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sight appears a grotesque supposition, we must remember that it would appear equally so to ascribe such possibilities to the individual brain, were it not for the irrelevant accident of this particular form of complex standing in such relation to our own subjectivity that we are able to verify the fact of its ejectivity. Thus, for aught that we can tell to the contrary, Comte may have been even more justified than his followers suppose, in teaching the personification of Humanity. But, in the next place, if the social organism is not endowed with personality, this may be for either one of two reasons. All the conditions required for attaining so high a level of psychical perfection may not be here present; or else the level of psychical perfection may be higher than that which we know as personality. This latter alternative will be considered in another relation by-and-by, so I will not dwell upon it now. But with reference to all these possible contingencies, I may observe that we are not without clear indications of the great fact that the high order of complexity which has been reached by the social organism _is_ accompanied by evidence of something which we may least dimly define as resembling subjectivity. In numberless ways, which I need not wait to enumerate, we perceive that society exhibits the phenomena both of thought and conduct. And these phenomena cannot always be explained by regarding them as the sum of the thoughts and actions of its constituent individuals--or, at least, they can only be so regarded by conceding that the thoughts and actions of the constituent individuals, when thus _summated_, yield a different product from that which would be obtained by a merely arithmetical computation of the constituent parts: the composite product differs from its component elements, as H_2O differs from 2H + O. The general truth of this remark will, I believe, be appreciated by all historians. Seeing that ideas are often, as it is said, 'in the air' before they are condensed in the mind of individual genius, we habitually speak of the 'Zeit-geist' as the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the mere sum of all the individual minds of a generation. That is to say, we regard society as an eject, and the more that a man studies the thought and conduct of society, the more does he become convinced that we are right in so regarding it. Of course this eject is manifestly unlike th
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