Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/697

 on close examination, to be nothing else than the stability, the unity, and the durable character of the group. Honor demands from the individual those kinds of conduct which promote these ends of his society. Since conformity to this demand acquires, on the one hand, an ideal worth, so ideal and so powerful at the same time that honor is preferred to life; since the preservation of honor, on the other hand, has very sensible pleasurable effects upon the individual, and its loss produces equally keen pains, it comes about that honor constitutes an extraordinarily close bond between the whole group and its elements. Accordingly honor is one of the most thorough means of maintaining the existence and specific significance of the group.

From such recourse of social self-preservation to individual persons, to a material substance, to an ideal conception, we pass now to the cases in which social persistence takes advantage of an organ composed of a number of persons. The objective principle in which unity manifests itself again exhibits societary character. Thus a religious community embodies its coherence and its life principle in its priesthood; a political community its inner principle of union in its administrative organization, its union against foreign power in its military system; this latter in its corps of officers; every permanent union in its official head; transitory associations in their committees; political parties in their parliamentary representatives. The structure of such organs is the result of sociological division of labor. The reciprocity between individuals in which all socialization consists, and the special form of which determines the character of the group as such, goes on at first immediately between the separate members of the society as such. The unification of operations comes about from direct agreement or from mutual adjustment of interests; the unity of the religious community through the common longing of the religious sentiment for union; the military constitution of the group through the interest of every man capable of military service in being strong for offense and defense; the administration of justice through immediate