Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/616

 596 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

manifesting the seven groups or classes of social properties in such a manner that these factors and properties are united among themselves by means of their special combination and reciprocal dissolution. Further, each social aggregate has another organic characteristic a characteristic which it has in common with living bodies namely, the possession of a structure, a special arrangement adapted to the general use ; hence, also a correlated order, with mediate and immediate continuity of the particular organs or institutions which unite in the structure of the ensemble of the societies.

In fact, the amorphous social aggregate that is to say, a social aggregate without structure does not exist. Every society, large or small, the simplest that can be found, has at least that gen- eral structure of the whole which consists in the formation of a mass of which the factors are multiple, and of which the ele- ments and properties, derived from the combination of these factors, are arranged and united into a whole, which is at least partly distinct from the environment that surrounds and unites the factors in life and in death. We shall see later that another organic characteristic of every society consists in its being separated from others and from the external environment by a boundary.

The simplest, most general structure of societies may, then, be represented as an aggregate composed of heterogeneous fac- tors, land and population, functioning in a homogeneous manner, and organized merely to this extent, that the many parts are directly or indirectly united to each other and to the whole, and are contained within limits.

If the last condition is disregarded, the social aggregate, considered solely from the point of view of the mass, may then be defined from the static point of view, viz., every combination of land and population whose parts are united together into a structure of the whole, the dissolution of the parts involving the dissolution of the structure and vice versa; the same being true in regard to their transformation. The simplest structure thus constituted internally in a homogeneous fashion maintains itself in equilibrium, first, by its peculiar structure ; second, by