Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/696

 may, at the same time, be under the demands of several sorts of honor which are independent of each other. One may preserve his mercantile honor, or his scientific honor as an investigator, who has forfeited his family honor, and vice versa; the robber may strictly observe the requirements of thieves’ honor after he has violated every other; a woman may have lost her womanly honor and in every other respect be most honorable, etc. Thus honor consists in the relation of the individual to a particular circle, which in this respect manifests its separateness, its sociological distinctness from other groups.

So far as its content is concerned, honor seems to me to get its character as duty of the individual from the circumstance that, in preserving his own honor, the individual preserves at the same time the honor of his own social circle. The officer guards, in his own honor, that of the whole corps of officers, the merchant that of the mercantile class, the member of the family that of his family. This is the enormous advantage which society derives from the honor of its members, and for the sake of which society permits the individual to do things which are otherwise both by ethics and law positively forbidden.

When the social group intrusts to each of its elements its total honor pro rata, it confides to the individual at the same time a good of extraordinary value, something that the individuals are, as a rule, not in a position to gain for themselves, something that they have simply to keep from losing. Since the honor of the whole circle becomes thus at the same time the private possession of the individual, and in this individualization becomes his honor, it thereby demonstrates a unique and extremely close coalescence of individual and social interest. The latter has taken in this case, for the consciousness of the individual, a completely personal form. Herewith the enormous service is manifest which honor renders to the self-maintenance of the group, for what I called the honor of the group, represented by the honor of the individual, proves,