Darwinism was very largely responsible for the development not only of a natural history view of man but also of a naturalistic view of society and its institutions. Obviously, if man is a part of nature, society is also. If society is a culminating product of organic evolution, then the social institutions must be viewed as means whereby societies have sought to maintain and perpetuate themselves in adaptation to their environments. The result was that social scientists of the generation after Darwin busily applied themselves to the significance of the concepts of fecundity, variation, struggle for existence, selection, heredity, and adaptation for the interpretation of social phenomena. It was inevitable that the use of biological analogies would be pushed too far. It was also to be expected that the progress of psychology and ethnology would change the points of emphasis in sociology from the biological to concepts imbued with psychological and culturistic implications. Nevertheless, the biological orientation served to give firmness to sociological interpretation, partly through supplying useful rubrics and partly by removing sociological theory from the deadly grip of a sterile metaphysics.

Among the most widely exploited of these early concepts was that of the social organism. While Herbert Spencer is generally said to have held that society is an organism, his own statement of the matter warrants no such opinion. It remained for certain French and German writers to make such a downright assertion and to attempt to demonstrate it by ingenious reasoning. Spencer, on the contrary, said only that society is like an organism because it grows, differentiates, and has systems of agencies which may conveniently be called sustaining, circulatory, and regulatory. He then added that these likenesses are only analogies and that the truths pictured by them were equally true without analogical support. Moreover, being the outstanding protagonist of political individualism, he was very careful to point out that society has no central censorium and hence cannot feel and think as a unitary body. Since the individual is the feeling and acting unit, it follows, he pointed out, that the welfare of the individual is the sole end and justification of social policy and social organization. He expressly stated that society is not classifiable with any known type of organism and that those products of social activity represented broadly by the terms tradition and institutions are genuinely super-organic and constitute a new social environment in which the individual lives, moves, and has his being.

Spencer's view seems essentially sound. When he concluded that, after all is said, the basic and enduring analogy between society and an organism is the mutual interdependence of parts in both, he meant that society may rightly be viewed as a separate and special object of scientific investigation and that it must be conceived as an integrated, complex whole in which are included many delicately interrelated parts. Society is thus something more than the mechanical juxtaposition of a number of individuals. As Spencer indicated, its evolution is attended by an increasing differentiation of parts held together in an even more complex coordination and cooperation of units by a perfected integration. These two processes of integration and differentiation, moreover, must keep pace with each other, unless social evolution is to end in a hard and fast solidarity destructive of individual initiative on the one hand, or in an inept anarchy destructive of social power on the other.

While, therefore, Spencer suggested the organismic conception of society, he was fundamentally opposed to a primary conclusion that was soon drawn from the analogy. It was not long before certain socialistic writers seized upon this view in order to strengthen the plea for the reorganization of political and economic institutions so as to give larger application to principles of social solidarity. It is in consequence of a certain inherent opposition of the individual and the collectivity that all the social sciences have struggled with the question whether, and to what extent, the community or the individual constitutes the end or the means. As noted above, Spencer was unequivocal in his answer and, as usual, philosophical certainty was some stages removed from reality. There has been much talk of individual rights and a tendency to set up inviolable principles regarding them, but one observes that these rights are repeatedly invaded by the socially constituted authorities nominally set up to protect the individual in his exercise of them. The basic rule of practice seems to be that the individual has the right to act in his own interest so long as his action does not conflict with what, at the time, the social group conceives to be its own larger interest. Individual rights derive from social approval and depend, for their realization, on the state of group opinion.

Now the reason for this situation would seem to be that the struggle for existence on the human plane has always been carried out on two levels. There is within the social group the struggle of individuals for existence, power, and prestige; and there is the overshadowing struggle between groups. No group ever intends to give its members rights which will weaken it in its struggle with other groups. Moreover, when the latter struggle breaks out in the form of war, or even of economic competition, the traditional and constitutional rights of the individual vanish in a wave of group sentiment which makes group strength and group preservation the primary aim of individual effort. Man is thus, in last analysis, a gregarious animal who, by nature and training, is keyed to an age-old struggle between groups, in which leaders and followers make war upon other leaders and followers, with death or the prizes of life in the balance. At such times the individual is no longer the end but the means; individual happiness and welfare are cast aside, often with a genuine enthusiasm, in order that one's race and blood and all that symbolizes their distinctiveness may survive. At such times society, as an organized, integrated super-entity, becomes a truly Hobbesian Leviathan, absorbing within itself the rights and the wills of its members.