Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/43

 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP 3*

stratum resemble each other the more as totalities the larger they are, however manifold their personal variations may be ; on the other hand, special minor centers of common conversation, temper, interest, which, however, incessantly interchange their members. There thus occurs that incessant variation of attach- ment and detachment in the large society which, according to the nature of the persons concerned, affects one now as the most intolerable superficiality and again as a rhythmic play of the highest aesthetic charm. The ball, with the modern form of dance, exhibits this formal sociological type in a quite distinct example : a momentary and quite wonderfully close relationship of each single pair, modified into a quite new formation through constant changes among the pairs ; this physical contiguity between persons quite strange to each other, on the one side, made possible by the fact that they are all guests of a single host who, however loose the relationship to himself maybe, affords a certain reciprocal security and legitimation ; on the other hand, through the unpersonal and, so to speak, anonymous character of the relationship which the size of the society and the formality of behavior joined with it, produce. Evidently these traits of the large "society" which the ball presents at once in a subli- mated form and perhaps in caricature, are attached to a definite minimum number of participants ; and we may often make the most interesting observation that an intimate circle of a few persons attains the character of a "society" through the appear- ance of a single additional person.

In a case which, to be sure, concerns a much less complicated quality, the number which produces a definite sociological uni- tary structure is somewhat more firmly fixed. The patriarchal domestic family numbers, in the most various regions, always twenty to thirty heads, and that, too, under quite dissimi- lar economic conditions, so that these cannot, or at least can- not exclusively, occasion the numerical equality. It is rather probable that the inner reciprocities which constitute the special structure of the domestic family produce the proportions of closeness and extension demanded for this structure only within just these boundaries. The patriarchal family has been every-