mutual needs of the members of the smallest social unit, the
family.

In practice the individual is helpless. Of all animals, indeed, man is
the most helpless when left to himself. He must be cared for by others
at every moment during his long infancy. He is dependent on the
exertions of others for shelter and clothes, while others are occupied
in preparing his food and conveying it from the ends of the world. Even
if we confine ourselves to the most elementary needs of a moderately
civilized existence, or even if our requirements are only those of an
idiot in an asylum, yet, for every one of us, there are literally
millions of people spending the best of their lives from morning to
night and perhaps receiving but little in return. The very elementary
need of the individual in an urban civilization for pure water to drink
can only be attained by organized social effort. The gigantic aqueducts
constructed by the Romans are early monuments of social activity typical
of all the rest. The primary needs of the individual can only be
supplied by an immense and highly organized social effort. The more
complex civilization becomes, and the more numerous individual needs
become, so much the more elaborate and highly organized becomes the
social response to those needs. The individual is so dependent on
society that he needs not only the active work of others, but even their
mere passive good opinion, and if he loses that he is a failure,
bankrupt, a pauper, a lunatic, a criminal, and the social reaction
against him may suffice to isolate him, even to put him out of life
altogether. So dependent indeed on society is the individual that there
has always been a certain plausibility in the old idea of the Stoics,
countenanced by St. Paul, and so often revived in later days (as by
Schaeffle, Lilienfeld, and Rene Worms), that society is an organism in
which the individuals are merely cells depending for their significance
on the whole to which they belong. Just as the animal is, as Hegel, the
metaphysician, called it, a "nation," and Dareste, the physiologist, a
"city," made up of cells which are individuals having a common ancestor,
so the actual nation, the real city, is an animal made up of individuals
which are cells having a common ancestor, or, as Oken long ago put it,
individuals are the organs of the whole.[251] Man is a social animal in
constant action and reaction with all his fellows of the same group--a
group which become