Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/40

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one ; inasmuch as the personality takes a place in an organiza- tion determined by number alone, its character as a member of the group has assumed complete mastery over its individually differentiated character. Whether the division into numerically equal subgroups is rough and in practice continually modified, as in the Hundreds of the Germans, the Peruvians, the Chinese ; or so refined, purposeful, and exact as in a modern army, in either case it betrays most clearly and pitilessly the existence for its own sake of the law of formation for the group, in one case as a newly emerging tendency which is in perpe.tual conflict and compromise with other tendencies, in another case an absolutely thoroughgoing application. That which is super- individual in the grouping, the complete assertion of the inde- pendence of its form, in contrast with every content of the individual life, exists nowhere in more absolute and emphatic shape than in the reduction of the organizing principles to purely arithmetical relationships ; and the degree of approach to this, as it in various ways appears in the most diverse groups, is at the same time the degree in which the group-idea, in its most abstract form, has absorbed the individuality of its factors. 4. Finally, in the following respect important sociological consequences attach themselves to numerical definiteness, although the effective quantities of the elements may be, according to the circumstances, quite varied. "Society," in the modern polite sense, furnishes a typical case. How many persons must be invited in order that a "society" may exist? 1 The qualitative relationships between host and guests manifestly do not decide the question. The invitation of two or three persons, who have a completely formal and essentially unrelated attitude toward us, does not bring a "society" into existence. On the other hand, the opposite is the case if we call together, say, the fifteen persons of our most intimate acquaintance. The number remains ever the decisive factor, although its size is naturally dependent, in special cases, upon the type and the

1 [With our somewhat generous vocabulary of specific terms for social functions of all degrees we lack a generic term for the concept " assemblage involving formality." We venture to press the symbol " society " into service. The author's meaning is plain from the context. TR.]