Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/493

 knowledge. This is the case with those peculiar types of secret society whose substance is an esoteric doctrine, a theoretical, mystical, religious gnosis. In this case secrecy is the sociological end-unto-itself. The issue turns upon a body of doctrine to be kept from publicity. The initiated constitute a community for the purpose of mutual guarantee of secrecy. If these initiates were merely a total of personalities not interdependent, the secret would soon be lost. Socialization affords to each of these individuals a psychological recourse for strengthening him against temptations to divulge the secret. While secrecy, as I have shown, works toward isolation and individualization, socialization is a counter-active factor. If this is in general the sociological significance of the secret society, its most clear emergence is in the case of those orders characterized above, in which secrecy is not a mere sociological technique, but socialization is a technique for better protection of the secrecy, in the same way that the oath and total silence, that threats and progressive initiation of the novices, serve the same purpose. All species of socialization shuffle the individualizing and the socializing needs back and forth within their forms, and even within their contents, as though promotion of a stable combining proportion were satisfied by introduction of quantities always qualitatively changing. Thus the secret society counterbalances the separatistic factor which is peculiar to every secret by the very fact that it is society.

Secrecy and individualistic separateness are so decidedly correlatives that with reference to secrecy socialization may play two quite antithetical rôles. It can, in the first place, as just pointed out, be directly sought, to the end that during the subsequent continuance of the secrecy its isolating tendency may be in part counteracted, that within the secret order the impulse toward community may be satisfied, while it is vetoed with reference to the rest of the world. On the other hand, however, secrecy in principle loses relative significance in cases where the particularization is in principle rejected. Freemasonry, for example, insists that it purposes to become the most universal society, “the union of unions,” the only one that repudiates every particularistic character and aims to appropriate as its material exclusively that