Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/679

 the self-preservation of the individuals may be complete while that of the group is weakened and destroyed, or, on the contrary, the latter may show itself still in full force after the self-sustaining power of the individuals is in decadence. These facts have done the most to recommend the idea that the society, the unified group, is a structure of independent reality, which leads its life after peculiar laws and by virtue of peculiar forces, independent of all its individual components. In fact, when we consider the development and the characteristics of language, morals, church, law, political and social organization, that conception seems inevitable. All these seem to be products and functions of an impersonal structure. They seem to belong to all in common, as a piece of public property belongs to the community, yet in such a way that no individual could be named as the sufficient cause or the determining purpose of the same, nor could the precise share of any single individual in its creation be distinguished. These products stand rather over against the individual as something objective, absolved from the limitations of personal life. On the other hand, it is certain that in the last analysis only individuals exist, that there are human products apart from human beings themselves only in the case of material things; that, on the other hand, spiritual structures like those just mentioned have their existence only in personal minds. Every attempt to think of them outside of persons is a mysticism like the conceptual realism which made independent substantial entities of human ideas. How, then, if we hold fast to the existence of individuals only, shall we explain the super-individual character of those structures, the objectivity and independence of societary forces and organizations?

So far as I can see, this antinomy can be resolved in only one way. From the view point of completed knowledge we must hold unconditionally to the fact that there are only spiritual individuals. An all-penetrating vision would peremptorily resolve that appearance which seems to announce a new independent unity above the individuals into the reciprocity which plays between the individuals, and it would see that, if this