Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/26

 14 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the less comprehensive, the larger the circumference of their application. Illustrations might extend from the rules of "international courtesy," which are much fewer in number than those to be observed in every narrower circle ; to the fact that the individual states of the German empire have, as a rule, a less comprehensive constitution the larger they are. Expressed in the form of a theorem : With increasing extent of the circle, the common elements which bind each with each into the social unity are decreasingly circumstantial. It is consequently (although at first paradoxical) possible to hold a great circle together with a smaller minimum of norms than would be required for a small circle. Of course, the aggregate of norms will be greater in the former than in the latter, but it consists of the special norms of the subdivisions of the circle, whereas the circle as a totality makes up for its size by deficit of many gen- erally applicable norms. In qualitative respects, moreover, the modes of conduct which a community, in order to exist as such, must demand of its members are usually the more prohibitive and limiting in nature as extension increases. The positive combinations which, proceeding from element to element, give the group-life its proper content must at last be left to the individuals. The manifoldness of the persons, the interests, the occurrences, becomes too great to be regulated from one center. To this center, therefore, there is left only the prohibitive func- tion, the determination of those things which under no circum- stances may be done ; the bounding of freedom rather than the direction of it wherewith, of course, is meant only the trend of a development which is perpetually crossed and turned aside by other tendencies. Thus, where a great number of divergent cir- cles of religious feeling or interest are to be composed into a unity. For example, from the decline of Arabian polytheism Allah arose as the universal concept, so to speak, of God in gen- eral. Polytheism produces necessarily a cleavage of the area included within the faith, because the components of the same will in different ways, according to the variety of their subjec- tive and practical tendencies, turn to the various divinities. The abstract and unifying character of Allah is consequently in