§ 5.

Contrasted as are their units, primitive communities and advanced ones must essentially differ in the principles of their structure. Like other organisms, the social organism has to pass in the course of its development through temporary forms, in which sundry of its functions are fulfilled by appliances destined to disappear as fast as the ultimate appliances become efficient. Associated humanity has larval appendages analogous to those of individual creatures. As in the common Triton of our ponds, the external lungs or branchiæ dwindle away when the internal lungs have grown to maturity; and as during the embryo stage of the higher vertebrata, temporary organs appear, serve their purpose awhile, and are subsequently re-absorbed, leaving only signs of their having been; so, in the earlier forms of the body politic do there exist institutions which after answering their ends for a time are superseded and become extinct.

But deciduous institutions imply deciduous sentiments. Dependent as they are upon popular character, established political systems cannot die out until the feeling which upholds them dies out. Hence during man’s apprenticeship to the social state there must predominate in him some impulse corresponding to the arrangements requisite; which impulse diminishes as the probationary organization made possible by it, merges into the ultimate organization. The nature and operation of this impulse now demand our attention.

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