Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/650

 634 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

member of thousands of societies, some of them too temporary and trivial to deserve the name in any very serious sense. Each of us probably has been a member of hundreds of societies, each of which has left some permanent effect upon his life and char- acter. Herein lies the explanation of the variety of individualities in so far as that is a social product.

People may be united by relations of time, space, similarity, and causation. Similarity of persons, as persons, is similarity in experience, and experience is conscious activity. Relations of similarity and causation are more important than those of space and time alone. If people are together in time and space, yet without relations of similar experience or of causation, as may be the case with a group in a railway car, then they do not constitute a society in any important sense. If they are united in experi- ences, or activities that are temporary, trivial, and without causal importance, then they are a society in a thin and attenuated sense of that word. There are degrees of association, and therefore there are societies of many degrees. A society is important in proportion to the number of persons united, the duration of their union, the character of the similar experiences or activities which unite them, and the causal effectiveness of their union. A society in the fullest sense of the word is united by all four of the mentioned forms of relationship. Its members are together in time and space, but more especially they are together in similarity of human activities, affected by similar causes, affecting each other, and aware of their union. This is submitted as an answer to the question, "What is a Society?"

Since the above was written, there has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology an article by Professor Romano Adams, 12 in which he says, in effect, that it is impossible to prove that society has any sort whatever of objective unity, but that the sociologist is at liberty to think of society as a unity without regard to whether it is an objective unity or not ; that the ques- tion of unity is a matter of method of thought. The statement and argument are astute and ingenious, but an erroneous hypothesis may be quite as ingenious as a true one.

" The Nature of Social Unity," American Journal of Sociology, September, 1904, p. 208.