Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/492

 solidly merged in the environing, living group. This group alone gives him the possibility of a fulfilled and spiritual existence. The direction of those connective tissues through which the contents of his life come to him, run perceptibly at every moment only between his social milieu and himself. So soon, however, as the labor of the group has capitalized its output in the form of literature, in visible works, and in permanent examples, the former immediate flow of vital fluid between the actual group and the individual member is interrupted. The life-process of the latter no longer binds him continuously and without competition to the former. Instead of that, he can now sustain himself from objective sources, not dependent upon the actual presence of former authoratative persons. There is relatively little efficacy in the fact that this now accumulated stock has come from the processes of the social mind. In the first place, it is often the labor of far remote generations quite unconnected with the individual’s feeling of present values, which is crystallized in that supply. But, more than that, it is before all else the form of the objectivity of this supply, its detachment from the subjective personality, by virtue of which there is opened to the individual a super-social natural source, and his mental content becomes much more notably dependent, in kind and degree, upon his powers of appropriation than upon the conventionally furnished ideas. The peculiar intimacy of association within the secret society, of which more must be said later, and which gets its place among the categories of the feelings from the traits of the specific “confidence” (Vertrauen) characteristic of the order, in consequence of what has been said very naturally avoids committing the contents of its mysteries to writing, when tradition of spiritual contents is the minor aim of the association.

In connection with these questions about the technique of secrecy, it is not to be forgotten that concealment is by no means the only means under whose protection promotion of the material interests of the community is attempted. The facts are in many ways the reverse. The structure of the group is often with the direct view to assurance of keeping certain subjects from general