Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/705

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY 689

public schools, with their investigating and placing-out agents, empowered under supervision of the courts to take children away from parents and to place them in new homes. A large part of the unlimited coercion of the patria potestas is here extracted from the family and annexed to the peculiar coercive institution where it is guided by notions of children's rights, and all families are thereby toned up to a stronger emphasis on persuasion as the justification of their continuance.

CHAPTER XI.

THE CHURCH.

The church may be looked upon as both an original and a derived institution. As original, it belonged to the segmentary form of society, the blood-relationship of communicants, the empiric stage of self-consciousness, and the ethnic stage of religious belief. As derived, it appeared in the organic or terri- torial form of society, the contractual relationship of individuals, the reflective stage of self-consciousness, and the ethical stage of religious belief. We are to inquire now into the threefold char- acter of this institution — its persuasive motive, its material basis, and its coercive organization. The psychic basis of the church we name religion. The church itself is the organization which grows up about religious belief in the struggle for existence. The material basis is the social products, which, being reduced to private property, constitute the material penalties which support organization.

What is exactly the peculiar psychic principle of religion ? Sociology must answer this question somewhat more narrowly than philosophy and psychology. Professor Baldwin,' summa- rizing current theories, reduces the factors of religion to two : the feeling of dependence and the feeling of mystery. Sociology, having the definite problem of social relations and social organi- zation in mind, must narrow this description so as to imply its social bearings. It is but a particular deduction from Baldwin's generalized terms if we describe the religious motives as the belief in moral perfection and the consciousness of guilt. From the

' Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 327.