Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/505

 Pythagoreans, is the most striking form of this protective arrangement. The circle of the only partially initiated constitutes to a certain extent a buffer area against the totally uninitiated. As it is everywhere the double function of the “mean” to bind and to separate—or, rather, as it plays only one rôle, which we, however, according to our apperceptive categories, and according to the angle of our vision, designate as uniting and separating—so in this connection the unity of activities which externally clash with each other appears in the clearest light. Precisely because the lower grades of the society constitute a mediating transition to the actual center of the secret, they bring about the gradual compression of the sphere of repulsion around the same, which affords more secure protection to it than the abruptness of a radical standing wholly without or wholly within could secure.

Sociological self-sufficiency presents itself in practical effect as group-egoism. The group pursues its purposes with the same disregard of the purposes of the structure external to itself, which in the case of the individual is called egoism. For the consciousness of the individual this attitude very likely gets a moral justification from the fact that the group-purposes in and of themselves have a super-individual, objective character; that it is often impossible to name any individual who would directly profit from the operation of the group egoism; that conformity to this group program often demands unselfishness and sacrifice from its promoters. The point at issue here, however, is not the ethical valuation, but the detachment of the group from its environments, which the group egoism effects or indicates. In the case of a small group, which wants to maintain and develop itself within a larger circle, there will be certain limits to this policy, so long as it has to be pursued before all eyes. No matter how bitterly a public society may antagonize other societies of a larger organization, or the whole constitution of the same, it must always assert that realization of its ultimate purposes would redound to the advantage of the whole, and the necessity of this ostensible assertion will at all events place some restraint upon the actual egoism of its action. In the case of secret