ABSTRACT
Persons, cities, and nations acquire in the course of their development characteristics which give to each of them an increasingly distinctive personality. The trend toward individualization and therefore toward pluralism can be seen at all levels of living processes. For humankind, the ultimate expressions of these two trends are on the one hand the cult of personality and on the other hand the efforts to establish a world order integrating all nations into a single political body. This chapter illustrates how, in nature, organic life evolved progressively from a low level of unity toward a higher level of integration through the intermediary of pluralistic diversification. This brief excursion into the domain of theoretical biology will also help to sharpen the qualitative distinction between biological evolution and the social evolution of humankind. All living things present great similarities in their chemical composition and in their fundamental physiological functions.
