sight appears a grotesque
supposition, we must remember that it would appear equally so to ascribe
such possibilities to the individual brain, were it not for the
irrelevant accident of this particular form of complex standing in such
relation to our own subjectivity that we are able to verify the fact of
its ejectivity. Thus, for aught that we can tell to the contrary, Comte
may have been even more justified than his followers suppose, in
teaching the personification of Humanity.

But, in the next place, if the social organism is not endowed with
personality, this may be for either one of two reasons. All the
conditions required for attaining so high a level of psychical
perfection may not be here present; or else the level of psychical
perfection may be higher than that which we know as personality. This
latter alternative will be considered in another relation by-and-by, so
I will not dwell upon it now. But with reference to all these possible
contingencies, I may observe that we are not without clear indications
of the great fact that the high order of complexity which has been
reached by the social organism _is_ accompanied by evidence of something
which we may least dimly define as resembling subjectivity. In
numberless ways, which I need not wait to enumerate, we perceive that
society exhibits the phenomena both of thought and conduct. And these
phenomena cannot always be explained by regarding them as the sum of the
thoughts and actions of its constituent individuals--or, at least, they
can only be so regarded by conceding that the thoughts and actions of
the constituent individuals, when thus _summated_, yield a different
product from that which would be obtained by a merely arithmetical
computation of the constituent parts: the composite product differs from
its component elements, as H_2O differs from 2H + O. The general truth
of this remark will, I believe, be appreciated by all historians.
Seeing that ideas are often, as it is said, 'in the air' before they are
condensed in the mind of individual genius, we habitually speak of the
'Zeit-geist' as the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is
something other than the mere sum of all the individual minds of a
generation. That is to say, we regard society as an eject, and the more
that a man studies the thought and conduct of society, the more does he
become convinced that we are right in so regarding it. Of course this
eject is manifestly unlike th