The more complex civilization becomes, and the more numerous individual needs become, so much the more elaborate and highly organized becomes the social response to those needs. The individual is so dependent on society that he needs not only the active work of others, but even their mere passive good opinion, and if he loses that he is a failure, bankrupt, a pauper, a lunatic, a criminal, and the social reaction against him may suffice to isolate him, even to put him out of life altogether. So dependent indeed on society is the individual that there has always been a certain plausibility in the old idea of the Stoics, countenanced by St. Paul, and so often revived in later days (as by Schäffle, Lilienfeld, and René Worms), that society is an organism in which the individuals are merely cells depending for their significance on the whole to which they belong. Just as the animal is, as Hegel, the metaphysician, called it, a "nation," and Dareste, the physiologist, a "city," made up of cells which are individuals having a common ancestor, so the actual nation, the real city, is an animal made up of individuals which are cells having a common ancestor, or, as Oken long ago put it, individuals are the organs of the whole.
Man is a social animal in constant action and reaction with all his fellows of the same group—a group which becomes ever greater as civilization advances—and socialism is merely the formal statement of this ultimate social fact.
There is a divinity that hedges certain words. A sacred terror warns the profane off them as off something that might blast the beholder's sight. In fact it is so, and even a clear-sighted person may be blinded by such a word. Of these words none is more typical than the word "socialism."