Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/42

 30 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

same degree, however, in which the quantity of the elements affords to the higher, more individual psychic factors no more room, the effort must be made to atone for this lack of the former sort of charm by enhancement of the external and the sensible. Between multiplicity of persons meeting together for festive purposes, and the luxury, the mere sensuous satisfaction of their meeting, there has always been the closest connection. At the end of the Middle Ages, for example, luxury at weddings increased so much, merely in the matter of the number of attend- ants who accompanied the bridal pair to the baths taken on these occasions, that the authorities often precisely ordained, in their sumptuary laws, what might be the maximum number of persons constituting this escort. If eating and drinking have always been the combining agencies of great companies, for which otherwise a unifying interest and consensus would have been difficult to reach, so must now a " society," purely on account of its quantitative factor, which excludes community and reciprocity of the finer and more spiritual concords, the more strongly emphasize these pleasures which are sensual, and on that account with greater certainty to be shared in by all.

A further characteristic of the " society," on the ground of its numerical difference, in contrast with the congregation of a few, consists in the fact that a complete unification of tone, which in the latter case is possible, neither can nor should be possible in the former ; that, on the other hand, for a further difference, the construction of partial groups is easily possible. The life-principle of a friendly coexistence of a few persons abruptly opposes division into two separate mental attitudes, and even separate conversations. The "society" is at that moment present in which, instead of its absolutely single center, a duality emerges : on the one hand, a general, but only quite loose, centrality, which in essence is only externally and even spatially founded, whence, therefore, societies of like social

operate in the direction of socialization, if a unity is to be attained through division of labor something which, however, is evidently only in a slight degree possible within a " society." It is, therefore, sociologically, a perfectly correct instinct which causes us to regard the thrusting into prominence of the personal individuality in a " society," even if the personality be in itself significant and pleasing, as tactlessness.