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, magistrates, and the soldiers who in the last resort must be called out to enforce the decrees of the community, it might appear that law could not exist.  And certainly it is hard to admit that what is known as mob-law is any law at all.  For historical purposes, however, we must be prepared to use the expression “law” rather widely.  We must be ready to say that there is law wherever there is punishment on the part of a human society, whether acting in the mass, or through its representatives.  Punishment means the infliction of pain on one who is judged