Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/384

 absolute, in the idea of an Absolute Being as the cause of the world. A similar process may project belief beyond the confines of its social origin, develop it into a similar organic need, and beget for it the idea of deity as an absolute object.

Another side of the social life which develops into a corresponding one within the religious life is found in the concept of unity. That we do not simply accept the disconnected manifoldness of our impressions of things, but look for the connections and relations which bind them into a unity; yes, that we everywhere presuppose the presence of higher unities and centers for the seemingly separate phenomena, in order that we may orient ourselves aright amid the confusion with which they come to us, is assuredly one of the important characteristics of social realities and necessities. Nowhere do we find, so directly and appreciably, a whole made up of separate elements; nowhere is their separation and free movement so energetically controlled by the center, as in the gens, the family, the state, in every purposive organization. When primitive associations are so often found organized in tens, it means, clearly, that the group-relationship is similar to that of the fingers of the hand—relative freedom and independent movement of the individual, and, at the same time, unity of purpose and inseparableness of existence from others. The fact that all social life is a relationship at once defines it as a unity; for what does unity signify but that many are mutually related, and that the fate of each is felt by all? The fact that this unity of society is occasionally attacked, that the freedom of the individual prompts him to break away from it, and that it is not absolutely true of the closest and most naïve relations, like the unity of the constituent parts of an organism—all this is precisely what must have driven it home to human consciousness as a particular form and special value of existence. The unity of things and interests which first impresses us in the social realm finds its highest representation—and one, as it were, separated from all material considerations—in the idea of the divine; most completely, of course, in the monotheistic, but relatively also in the lower, religions. It is the deepest significance of the God-idea that the manifoldness and contradictoriness of things find in it their