ource of social rank, under
an economic system of the more developed kind.

In this brief sketch it has been impossible to do more than hint how
social organization is relative to numbers, which in their turn are
relative to the skill with which the food-quest is carried on. But
if, up to a certain point, it be true that the structure of society
depends on its mass in a more or less physical way, there is to be
borne in mind another aspect of the matter, which also has been hinted
at as we went rapidly along. A good deal of intelligence has throughout
helped towards the establishing of the social order. If social
organization is in part a natural result of the expansion of the
population, it is partly also, in the best sense of the word, an
artificial creation of the human mind, which has exerted itself to
devise modes of grouping whereby men might be enabled to work together
in larger and ever larger wholes.

Regarded, however, in the purely external way which a study of its
mere structure involves, society appears as a machine--that is to say,
appears as the work of intelligence indeed, but not as itself instinct
with intelligence. In what follows we shall set the social machine
moving. We shall then have a better chance of obtaining an inner view
of the driving power. We shall find that we have to abandon the notion
that society is a machine. It is more, even, than an organism. It is
a communion of souls--souls that, as so many independent, yet
interdependent, manifestations of the life-force, are pressing
forward in the search for individuality and freedom.

CHAPTER VII
LAW

The general plan of this little book being to start from the influences
that determine man's destiny in a physical, external, necessary sort
of way, and to work up gradually to the spiritual, internal, voluntary
factors in human nature--that strange "compound of clay and flame"--it
seems advisable to consider law before religion, and religion before
morality, whether in its collective or individual aspect, for the
following reason. There is more sheer constraint to be discerned in
law than in religion, whilst religion, in the historical sense which
identifies it with organized cult, is more coercive in its mode of
regulating life than the moral reason, which compels by force of
persuasion.

To one who lives under civilized conditions the phrase "the strong
arm of the law" inevitably suggests the policeman. Apart from policemen,
m