On Society

ed organs, indispensable to each other, and having really no independent life. Human nature is not a bundle of sticks or a sack of potatoes. It is a living body; and it can no more, be truly separated into parts than a living man can be separated into a digestive apparatus and a nervous system. Society is an Organism and it must be treated as a whole. The elements of society (i.e., of Humanity) can be separated only in thoughtâ??not in fact. The State, the Church, Law, Public Opinion, Economics, Ethics, are subjects which we may reason about separately, and detach in the abstract. But for all purposes of concreteapplication we must consider them as depending one on each other. Now the popular social and political schemes treat society piecemeal, in arbitrary sections. They study society in analytic groups, and then they begin to act as if these groups were separable factors. It is as though physicians and surgeons, after studying the physical organism first as skeleton, then as nervous and digestive apparatus, then as a circulating systemâ??were to begin to treat any one of them by itself, as if bone, heart, or brain could be treated by drugs or instruments apart from the rest of the body, and without reference to any reaction such treatment might cause elsewhere. The Socialist, the Communist, the Co-operator, the Democratic reformer, the Land Reformer, the suffrage reformer, the Temperance or Sex agitation, confine themselves to one definite element or capacit...