Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/683

 exclusive, that is, it insisted that no persons should be admitted as Zunftmeister except sons or sons-in-law of masters or the husbands of masters’ widows.

The physiological coherence of successive generations is of incomparable significance for the maintenance of the unitary self of the group, for the special reason that the displacement of one generation by the following does not take place all at once. By virtue of this fact it comes about that a continuity is maintained which conducts the vast majority of the individuals who live in a given moment into the life of the next moment. The change, the disappearance and entrance of persons, affects in two contiguous moments a number relatively small compared with the number of those who remain constant. Another element of influence in this connection is the fact that human beings are not bound to a definite mating season, but that children are begotten at any time. It can never properly be asserted of a group, therefore, that at any given moment a new generation begins. The departure of the older and the entrance of the younger elements proceed so gradually and continuously that the group seems as much like a unified self as an organic body in spite of the change of its atoms. If the substitution of elements took place all at once and suddenly, in such a way as to affect the group throughout, it could scarcely be said that in spite of the disappearance of individuals the group maintains its unitary selfhood. Since at each moment those who were members of the groups in earlier moments constitute a vast majority over the entering members, the identity of the group is saved, in spite of the fact that moments far separated from each other may have no common elements.

The foregoing is one of the few cases in which the fact that change is gradual furnishes a real explanation of the change. In general, care must be taken not to imagine that a change from one condition into another quite different is explained when it is described as “gradual.” When we use that formula, we are apt to think of a multitude of intermediate stages interposed between the two extremes in question. We assume that the difference