Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/204

 1 92 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

hundred members, purely as such, lends to the group a special significance and dignity. The nobility in Locri Epizephyrii traced its origin back to noble-women of the so-called "hundred houses " that had shared in the founding of the colony. In the same way, tradition has it that the original settlements by which Rome was founded comprised a hundred Latin gentes, a hun- dred Sabellic, and a hundred composed of various elements. The complete number of one hundred members evidently lends the group a certain style, the precisely and accurately limited outline, in contrast with which every somewhat smaller or larger number appears, to a certain extent, vague and less complete in itself. The hundred has an essential unity and system which made it especially available for every genealogical mythology, a species of symmetry and of rational necessity, while all other numbers of group-elements seemed to be accidental, not in like manner cohering of inner necessity, not equally unchangeable in their proper essential structure. The peculiarly adequate relation to our intellectual categories, the easy visibility of the number one hundred, which makes it so available as a principle of subdivision, thus appears as a reflex of an objective peculiarity of the group, which accrues to the latter from this numerical precision.

This just-mentioned qualification is completely separate from those previously treated. In the case of the dyad and triad combinations, the number determined the proper inner life of the group, but it does this still not as quantity ; the group displays all those phenomena, not because it, as a whole, has this size, but the essential thing is definite relationships of each individual element, on account of reaction with one or with two other elements. Quite different was the case with all survivals of the number of the fingers. Here the ground of the synthe- sis lay in the more convenient visibility, organization, docility; in short, properly not in the group itself, but in the agent that had theoretically or practically to deal with it. A third signifi- cance of the number of members is connected finally with the fact that the group objectively and as a whole that is, without distinction of the individual positions of the elements betrays