Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/35

 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP 23

greatest to the least importance. This size is highly significant for the group. Nomadic stocks, for example, often have, in default of otherwise stable life-content, scarcely any other possibility of organizing themselves except in accordance with the number-principle. Its significance for a crowd upon the march controls even today the structure of armies. It persists naturally in the circumstance that often in the subdivision of a conquered or colonized or newly discovered land, where in the first instance there is a lack of real standards of organization, the principle of correlation, according to numerically equal divisions, has the first place ; for example, the oldest constitu- tion of Iceland is controlled in this way.

2. While we have up to this point been concerned with the numerical equality of different divisions, the number may be used further in order to characterize a single, and indeed lead- ing, circle of persons from within a total group. For example, it was in many cases the custom to designate the administrative group of the craft-organizations by their number : In Frankfort the heads of the wool-weavers were known as "The Six ; " among the bakers it was "The Eight;" in mediaeval Barcelona the senate was called "The One Hundred," etc. It is extremely noteworthy how precisely the most eminent personalities are designated by that which is in itself least distinguishing, which is completely indifferent to every qualification, namely, mere number. The presumption behind this fact seems to me to be that with a number, say with six, not six individual, isolated elements, simply standing side by side, are meant, but a synthe- sis of these. Six is not I and I and i, etc., but a new concept, which is realized by the concurrence of these elements, and not/n? rota in each of them for himself. In other connections we must designate the vital functional reciprocity of elements as their unity, which rises above their mere sum and in sociological antithesis with it. Here, however, in giving a name to a body of administrators, a committee, etc., by means of the mere sum, in reality that functional togetherness is in mind, and it is, as a name, possible only for the reason that the number in itself sig- nifies a unity formed of unities. In the case cited, The Six are