The state: Is government a mechanism or a living organism?

“ The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. ”

“ In fact, we can most positively assert, and I shall justify this assertion in the course of these pages, that by the Doctrine of Filiation, or Descent, we are enabled for the first time to reduce all organic phenomena to a single law, and to discover a single active cause for the infinitely intricate mechanism of the whole of this rich world of phenomena. In this respect, Darwin’s theory stands quite on a level with Newton’s Theory of Gravitation; indeed, it even rises higher than Newton’s theory! ”

“ God help the nation where self-government, in its literal sense, exists, Hugh! The term is conventional, and, properly viewed, means a government in which the source of authority is the body of the nation, and does not come from any other sovereign. When a people that has been properly educated by experience calmly selects its agents, and coolly sets to work to adopt a set of principles to form its fundamental law or constitution, the machine is on the right track, and will work well enough so long as it is kept there ”

“ Conditions on which the public power can act.—Two points forgotten by the authors of the preceding constitutions.— Difficulty of the undertaking and poor quality of the available materials.
Every human society requires government, that is to say an authority. No other machinery is more useful. But a machinery is useful only if it is adapted to its purpose; if not it will not work, or may even work contrary to its purpose. Hence, during its construction, one must first of all consider the magnitude of the work it has to do as well as the quality of the materials one has at one's disposal. ”

“ Forms of government would be, as Pope said, indifferent:
"Whate'er is best administered is best."
The whole case is changed if we take the other view, and regard political institutions as a part of a living social organism. Inorganic machines may remain unchanged, but to a living organism change is a part of the law of its being. Either growth and development or decay and disintegration are, and always must be, going on. It is the test of the wisdom and sagacity of statesmen, that they shall know how little or how much change is desirable or inevitable. ”

“ When the businessmen of the country were demanding the right to organize themselves adequately to promote their legitimate interests; when the farmers were demanding legislation which would give them opportunities and incentives to organize themselves for a common advance, it was natural that the workers should seek and obtain a statutory declaration of their constitutional right to organize themselves for collective bargaining as embodied in Section 7 (a) of the national Industrial Recovery Act.
Machinery set up by the federal government has provided some new methods of adjustment. ”

“ But the equilibrium of capacities, the prelude of which we have seen in the division of labor, does not fulfil the entire destiny of machinery, and the views of Providence extend far beyond. With the introduction of machinery into economy, wings are given to LIBERTY.
The machine is the symbol of human liberty, the sign of our domination over nature, the attribute of our power, the expression of our right, the emblem of our personality. ”

“ All around us may be seen, if our eyes are open, the evidences of the work of our government. Always the governmental machinery is at hand to serve us in a thousand ways, if we are wise enough to use it. The more we study its work, the more we shall be impressed by the fact that its greatest service is in opening the way for cooperation, and in providing the organization and the leadership for such cooperation. ”

“ And it is just because the ordinary machinery of government has been used on a large scale for this kind of work that the outcry against bureaucracy has recently been so vehement. It is not possible to imagine a worse method of conducting a great productive enterprise than to put it under the control of an evanescent minister selected on political grounds, and supported by a body of men whose work is carried on in accordance with the traditions of the Civil Service. ”

“ Tchernoff, Roussanoff, Zenzinoff, and a herd of the Dielo Naroda staff have so completely lost all shame that they unblushingly proclaim as if it were a mere bagatelle, that. in "their" ministries everything remains as of old. Revolutionary and democratic phrases to gull the Simple Simons; bureaucracy and red tape in the Government departments for the "benefit" of the capitalists—here you have the essence of the present "honorable" coalition. ”

“ The Marxist and the democratic socialist generally shirk this riddle altogether; the Fabian conception of a bureaucracy, official to the extent of being a distinct class and cult, exists only as a starting-point for healthy repudiations. Whatever else may be worked out in the subtler answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than that the necessary machinery of government must be elaborately organised to prevent the development of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy, tacit or expressed, against the normal man. ”

“ We shall support no candidate, however conspicuous his position or brilliant his ability, in whom the impulses of the party manager have shown themselves predominant over those of the reformer; for he will be inclined to continue that fundamental abuse, the employment of the Government service as a machinery for personal or party ends. ”

“ The leader or leaders of that machine are the rulers of the community, even though they occupy no offices and cannot be held in any way publicly responsible. Here, again, as in the case of the multi-millionaire, we have an example of a dangerous inequality in the distribution of power, and one which tends to maintain and perpetuate itself. The professional politician is frequently beaten and is being vigorously fought; but he himself understands how necessary he is under the existing local political organization, and how difficult it will be to dislodge him. ”

“ FRANKLIN K. LANE TO LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT OUTLOOK Washington, December 4, 1911
MY DEAR ABBOTT,— ... We are making history fast these days, and at the bottom of it all lies the idea, in the minds of the American people, that they are going to use this machine they call the Government. For the centuries and centuries that have passed, government has been something imposed from above, to which the subject or citizen must submit. For the first century of our national life this idea has held good. ”

“ But this is a superficial understanding of the matter; the people cannot possibly rule themselves; the existence of any rule whatever implies rulers as well as those ruled over; to talk of the people ruling is nonsense, or at best a mere figure of speech to indicate that they have a choice of rulers. Here as elsewhere there is and must be a government ruling by force; here as elsewhere that government is a human machine wielding or intended to wield irresistible power over its subjects, and constantly menacing the disobedient with deprivation of property, liberty and life. ”

“ It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. ”

“ ELECTION TIME It is the ambition of the agitator to use the machinery of government to make men more unselfish. In so far as he succeeds in this, he is creating a living church, the only sort of State church that would be entirely at one with our system, because it would be merely a representation in the formal government of a spirit abroad among the people.
Campaign platforms are merely creeds. “I believe in Civil Service Reform” is a way of saying “I do not believe in theft,” and the phrase was a fragmentary and incomplete formulation of the greater truth. ”

“ Before the Nation came to rule over us we had other governments which were foreign, and these, like all governments, had some element of the machine in them. But the difference between them and the government by the Nation is like the difference between the hand-loom and the power-loom. In the products of the hand-loom the magic of man's living fingers finds its expression, and its hum harmonizes with the music of life. But the power-loom is relentlessly lifeless and accurate and monotonous in its production. ”

“ They consider the polling booth as a preparatory school for triflers, fools and the ignorant; we regard it as a seat of judgment from which those three classes should be strictly excluded. They speak of “liberty” and “self{389} government” as ideal products of universal suffrage; we say in the first place that “liberty” and “self government” are impossible in a civilized country; and second, that instead of “self government” manhood suffrage has produced and can only produce machine and ring government ”

“ But to govern a state well, is the most difficult science in the world; and few men, who have ever been in the possession of power, have known what to do with it, or ever understood the principles upon which all power is founded; and their mistakes have made endless havock amongst mankind.
Government is political, as a human body is natural, mechanism: both have proper springs, wheels, and a peculiar organization to qualify them for suitable motions, and can have no other than that organization enables them to perform ”

“ In plain words, then, this human machine is moved like other machines. What we call Reason, spontaneity, volition, are, when analysed, no exceptions to the law-governed mechanism of the world we live in. Our motives make us, not we our motives. The faculty we exercise under the name of Choice, is really neither more nor less than a determined, unalterable, impulsion; the result of a mechanical law. And this law has formed and now constitutes the Universe. ”

“ Constitute government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of powers, which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use and potency of the laws depends upon them. Without them your commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active, effective organization.—Burke. ”

“ It is, therefore, the difficult task of one who would now write at once practically and critically of our national government to escape from theories and attach himself to facts, not allowing himself to be confused by a knowledge of what that government was intended to be, or led away into conjectures as to what it may one day become, but striving to catch its present phases and to photograph the delicate organism in all its characteristic parts exactly as it is today ”

“ We might speak of the several states as so many organs of our own nation; the commercial or farming or manufacturing communities of a state would be like the tissues forming an organ, made up ultimately of human units, which, like cells, are engaged in similar activities. As the individual human lives and the activities of differentiated economic groups constitute the life of a nation and national existence, so cell-lives make the living of an organism, and the expressions "division of labor" and "differentiation" come to have a biological meaning and application. ”

“ But we have to look in the same way on the cell-state, which is made up from the separate individualities in human society or in the kingdom of the tissue-animals, or the branches in the kingdom of the tissue-plants. Their complex organism, composed of various organs and tissues, can only be understood when we are acquainted with their constituent elements, the cells, and the laws according to which these elementary organisms unite to form cell-communities and tissues, and are in turn modified in the divers organs in the division of labor. ”

“ In conformity with the law of evolution of all organised bodies, that general functions are gradually separated into the special functions constituting them, there have grown up in the social organism for the better performance of the governmental office, an apparatus of law-courts, judges, and barristers ”

“ The State is a real organism, and the connexion of part to part is not mechanical, but organic. The State has a life of its own. And its members also have their own lives, which are included in the higher life of the State. All the parts of an organism are themselves organisms. And as the distinction between organic and inorganic is that the former has its end in itself, while the latter has its end external to it, this means that the State is an end in itself, that the individual is an end in himself, and that the former end includes the latter. ”

“ The unity of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet distinct from the unity of those parts. Even in chemistry the laws which regulate the molecule are not the laws which regulate the constituent atoms. And in that highest and most complex of all unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to find, laws of another range, and a remoter purport, obscurer to us in their origins, more mysterious in their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the unities which compose it. ”

“ A vote is not the impersonal counting of one; it is a manifestation of some tendency of the social organism through a member of that organism.
The democratic formula that government derives its powers from the consent of the governed ... means that in democracy the governors and the governed are not of two classes, but two aspects of the same fact—the fact of the possession by society of a unified and articulate will.
The aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into their proper positions in the social organism.... ”

“ Every living thing in the first place is composed of soul and body, of these the one is by nature the governor, the other the governed; now if we would know what is natural, we ought to search for it in those subjects in which nature appears most perfect, and not in those which are corrupted; we should therefore examine into a man who is most perfectly formed both in soul and body, in whom this is evident, for in the depraved and vicious the body seems [1254b] to rule rather than the soul, on account of their being corrupt and contrary to nature. ”

“ As in Hobbes's "Leviathan," the representative of the sovereign authority in the living organism, though he derives all his powers from the mass which he rules, is above the law. The questioning of his authority involves death, or that partial death which we call paralysis. Hence, if the analogy of the body politic with the body physiological counts for anything, it seems to me to be in favour of a much larger amount of governmental interference than exists at present, or than I, for one, at all desire to see. ”

“ This is usually expressed by saying that the theory of evolution by natural selection is a mechanical theory. It endeavours to comprise all the facts of adaptation in organic nature under the same category of explanation as those which occur in inorganic nature—that is to say, under the category of physical, or ascertainable, causation. Indeed, unless the theory has succeeded in doing this, it has not succeeded in doing anything—beyond making a great noise in the world. If Mr. Darwin has not discovered a new mechanical cause in the selection principle, his labour has been worse than in vain. ”

“ The theory of natural selection proposed by Darwin explains the origin of so-called purposive organisms by purely mechanical causes. There is no purposive impulse discoverable anywhere in organic life; everything is the necessary result of the struggle for existence, which acts as a blind regulator and not as a foreseeing God, and which causes the transformation of organic forms by the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation. ”

“ All phenomena of Adaptation, in the end, can be traced to251 conditions of nutrition of the organism, in the same way as the phenomena of Inheritance are referable to conditions of reproduction; but the latter, as well as the former, may further be traced to chemical and physical, that is to mechanical, causes. According to Darwin’s Theory of Selection the new forms of organisms, the transformations which artificial selection produces in the state of cultivation, and which natural selection produces in the state of nature, arise solely by the interaction of such causes. ”

“ Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the “struggle for life” the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. ”

“ On the other hand, vitalism met with a powerful opponent in Charles Darwin, who solved, by his theory of selection, one of the most obscure biological problems, the constantly repeated question: How can we give a mechanical explanation of the orderly structures of the living being? ”

“ There is determinism in nature, mechanical forces are everywhere operative, but there are no machines in the proper sense of the word. When we call an organism a living machine we at once take it out of the categories of the merely mechanical and automatic and lift it into a higher order—the vital order.
Professor Le Dantec says we are mechanisms in the third degree, a mechanism of a mechanism of a mechanism. The body is a mechanism by virtue of its anatomy—its framework, its levers, its hinges; it is a mechanism by virtue of its chemical activities ”

“ From the foregoing discussion, it will be evident, I am sure, that there is ample justification for the biological dictum that a living individual is a mechanism. Not only is the organism composed always of cell units grouped mechanically in tissues and organs and organic systems; not only are the operations which make up its life constant and regular under similar conditions; not only is the whole creature mechanically connected with the inorganic world ”

“ The organism is on the physical side a mechanism, and so long as the mechanical interpretation of organic phenomena is confined to expressing the mechanical principles involved in the mechanical relations, it is eminently to be applauded. But the organism is something more than a mechanism, even on the physical side; or, since this statement may be misunderstood, let me say, what no one will dispute, that the organism is a mechanism of a very special kind, in many cardinal points unlike all machines. ”

“ The engine then takes the energy thus liberated, and as a result of its peculiar mechanism converts it into the motion of its great fly-wheel. With this notion clearly in mind the question forces itself to the front whether the same facts are not true of the living animal organism. It, too, is fed with food containing a store of energy; and should we not regard it, like the steam engine, simply a machine for converting this potential energy into motion, heat, or some other active form? ”

“ By Darwinism we mean, as you know, the transmutation of species by variation and natural selection—selection accomplished mainly, if not solely, by the struggle for existence. Now this doctrine of organic development and change or metamorphic evolution, which was, with its originators, Wallace and Darwin, a purely biological doctrine, was transported to the field of sociology by Spencer and applied with great power to all human institutions, legal, moral, economic, religious, etc. Spencer has taught the world that all social institutions are fluid and not fixed. ”

“ History is only the last chapter of organic evolution, and both where similar causes are at work and where new factors have arisen, the parallel between social and organic evolution is instructive. While the Darwinian principle of natural selection as an explanation of the origin of species has an aspect which makes it almost as naive as the doctrine of special creations, it has given an extraordinary stimulus to modern thought. ”

“ Darwin was so much impressed with this teleological aspect of organic life that he frankly admitted that, if only one example in a natural state could be produced, an example of an organism showing structure and function useful not to itself, but to another organism, his whole theory of evolution would fall to the ground. A mechanism is a means, never an end, an organism is an end, never a means.
A biological process is finite, it has a definite beginning and end ”

“ But the response made by the organism to physical coercion may be called a mockery of physics. The mechanists help themselves out with crude analogies from the mechanical, conceal the problem with the name “irritability,” and thus get rid of the greatest marvels. If vital force itself were to call out from its cells, “Here I am,” they would probably see in it only a remarkable case of “irritability.” Mechanism is no more positive knowledge than vitalism is; it is only the dogmatic faith of the majority of present-day naturalists. ”

“ If the laws of matter and force alone account for the living organism, if we do not have to think of something that organizes, then how do we account for the marvelous diversity of living forms, and their still more marvelous power of adaptation to changed conditions, since the laws of matter and force are the same everywhere? Science can deal only with the mechanism and chemistry of life, not with its essence; that which sets up the new activity in matter that we call vital is beyond its analysis. ”

“ The Spontaneous Activity of the Organism. What is particularly luminous in all the theories that express the most recent anti-Darwinian tendency is that they tend to bring into prominence the mysterious powers of living organisms, by means of which, instead of passively waiting for natural selection and the continual accumulation of unceasing variations, they are able spontaneously and of themselves to bring forth what is necessary for self-maintenance, often what is new and different, of course not unlimitedly, but with considerable freedom and often with a surprising range of possibilities. ”

“ These typify the infinity of wrongs, varying in degrees of hardship, which legal regulations necessarily involve. Society, a living growing organism, placed within apparatuses of dead, rigid, mechanical formulas, cannot fail to be hampered and pinched. The only agencies which can efficiently serve it, are those through which its pulsations hourly flow, and which change as it changes.
How invariably officialism becomes corrupt every one knows. ”

“ We have yet to begin to learn all that we are to know concerning the ultimate laws of organized bodies. What is the principle of life? What is the rule of that action of which assimilation, secretion, developement, are manifestations? and which appears to be farther removed from mere chemistry than chemistry is from mechanics. And what again is the new principle, as it seems to be, which is exhibited in the irritability of an animal nerve? the existence of a sense? How different is this from all the preceding notions! No efforts can avoid or conceal the vast but inscrutable chasm. ”