oses.

* * * * *

Let us set out by succinctly stating the points of similarity and the
points of difference. Societies agree with individual organisms in four
conspicuous peculiarities:--

1. That commencing as small aggregations, they insensibly augment in
mass: some of them eventually reaching ten thousand times what they
originally were.

2. That while at first so simple in structure as to be considered
structureless, they assume, in the course of their growth, a
continually-increasing complexity of structure.

3. That though in their early, undeveloped states, there exists in them
scarcely any mutual dependence of parts, their parts gradually acquire a
mutual dependence; which becomes at last so great, that the activity and
life of each part is made possible only by the activity and life of the
rest.

4. That the life of a society is independent of, and far more prolonged
than, the lives of any of its component units; who are severally born,
grow, work, reproduce, and die, while the body-politic composed of them
survives generation after generation, increasing in mass, in
completeness of structure, and in functional activity.

These four parallelisms will appear the more significant the more we
contemplate them. While the points specified, are points in which
societies agree with individual organisms, they are also points in which
individual organisms agree with one another, and disagree with all
things else. In the course of its existence, every plant and animal
increases in mass, in a way not paralleled by inorganic objects: even
such inorganic objects as crystals, which arise by growth, show us no
such definite relation between growth and existence as organisms do. The
orderly progress from simplicity to complexity, displayed by
bodies-politic in common with living bodies, is a characteristic which
distinguishes living bodies from the inanimate bodies amid which they
move. That functional dependence of parts, which is scarcely more
manifest in animals than in nations, has no counterpart elsewhere. And
in no aggregate except an organic or a social one, is there a perpetual
removal and replacement of parts, joined with a continued integrity of
the whole. Moreover, societies and organisms are not only alike in these
peculiarities, in which they are unlike all other things; but the
highest societies, like the highest organisms, exhibit them in the
greatest degree. We see that