ions for a time and then
disappear, leaving others to supply their places; so, in each part of a
society the organ remains, though the persons who compose it change.
Thus, in social life, as in the life of an animal, the units as well as
the larger agencies formed of them, are in the main stationary as
respects the places where they discharge their duties and obtain their
sustenance. And hence the power of individual locomotion does not
practically affect the analogy.

4. The last and perhaps the most important distinction is, that while in
the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with feeling, in
a society all the members are endowed with feeling. Even this
distinction, however, is not a complete one. For in some of the lowest
animals, characterized by the absence of a nervous system, such
sensitiveness as exists is possessed by all parts. It is only in the
more organized forms that feeling is monopolized by one class of the
vital elements. And we must remember that societies, too, are not
without a certain differentiation of this kind. Though the units of a
community are all sensitive, they are so in unequal degrees. The classes
engaged in laborious occupations are less susceptible, intellectually
and emotionally, than the rest; and especially less so than the classes
of highest mental culture. Still, we have here a tolerably decided
contrast between bodies-politic and individual bodies; and it is one
which we should keep constantly in view. For it reminds us that while,
in individual bodies, the welfare of all other parts is rightly
subservient to the welfare of the nervous system, whose pleasurable or
painful activities make up the good or ill of life; in bodies-politic
the same thing does not hold, or holds to but a very slight extent. It
is well that the lives of all parts of an animal should be merged in the
life of the whole, because the whole has a corporate consciousness
capable of happiness or misery. But it is not so with a society; since
its living units do not and cannot lose individual consciousness, and
since the community as a whole has no corporate consciousness. This is
an everlasting reason why the welfares of citizens cannot rightly be
sacrificed to some supposed benefit of the State, and why, on the other
hand, the State is to be maintained solely for the benefit of
citizens. The corporate life must here be subservient to the lives of
the parts, instead of the lives of the parts being