As part of my ongoing crusade toward the release of genuine knowledge allowing us
to understand ourselves according to a scientific manner, I am posting an item of historical
interest, Keith’s Does Man’s Body Represent a Commonwealth ? I had best say a few words by way of explanation, although I am not going to review the essay. This essay was brought to my attention by an amateur would be scientist of human nature, who spent decades writing about society as a social organism. Morley Roberts was a novelist who also produced a flurry of works, such as Bio-Politics, 1938, and The Behaviour of Nations, 1941, which employed an organicist theme, but to very poor effect. Apart from his enthusiasm for organicism, he gives us little else of value. He was a friend of the professional anthropologist Keith, and he mentions his indebtedness to Keith for the inspiration provided by this essay. The essay is interesting to me for the way Keith talks about Spencer’s involvement in the idea of society as a social organism, and this same criticism of Spencer can be found at the beginning of Robert’s Bio-Politics, where Spencer is cursed for betraying the possibility of founding a true scientific sociology based upon biological principles. Neither Morley nor Keith explore the significance of this betrayal, but since we see modern science, and all other intellectual work of any notoriety, as being aids to absolute theocracy, this betrayal by Spencer falls readily into the category of Gatekeeper, such as we see in modern contemporaries such as the familiar Dawkins, and another miscreant I am working on right now, a latterday Spencer called Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle, 1995, a vibrant voice of organicism, crying out alone in a wilderness of ignorance, who nonetheless is no more an organicist for real, than I am a Martian, for real. The title of Keith’s essay does indicate the peculiar twist given to organicism by Morley, in all of his five main works on the subject, wherein we see the body of the individual likened to a society, which rather inverts the real meaning of organicism, which is supposed to be a rigorous form of scientific sociology, treating society as a true organism created by nature.