Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/422

 extreme loftiness of the Christian conception of God (which was directly demonstrated in the idea of the necessity of the propitiatory death of Christ) at last made equality before God possible. Distance from Him was so immeasurable that differences between men vanished before it. It was necessary that the divine principle should be withdrawn to this height in order that it should suffice to reconcile the endless differences of believers.

I come now to the last sociological problem which I will connect with the fact of superiority and inferiority. On the one hand superiority and inferiority constitute a form of the objective organization of society. On the other hand they are an expression of differences in the personal quality of men. What now is the relation of these two determinations to each other, and how is the form of socialization affected by the variations of this relation?

In the beginning of social development superordination of one person over others must have been the adequate expression and consequence of personal superiority. There is no visible reason why, in a social condition without firm organization which a priori assigns to the individual his station, anybody should subordinate himself to another, unless force, piety, mental superiority, suggestion, in short the relation of his personal qualities to those of the other, determined him to such submission. From this origin of superordination and subordination, which of course is at every moment operative within society, and continually founds new relations, there develop permanent organizations of superordination and subordination into which individuals are born, or in which they gain specific positions on the ground of quite other qualities than those which established in the first place the superordination and subordination in question. While at first there were simply human beings with their peculiarities, and their relations grew out of these, later the relations themselves were given as objective forms, “stations,” empty spaces and boundaries as it were, thenceforth to be “filled out” by individuals. The more firmly