ABSTRACT
Herbert Spencer's social and political teachings are familiar enough in their main outlines to readers who otherwise know little or nothing of his works. The comparison between society and an individual organism had been instituted before Mr. Spencer’s time, but in a way too vague for it to be productive of much result. Mr. Spencer, in taking the matter up among his earlier studies, endeavoured to do something more than point out more or less fanciful analogies. Utilizing the comprehensive generalizations of modern biology, he undertook to indicate the real parallelisms. Having thus indicated the principal parallelisms between societies and individual organisms, Mr. Spencer proceeds to point out their chief differences. From the earliest developments of gregariousness to the latest extension of governmental activity, the only ultimate authority for the restraints exercised by society in its corporate capacity over its individual members is the welfare of those individual members.
