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 374 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

complete sense. Presently association becomes to such a degree psychical that the security is more and more conventional that is, artificial and consequently weak with the defects of human knowledge and feeling. From that time forward the social problem may be stated in terms of security, namely: How may that security for the individual and for the association without which the individual cannot remain satisfied in the association be so sanctioned and safeguarded that it will not destroy itself ?

Let our first concrete illustration be the institution of politi- cal sovereignty. Sovereignty, in fact, is power to claim obedi- ence from the persons composing the society, and to be free from liability to render obedience in turn to any other persons. Sovereignty in its workings is a realization of security. There are gradations in amounts of goods secured and of degrees of cer- tainty with which they are assured, marked by transit from the fist-law of the horde to the blood-feud of the tribal state, and to the legal sanction of the civic state. The attainment of sover- eignty, however, by any sort of ruling power, marks the realiza- tion of security for somethings in higher degrees, and henceforth there is order of some sort. There is some certainty in the place of total uncertainty ; some conventionality in place of complete arbitrariness ; some uniformity instead of utter irregularity. With all this, and in virtue of all this, there is heightened intensiveness of association.

In his Study of Sociology Herbert Spencer has insisted on the necessity of becoming familiar with the concept of the cer- tainty of relations in the real world. In the social section of the real world there is a tendency to realize in practice certainty of objective relations, and to develop corresponding conscious- ness of that certainty. This certainty of relations in its lowest forms is merely an aspect of the general cosmic law. Human association tends to establish relations of an order peculiar to itself, and these objective relations, with the corresponding sub- jective facts in view of them, are first demonstrations that society exists, then essentials of association, then conditions of improved association. We have the permanent dilemma, with the terms