Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/256

 244 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ities, a great number of affinities with the empire of the Incas. In the latter the worship of the sun was in harmony with the con- ception of an empire whose frontiers came to be extended wherever the brilliant rays of the divine aster penetrated. Simi- larly it was said of Charles V. and Philip II. that the sun never sank to rest upon their territories. Spain realized what Peru con- tained only in germ a world-empire. Was not Louis XIV. at the epoch of his power called the " sun king " ? There was something more in this than flattery. It was an imperial concep- tion with assimilations of the limits of sovereignty with those of the solar radiation. This conception had its remotest origin in the beliefs of populations still savage, but in which the commu- nal form existed along with military authority. For instance, the chiefs of the Huron tribes bore the name of the sun, and those of the Natchez the title of sun kings.

Everywhere and always, the limits of power are at least instinctively conceived as the resultant of the composition and organization of the internal forces in equilibrium with the com- position and organization of the external forces. However, in this estimation each group, especially the group that is wide- spread, has the illusion that its power is illimitable. The illusion, in reality, is only an abstraction made from the reaction of the other forces ; a constant, but variable reaction which produces at each moment a state of unstable equilibrium, which always announces new changes.

G. DE GREEF.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.

[To be continued.]