time of hatching, i.e., the moment the individual enters on
its life as an active member of the community.

c) Owing to this pre-established structure and the specialized
functions which it implies, ants are able to live in a condition of
anarchistic socialism, each individual instinctively fulfilling the
demands of social life without "guide, overseer, or ruler," as Solomon
correctly observed, but not without the imitation and suggestion
involved in an appreciation of the activities of its fellows.

An ant society, therefore, may be regarded as little more than an
expanded family, the members of which co-operate for the purpose of
still further expanding the family and detaching portions of itself to
found other families of the same kind. There is thus a striking analogy,
which has not escaped the philosophical biologist, between the ant
colony and the cell colony which constitutes the body of a Metazoan
animal; and many of the laws that control the cellular origin,
development, growth, reproduction, and decay of the individual Metazoan,
are seen to hold good also of the ant society regarded as an individual
of a higher order. As in the case of the individual animal, no further
purpose of the colony can be detected than that of maintaining itself
in the face of a constantly changing environment till it is able to
reproduce other colonies of a like constitution. The queen-mother of the
ant colony displays the generalized potentialities of all the
individuals, just as the Metazoan egg contains _in potentia_ all the
other cells of the body. And, continuing the analogy, we may say that
since the different castes of the ant colony are morphologically
specialized for the performance of different functions, they are truly
comparable with the differentiated tissues of the Metazoan body.

C. HUMAN SOCIETY

1. Social Life[86]

The most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that
the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists.
If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it
remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller
bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may
maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a
contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing
may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn
the energies which act upon it into me