Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/48

 36 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

phenomena : isolation and freedom. The mere fact that an individual is in no sort of reciprocal relationship with other indi- viduals is, of course, not sociological, but it also does not fill out the entire concept of isolation. This concept rather, in so far as it is emphasized and is essentially significant, signifies by no means merely the absence of all society, but rather the existence of society in some way represented and afterward inhibited. Isolation receives its unequivocal positive meaning as long- distance effect of society whether as echo of past or anticipa- tion of future relationships ; whether as longing after society or as voluntary turning away from it. The isolated man has not the same characteristics as if he had been from the beginning the only inhabitant of the world ; but socialization, even if it is only that with the negative coefficient, determines his condition also. The whole joy and the whole bitterness of isolation are merely various reactions upon socially experienced influences. Either is a reciprocal effect from which the one member, after production of definite consequences, is really excluded and further lives and further works only ideally in the mind of the other member. In this connection there is decided significance in the well-known psychological fact that the feeling of loneliness seldom occurs so decidedly and importunately in actual physical isolation as when one is conscious of being a stranger and with- out attachments among many physically quite adjacent people for instance in a "society," 1 in the crowded streets of a great town. For the configuration of a group much depends upon whether it favors or even renders possible such loneliness within its limits. Close and intimate communities do not permit such intercellular vacuums in their structure. As we speak, however, of a social deficit, which is produced in fixed proportions to the societary conditions the anti-social phenomena of the miserable, the criminal, the suicides in like manner a given quantity and quality of societary life produces a certain number of temporarily or chronically solitary existences, which, to be sure, the statisti- cian cannot so exactly as in these other cases express in arith- metical terms. In another way isolation becomes sociologically

1 [With the connotations above indicated. TR.]