Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/49

 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP 37

significant, so soon as it ceases to consist in a relationship which is a play within an individual between himself and another definite group, or group-life in general ; but is rather a pause or a periodic differentiation within one and the same relationship. This is important in relationships which from their fundamental idea are aimed at permanent negation of isolation, as in the chief instance of monogamous marriage. So far as in the struc- ture of this relation the finest subjective shadings express them- selves, there is an essential difference whether man and wife, with the complete happiness of life in common, have still pre- served for themselves the pleasure in isolation, or whether their relation is never interrupted by devotion to solitude either because the habit of being together has taken from solitude its charm, or because an absence of essential assurance of love makes such interruptions feared as dangers or as infidelities. Thus isolation, apparently confined to a single person, consisting in the negation of sociality, is really a phenomenon of very posi- tive sociological significance ; not merely from the side of the agent, in whom it presents, as a conscious affection, an entirely determinate relation to society, but also through the decisive characteristic which its occurrence, both as cause and as effect, lends to large groups as well as to the most intimate relationships. Freedom, too, has among its many sociological meanings a phase which belongs in this connection. Freedom, too, appears in the first place as a mere negation of societary constraint, for every constraint is a restraint. The free man does not constitute a unity in connection with others, but he is such a unity of him- self. Now, there may be a freedom which consists in this mere absence of relationships, in the mere absence of every limitation through other beings : a Christian or an Indian eremite, a soli- tary settler in the German or the American forests, may enjoy a freedom in the sense that his existence is entirely filled out with other than social contents; in the same way a collective structure, a house-community or a civic body, which exists in a completely insular way, without neighbors and without correlation with other structures. For a being, however, that is in correlation with others, freedom has a much more positive significance. It is a