We have seen that the interpenetrating of psychic forces creates at the same time individuals and society, that, therefore, the individual is not a unit but a centre of forces (both centripetal and centrifugal), and consequently society is not a collection of units but a complex of radiating and converging, crossing and recrossing energies. In other words we are learning to think of society as a psychic process.

This conception must replace the old and wholly erroneous idea of society as a collection of units, and the later and only less misleading theory of society as an organism.24

The old individualism with all the political fallacies it produced⁠—social contract of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, majority rule of the nineteenth, etc.⁠—was based on the idea of developed individuals first existing and then coming together to form society. But the basis of society is not numbers: it is psychic power.

The organic theory of society has so much to recommend it to superficial thinking that we must examine it carefully to find its fatal defects. But let us first recognize its merits.

Most obviously, an organic whole has a spatial and temporal individuality of its own, and it is composed of parts each with its individuality yet which could not exist apart from the whole. An organism means unity, each one his own place, everyone dependent upon everyone else.

Next, this unity, this interrelating of parts, is the essential characteristic. It is always in unstable equilibrium, always shifting, varying, and thereby changing the individual at every moment. But it is always produced and maintained by the individual himself. No external force brings it forth. The central life, the total life, of this self-developing, self-perpetuating being is involved in the process. Hence biologists do not expect to understand the body by a study of the separate cells as isolated units: it is the organic connection which unites the separate processes which they recognize as the fundamental fact.

This interrelating holds good of society when we view it externally. Society too can be understood only by the study of its flux of relations, of all the intricate reciprocities which go to make the unifying. Reciprocal ordering⁠—subordinating, superordinating, coordinating⁠—purposeful self-unifyings, best describe the social process. Led by James, who has shown us the individual as a self-unifying centre, we now find the same kind of activity going on in society, in the social mind. And this interrelating, this unity as unity, is what gives to society its authority and power.

Thus the term organism is valuable as a metaphor, but it has not strict psychological accuracy.

There is this worldwide difference between the self-interrelatings of society and of the bodily organism: the social bond is a psychic relation and we cannot express it in biological terms or in any terms of physical force. If we could, if “functional combination” could mean a psychological relation as well as a physiological, then the terms “functional” and “organic” might be accepted. But they denote a different universe from that of thought. For psychical self-unitings knit infinitely more closely and in a wholly different way. They are freed from the limitations of time and space. Minds can blend, yet in the blending preserve each its own identity. They transfuse one another while being each its own essential and unique self.

It follows that while the cell of the organism has only one function, the individual may have manifold and multiform functions: he enters with one function into a certain group of people this morning and with another function into another group this afternoon, because his free soul can freely knit itself with a new group at any moment.25

This self-detaching, self-attaching freedom of the individual saves us from the danger to democracy which lurks in the organic theory. No man is forced to serve as the running foot or the lifting hand. Each at any moment can place himself where his nature calls. Certain continental sociologists are wholly unjustified in building their hierarchy where one man or group of men is the sensorium, others the hewers and carriers, etc. It is exactly this despotic and hopeless system of caste from which the true democracy frees man. He follows the call of his spirit and relates himself where he belongs today, and through this relating gains the increment of power which knits him anew where he now belongs and so continually as the wind of spirit blows.

Moreover in society every individual may be a complete expression of the whole in a way impossible for the parts of a physical organism.26 When each part is itself potentially the whole, when the whole can live completely in every member, then we have a true society, and we must view it as a rushing of life⁠—onrush, outrush, inrush⁠—as a mobile, elastic, incalculable, Protean energy seeking fitting form for itself. This ideal society is the divine goal towards which life is an infinite progress. Such conception of society must be visibly before us to the exclusion of all other theories when we ask ourselves later what the vote means in the true democracy.27