreads and flows over the surface of the earth, its members walking in apparent freedom, yet bound indissolubly together and thrilling in response to social stimulus and impulse.

Before Society grew at all we were but human animals, maintaining and reproducing ourselves like any other animals, but with no connection, no common life. They were of no faintest use to one another, but quite the contrary, being legitimate competitors for a free supply, and so naturally hating and destroying one another. As Society grows the connection between its members grows and thickens and differentiates. Men are of increasing use to one another, no longer competitors in any legitimate sense, but combiners in common production and distribution, and so naturally helping and loving one another. Those who still compete and destroy are but survivals from the earlier period, mischievous relics and back-numbers. All Social evolution is the story of the development and improvement of the connective tissues of Society, from language, the great psychic medium, to steel rail and wire, the infinitely multiplying physical medium. This connection and interaction of the human animals is the most conspicuous fact about them, and that connection is by every test organic.

Another and similar reason for our denial of the social organism is the fact of the temporary detachableness of the individual human being. Men visibly walk about on their own feet, going apparently where they will, and no examination discloses a Siamese band between one man and his brother man. So when the sociologist says there is no such thing as a separate human creature,—that a solitary human creature is a contradiction in terms,—the average individualist replies, “See Robinson Crusoe!” This answer shows great lack of biological knowledge. The splendid growth of education in our day, which is beginning to teach our children dynamics as well as statics, laws as well as facts, will soon remove this ignorance.

If I say, “There is no such thing as a tree without roots,” it might be replied, “But there is! See my Christmas tree?” Yes, it is there for a little, but it is not really a tree, it is timber; it cannot last, nor grow, nor reproduce its kind.

I may say, “There is no such thing as a man without a head,” and someone reply, “But there is! See this gentleman on the dissecting table and his head on the tray yonder.” That is not a man, it is a corpse. I may say, “There is no such thing as a finger without a hand,” and it be replied, “See this one here in alcohol!” That again is not a finger, it is but a corpse. If you join a severed finger quickly enough, it will grow on again. If you return a severed man to his society soon enough, he will grow on again. So in this perfectly true statement, “There is no such thing as a solitary human creature; it is a contradiction in terms”; the presentation of a man on an island or in a prison cell is no answer.

Though cut off like the finger, he does not instantly deliquesce and disappear. His connection with the society which evolved him being severed, he may continue to live as an animal, but is in process of decay as a human being; he is an ex-man. Our connection is so subtle, so fluent, each human brain being so large a storage battery of social energy, that we can separate for a time with no loss. But make the separation complete and the humanness dies.

We have been deterred also from seeing the larger and more vital human relation by the smaller and more arbitrary. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these is the Family, often called the Unit of the State.

Now the family is not a distinctively human relation at all; many varieties of animals, especially among the higher carnivora, have families, with monogamic union, too, where devoted parents strive and suffer to provide for and protect their young. A perfectly normal and necessary group is the family, and one proved best for successful reproduction of the species, but not a social unit at all. The individual is the social unit, combining to develop the structure and functions of Society.

Families never combine, they can’t. Families take no part in social relation. Each family has its own structure and functions, its own interests, its own purposes, and these are frequently in direct opposition to the social good. Just as Society offers a surer, safer, higher life to the individual, and thus makes possible that inordinate egoism which is so serious a danger; so it gives the same opportunity to the family and allows of a wider, deeper, and more intense familism than is possible among sub-social animals.

It is most interesting to watch the slow struggle of the true social relation to establish and extend itself against these natural obstacles, as in the successive overthrow of Patriarchism and Feudalism by the State. The City as a social group has much easier recognition with us than larger entities. Civic consciousness began early and found its splendid flower and fruit, as well as its iron limitations, in Greece. National consciousness is now quite well established, having the same advantages and disadvantages as the Civic, only on larger scale. To-day we are beginning to feel the largest consciousness of all, the truly Human, in whose unbounded growth and beautifully progressive development the petty limitations of all earlier forms are slowly disappearing. “What are your national distinctions?” an inquiring Englishman asked me. “The time is past for national distinctions,” I replied. “The time is coming for the people of the world, and Americans are the first of them.”

Then, too, we have been so occupied in the specific local function of Society as to miss that general grouping and balancing which made them all possible. Take that vast and varying social function the Church,—organised religion,—appearing very early in the dominance of savage priestcraft, finding its height in the resistless Hierarchies of Egypt and Palestine, and struggling ever since to hold its failing sway.

Take the Army, another very early, very strong, and very hard-dying social form. It is still with us, brilliant and loud, an increasing evil in the fast-growing industrial life of to-day. See the Soldier scorning the Merchant in the Middle Ages. See the Merchant directing the Soldier to-day. His time of pre-eminence is past.

So in course of social evolution one and another organic group has been developed, each tending to excess by the law of inertia (and social inertia is the most long-winded we know), yet all inevitably sinking into place in the smooth, complex interaction toward which we are moving. Men, specialised to the social service, in their several lines, yet knowing not what they served, have limited their enthusiasm to their specialty, and striven to make the Church, the Army, the Law, Art, or what they call Business, their supreme end.

The real social organism includes them all, and relates them all in order of importance. This order of importance may as well be laid down here, as quite essential to an understanding of the nature of Society. The standard of measurement used is that of evolution, “lower” or “higher” being marked in that line of progress which leads always from the less to the greater, from the simple to the complex. Relative importance may perhaps be measured downwards: a stomach is more important than an eye, because you cannot live without it. But the eye is “higher” than the stomach, a later developed and more specialised organ.

So in social evolution agriculture is more important than literature, because we cannot live without it; but literature is higher than agriculture as being later developed and more highly specialised. The social organism has followed in its evolution the same path as earlier life-forms, developing first the simpler and more immediately vital processes, and later those more delicate and finer organs which are needed to fulfil the uses of its progressive life. And as, in physical evolution, we find now one and now another function of dominant importance to the creature, so in social evolution we can trace the varying value of social functions, the military and religious processes of early societies gradually giving way in importance to the industrial and educational processes of our own times.

Most valuable of all, to our so long religiously moulded minds, is the effect of this recognition of the nature of society upon Ethics. Vague indeed, complicated, mystical, difficult to understand, have been our gropings after this great science. Ethics is the Science of Social Relation; it could never be understood by individualists.

There is no ethics for an individual except to maintain, improve, and reproduce himself. A consistent and remorseless egoism is right for the individual animal; through it he fulfils the law of his being; through it he improves his race. So we, wishing to improve a breed of cattle, consistently and remorselessly select and train and breed from preferred individuals, neglecting or destroying the inferior ones. So do mistaken men, not appreciating the nature of society, urge a similar stern stirpiculture upon us, and would have us neglect or destroy our defective members and breed only from the best.

But when we have a social animal to deal with, as the bee, different laws operate, or, rather, the same laws on a larger scale, a higher plane. It is the best swarm now to be selected; and the value of the swarm depends not so much upon the size and vigour of its individual constituents as on how they work together. There is ethics in a hive, laws of collective behaviour. There is ethics in Society, because it is a collective unit.

Ethics, to Society, is what physics is to matter; ethics is the physics of social relation. Physical law holds material constituents together in those combinations and relations which make the material bodies we know. Ethical law holds social constituents together in those relations which make the social bodies we know.

But we, not knowing the social body, could not know its laws. We have striven in vain to predicate ethics of individuals. You “ought” to do so? Why “ought” I? Because it is “right.” What is “right”? Whatever God said. And what did God say? What these ancient gentlemen have written in their ancient times. And if I do not believe what the ancient gentlemen wrote? There is no answer to this except the somewhat fatuous one of “so much the worse for you!”

The writings of the ancient gentlemen were not susceptible of proof.

Then came Christ, talking sense. He grasped the nature of Society and preached its laws. Ye are all members of one body and of one another. You shall love your neighbour as yourself; that is, recognise him as really part of what you are part of—all one self; and the love of self becomes mutual love as we see what Self is to a Human Creature—Our Self. Christ saw and said all this, and did it, which is more; lived,—as far as one individual could,—true to his social relation, faithfully fulfilling his function to that great living thing, though its immediately surrounding constituents very naturally killed him.

That great Christian concept of mutual love and service is good ethics; it is scientific; its truth and value can be proved; it works. Had we grasped and applied it a good many painful centuries might have been saved us.

But we, our minds still darkened by the beast-concept of Egoism, trying to personally own the human soul and save our piece to all eternity without caring what became of the rest of it; we, with our personal God and his personal Son, and our personal damnation or salvation to consider, have very generally ignored the theory and practice of Christ, and made of him merely an article of faith by which to maintain our precious Egos forever and ever. And this in the face of his “Whoso saveth his life shall lose it; but whoso loseth his life for my sake [man’s sake, the sake of the whole] shall find it!”

When we realise the nature of society we shall come nearer to understanding the teachings of Christ than we have done in twenty centuries of sublimated self-seeking. In recognising it we rise at one step from the dark and narrow limits of the personal life, that poor animal existence, with its common animal wants and their fulfilment; with its animal loves and hates, hoped and fears, pains and pleasures; with its brief period of animal life, cut up into changeful patches of infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, and age, and take our true place in social life, which is immortal. Whether it dies off the earth in a million years or so we do not know yet; since it was born it has not died, but grown and grown continually. This wide, rich, glowing field of consciousness includes the animal life and maintains it in a higher and better condition than ever before, but its real distinctive range of feeling is far beyond that.

All noble and beautiful emotions we call “Human” are social and immortal. All the distinguishing abilities, the power and skill and ingenuity that we call “Human,” are social and immortal. “I” am born, grow up, and die. “I” am a transient piece of meat, enjoying food and sleep and mating, hunting and fighting.

But “We” are more than that. We together constitute another “I,” which is Human Life. That was born gradually, many long ages back, and is now slowly growing up. In that human life, that common, mutual, social life, are all things that make us human. When we enter consciously into that great life we are indeed immortal, “saved,” indeed, from primeval limitations of the animal ego.