The truth of the whole matter is that Spencer is wholly at sea the moment he touches political economy, and in place of some elementary knowledge on that subject, we have the obsolete theories of the Manchester School proclaimed in the name of physiology.
Then follows a series of very ingenious comparisons. Following Liebig, he compares coins to blood corpuscles calling the later blood-discs to enhance the analogy and concludes: “throughout extensive divisions of the lower animals, the blood contains no corpuscles; and in societies of low civilization, there is no money.”
Then the development of blood vessels in lower animals is compared to the development of roads in primitive societies; their greater perfection in higher animals comparing with the railroads which more effectively convey food stuffs to the centers of population. Amid much that is fantastic and tedious, he says: “And in railways we also see, for the first time in the social organism, a system of double channels conveying currents in opposite directions as do the arteries and veins of a well-developed animal.”
“We come at length,” says Spencer, “to the nervous system.” This is by far the most interesting item in Spencer’s catalogue, because it is here that the evolutionary philosopher and the Manchester School politician come into open contradiction.
“We have now to compare the appliances by which a society as a whole, is regulated, with those by which the movements of an individual creature are regulated.”
Beginning with the nervous systems of lower animals he discovers their inferiority to lie in the absence of a controlling center. The lower Annulosa is composed of a series of ring-like segments. Each ring has its own nerve ganglia linked by connecting nerves, but “very incompletely dependent on any general controlling power. Hence it results that when the body is cut in two, the hinder part continues to move forward under the propulsion of its numerous legs; and that when the chain of ganglia has been divided without severing the body, the hind limbs may be seen trying to propel the body in one direction, while the fore limbs are trying to propel it in another.”
As we move up in the animal world the nervous system culminates in a centralized brain, and similarly as society becomes more complex, government appears.