Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/38

26 tribute in general just as the term "hundred" came to have the meaning of subdivision in general. That the quantitative relation, which is quite as much the essence of a tax as of the social division, has obtained dominance psychologically over its peculiarity of content, appears most decisively in the circumstance that the original numerical limitation crystallizes into a designation of all modifications of the relation.

3. The numerical definiteness as form of organization assumes within the social development a typical function. The numerical method of division appears historically as a substitute for the class principle. It appears that in many places the groups consisted at first of subgroups held together by ties of blood, each of which constituted a unity in economic, penal, political, and other respects. That this internally very well-grounded organization was displaced by the melting together of ten or a hundred men for corresponding undertakings in common, must at first appear as a miraculous externalization, a schematization utterly lacking in essential life. We should look in vain in the immanent cohesive principles of this group for a justification of a change from the form with organic roots to this mechanical and formalistic order. The ground for it is rather to be found only in the whole which is composed of such subdivisions, and which makes demands that are independent in contrast with the life-principles of its parts. In the degree in which the whole as a unity is richer in content and more energetic, do the parts lose, at least at the outset and below the highest stage of development, their peculiar significance. They surrender the sense which they possess in and for themselves to the whole, and they are now the more useful the less a self-sufficient idea lives in each of them, and the more they as characterless parts receive back a position and significance only through their contribution to the whole. This is a universal tendency of social development, which makes itself manifest in the case of the modern soldier as contrasted with the knight of the Middle Ages, the factory laborer contrasted with the hand-worker, and every member of the present national and international organization as contrasted with the more or less autonomous domestic and natural