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 296 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

approximately designating the elements to be distinguished. This antithesis should be understood immediately in its peculiar sense, without prejudice to these provisional names from remoter mean- ings of the terms. I start then from the broadest conception of society, the conception which so far as possible disregards the conflicts about definitions; that is, I think of society as existing wherever several individuals are in reciprocal relationship. This reciprocity arises always from specific impulses, or by virtue of specific purposes. Erotic, religious, or merely associative impulses, purposes of defense or of attack, of play as well as of gain, of aid and instruction, and countless others bring it to pass that men enter into ways of being-together — relationships of acting for, with, against one another, in a correlation of conditions ; that is, men exercise an influence upon these conditions of association and are influenced by them. These reactions signify that out of the individual bearers of those occasioning impulses and purposes a unity, that is, a "society," comes into being. For unity in the empirical sense is nothing other than reciprocity of elements. An organic body is a unity because its organs are in a relationship of more intimate intercharge of their energies than with any ex- ternal being. A state is one because between its citizens the cor- responding relationship of reciprocal influences exists. We could indeed not call the world one if each of its parts did not somehow influence every other, if anywhere the reciprocity of the influ- ences, however mediated, were cut off. That unity, or socializa- tion, may, according to the kind and degree of reciprocity, have very different gradations, from the ephemeral combination for a promenade to the family; from all relationships "at will," to membership in a state; from the temporary aggregation of the guests in a hotel to the intimate bond of a mediaeval guild. Everything now which is present in the individuals — the immedi- ate concrete locations of all historical actuality — in the nature of impulse, interest, purpose, inclination, psychical adaptability, and movement of such sort that thereupon or therefrom occurs influ- ence upon others, or the reception of influence from them^ — all this I designate as the content or the material, so to speak, of socialization. In and of themselves, these materials with which