physical point of view, is first of all a product of nature, he is, from the point of view of intelligence, above all a product of society. The most important organs of the nervous system form, develop, differentiate, and integrate under the influence of the social milieu, just as the purely physical part of man is formed and developed under the influence of the physical milieu by the natural differentiation and integration of forces. The economic activity of society, work, customs, habits, laws, political liberty, authority, religion, science, art, in short, all of social life, forms and educates man, gives to his efforts, to his intellectual, moral and aesthetic needs, this or that direction, pushing in this or that sense the complete development of the superior organs of the nervous system (Lilienfeld 1873; cited in Schmoller 1902: 169, note 81). Indeed, the organic theory of society of Lilienfeld and Worms would seem to be an antidote to rampant laissez-faire competition, as Barberis (2003) noted: Organicism also reacted to a widely held political idea of the time: that individualism had been taken to extremes in modern society and that it was necessary to bring balance through an opposite emphasis. Against the self-sufficient individual of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the organicists claimed to bring the support of science to the primacy of the social bond. For these authors, the natural human state was that of association. As Worms put it in a critique of the contract theory: "Men did not need to associate themselves, they were born associated, and they remained so." Psychological and moral capacities developed through this association; in other words, humans owed their consciousness and their capacity for relative autonomy to society. Individuality as it was known and prized in modern society was a product of society. Lilienfeld stated this as a simple fact: "The intellectual and moral faculties of man are exclusively the product of social life." The organicists believed this should settle the conflict between individual liberty and social solidarity; humans would come to realize their strict dependence on the collective (Barberis 2003: 62). Lilienfeld did, however, have a progressivist understanding of evolutionary complexity similar to Spencer's: The direction of progress is indicated by Lilienfeld's hierarchical potentiation of forces, which in the order of their natural succession in the advancement of society represent the following order: mechanical, chemical, organic, emotional, intellectual, and social. Each