Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/703

 group, is met by the development of social organs, at least in two directions. First, an administrative agency (Amt), a commission, a delegation, etc., will have more special knowledge than the aggregate of other persons. By resort to these substitutes those frictions and oppositions will be avoided which come from pure ignorance of the things involved. The group will be the more able to maintain such unity of action as comes from knowledge of the conditions concerned, and from exclusion of the vascillations due to mere subjective influences, the more the direction of its special plans is committed to an organ separately designated for the purpose. The significance of a second and related factor is not so obvious. The absence of adaptations to the circumstances, which so often prevents unity in the actions of the mass (for subjective errors are numberless, while in the case of objectively correct representations all must at last come to the same result), is not always the consequence of mere ignorance of the subject, but often also of the very important sociological fact that the factions, which, in connection with any important subject, always divide the group, stand for mental differences upon matters far removed from and wholly unrelated to the question in hand. These differences are evidence that accord is radically impossible. The party divisions that have arisen from any cause whatsoever are preserved throughout the whole range of interests, and bring it to pass that, for example, political parties must occupy hostile camps, even about religious, aesthetic, personal, and culture questions of every sort, even in cases where the content of the new party programmes has no real connection with that which caused the original division. The line which divides parties in any vital matter is produced through affairs of every possible sort, from generalities to particularities, and simply because opponents upon the important subject will not coöperate upon any other. The mere fact that the one party has taken sides upon any open question is sufficient to make the opposing party take the other side. This power of party, as a mere form which shows itself in unbroken continuance throughout the most heterogeneous kinds of