ns in the mechanical sense, namely, as
decrease in bulk, or growth in hardness. Then Life appears; and after
that neither integration of matter nor dissipation of motion play any
part whatever. The result of life, however, is to fill the world more
and more with things displaying _organic unity_. By this is meant any
arrangement of which one part helps to keep the other parts in
existence. Some organic unities are material,--a sea-urchin, for
example, a department store, a civil service, or an ecclesiastical
organization. Some are mental, as a "science," a code of laws, or an
educational programme. But whether they be material or mental
products, organic unities must _accumulate_; for every old one tends to
conserve itself, and if successful new ones arise they also "come to
stay." The human use of Spencer's adjectives "integrated," "definite,"
"coherent," here no longer shocks one. We are frankly on teleological
ground, and metaphor and vagueness are permissible.

This tendency of organic unities to accumulate when once they are
formed is absolutely all the truth I can distill from Spencer's
unwieldy account of evolution. It makes a much less gaudy and
chromatic picture, but what there is of it is exact.

Countless other criticisms swarm toward my pen, but I have no heart to
express them,--it is too sorry an occupation. A word about Spencer's
conception of "Force," however, insists on being added; for although it
is one of his most essential, it is one of his vaguest ideas.

Over all his special laws of evolution there reigns an absolutely
general law, that of the "persistence of force." By this Spencer
sometimes means the phenomenal law of conservation of energy, sometimes
the metaphysical principle that the quantity of existence is
unalterable, sometimes the logical principle that nothing can happen
without a reason, sometimes the practical postulate that in the absence
of any assignable difference you must call a thing the same. This law
is one vast vagueness, of which I can give no clear account; but of his
special vaguenesses "mental force" and "social force" are good examples.

These manifestations of the universal force, he says, are due to vital
force, and this latter is due to physical force, both being
proportionate to the amount of physical force which is "transformed"
into them. But what on earth is "social force"? Sometimes he
identifies it with "social activity" (showing the latter to be