and model of all social
relations--as closer and more intimate than those which exist between
the organs of a plant or an animal. The individual, as Comte expressed
it, is an abstraction. Man exists as man only by participation in the
life of humanity, and "although the individual elements of society
appear to be more separable than those of a living being, the social
_consensus_ is still closer than the vital."[26]

Thus the individual man was, in spite of his freedom and independence,
in a very real sense "an organ of the Great Being" and the great being
was humanity. Under the title of humanity Comte included not merely all
living human beings, i.e., the human race, but he included all that body
of tradition, knowledge, custom, cultural ideas and ideals, which make
up the social inheritance of the race, an inheritance into which each of
us is born, to which we contribute, and which we inevitably hand on
through the processes of education and tradition to succeeding
generations. This is what Comte meant by the social organism.

If Comte thought of the social organism, the great being, somewhat
mystically as itself an individual and a person, Herbert Spencer, on the
other hand, thought of it realistically as a great animal, a leviathan,
as Hobbes called it, and a very low-order leviathan at that.[27]

Spencer's manner of looking at the social organism may be illustrated in
what he says about growth in "social aggregates."

When we say that growth is common to social aggregates and
organic aggregates, we do not thus entirely exclude community
with inorganic aggregates. Some of these, as crystals, grow in
a visible manner; and all of them on the hypothesis of
evolution, have arisen by integration at some time or other.
Nevertheless, compared with things we call inanimate, living
bodies and societies so conspicuously exhibit augmentation of
mass, that we may fairly regard this as characterizing them
both. Many organisms grow throughout their lives; and the rest
grow throughout considerable parts of their lives. Social
growth usually continues either up to times when the societies
divide, or up to times when they are overwhelmed.

Here, then, is the first trait by which societies ally
themselves with the organic world and substantially distinguish
themselves from the inorganic world.[28]

In this same way, comparing the characteristic general