and C. N. Starcke accepted the organic theory, they did so with reservations. The most withering attack on the organic theory seemed to come from Nikolai Karéiev, who "showed that this theory shared, together with Darwin's social theory, economic materialism and social psychic theories, the fate of all exclusive theories" (Worms 1898: 111). Alfred Espinas then tried to salvage the theory by maintaining that societies must "constitute organisms," or else one would have "to abandon altogether the idea of social life and social laws" (Worms 1898: 111). Novicow closed the section by reaffirming his faith in the organic theory, and Worms in his report stated that, by and large, the congress had "been productive of the most happy results" (Worms 1898: 109). Though these debates in Paris were characterized as "more animated" than usual (Small 1898: 412), a reviewer across the Atlantic seemed to take them lightly: It would hardly be possible to arouse American sociologists to very lively controversy over what remains in dispute. The men among us who make most use of the organic concept are satisfied that their opponents disagree with them only verbally, so far as the essential idea is concerned. Beyond that there remain merely differences of judgement about details in employing the concept. Since these differences relate to details and not to essentials, even the most zealous friends of the organic concept are satisfied that it can now take care of itself. They are content to assume that it is taken for granted, and their interest is transferred to other fields (Small 1898: 412). A couple of years earlier, the same reviewer, Albion W. Small, had also expressed an optimistic outlook for organicism. Discussing both Lilienfeld's and Schäffle's uses of society–organism analogies, Small wrote the tracing of these analogies is not the essence of sociology, but merely the most vivid method of presenting the phenomena of society in such form that the actual problems of sociology will appear. The analogies and terms suggested by them are tools of research and report, not solutions of problems.... The metaphors emphasize obvious analogies between social relations and physiological relations. They are used as spurs to scientific curiosity, so as to facilitate discovery of the limits of analogy, and thus of the distinctively social phenomena (Small 1896: 311). An earlier critic, however, was not so sanguine. Émile Durkheim rejected Lilienfeld's ideas on both ideological and methodological grounds. Ideologically,