Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/678

 and psychologically interpreted, can we gradually solve the riddle: “What is society in its essence?” For society is surely not a structure so unitary that a single exhaustive definition is possible. Society consists rather of the sum of all the ways and means of combination that appear among its elements. It cannot be said that “society” must exist before all these separate relations make their appearance in society. Any single relation may be eliminated, to be sure, since in the societies known to us there are always enough remaining relations. If we try to project our thought beyond all these relations, however, there remains no society at all.

Merely as an example of this method I shall attempt in the following to exhibit the specific ways in which society as such maintains itself. In this attempt I use the term “society” not in the now usual sense of the whole great complex of all the individuals and groups held together by common nationality or common culture. I see society rather wherever a number of human beings come into reciprocity and form a transient or permanent unity. In each such unification the phenomenon emerges which also determines the life of the individuals, viz., that at every moment destructive forces attack the life both from within and from without, and, if these alone operated, the unity would soon be resolved into its elements or transformed into other combinations. But opposed to these destructive forces there are preservative influences which hold the individual parts together by maintaining reciprocity between them, from which comes cohesion of parts, and hence a unity of the whole. This unity is of longer or shorter duration, until, like everything earthly, it at last yields to decomposing forces.

At this point the justification must appear for speaking of the society as a special unity over and above its individual elements. These phenomena of the self-preservation of societies are by no means identical with the instinct of self-preservation in the individual members. The latter, on the contrary, calls for quite different treatment; it employs quite different forces from those that preserve the group to which the individual belongs; so that