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pleteness, which is by no means always in point, confronts a group that is, the question whether all elements to which its principle extends are also actually included in it—then the consequences of this completeness must be carefully distinguished from those consequences which follow from its size alone. To be sure, the group will also be larger if it is complete than if it is incomplete; but not this association as a quantity, but the problem dependent immediately upon that, viz., whether with that quantity the group fills out therewith a prescribed scheme, may be so important for the group that, as in the case of labor coalitions, the disadvantages in cohesion and unity, following from mere increase of numbers, may stand in direct antagonism and counterpoise with the advantages of increasing completeness.

In general we may, in a very essential degree, explain the structures which are peculiar to large communities, as such, from the fact that they produce with these structures a substitute for the personal and immediate cohesion which is peculiar to the smaller circles. In the case of the large group, the question is one of correlating centers which are channels and mediators of the reciprocal action of the elements, and which thus operate as independent bearers of the societary unity, after this is no longer produced by immediate relationship of person to person. For this purpose magistracies and representatives grow up, laws and symbols of the group-life, organizations and social generalizations. At this point I have only to emphasize their connection with the numerical point of view. They all occur purely and maturely, so far as the main point is concerned, only in large circles, i. e., as the abstract form of group-dependence, whose concrete form can no longer exist after a certain extension of the community has been reached. Their utility, ramifying into a thousand social qualities, rests in the last analysis upon numerical presuppositions. The character of the superpersonal and objective with which such incorporations of the group-energies face the individual is derived directly from the multiplicity of the variously operative individual elements; for only through their multiplicity is the individual element in them paralyzed, and from the same cause the universal mounts to such a distance

from the individual that it appears as something existing entirely by itself, not needing the individual, and possibly even antagonistic to the individual-somewhat as the concept, which, composed of singular and various phenomena of the common, is the higher above every one of these details, the more it includes; so that precisely the universal ideas which rule the greatest circumference of particulars-the abstractions with which metaphysics reckons―attain a life apart, whose norms and developments are often alien, or hostile, to those of the tangible particulars. The great group thus gains its unity—as it expresses itself in its organs and in its law, in its political ideas and in its ideals-only at the price of a wide distance of all those structures from the individual, his views and needs, which find immediate activity and consideration in the social life of a small circle. From this relation there arises the typical difficulty of organizations in which a series of minor combinations are included within a larger one; viz., the fact is that the situations can be readily seen, and treated with interest and care, only close at hand; while, on the contrary, only from the distance which the central position holds can a just and regular relation of all the details to each other be established. This is a discrepancy which, for example, always emerges in the treatment of poverty, in the organization of labor, and in educational administration. The relationships of person to person, which constitute the lifeprinciple of smaller circles, are not easily compatible with the distance and coolness of the objective-abstract norms without which the great group cannot exist.

The unity and the correlating form of the great group, as contrasted with its elements and their primary socializations, come into existence only through negations. Social actions and regulations evolve in many ways the character of negativity in the degree of their numerical inclusiveness. In the case of mass actions, the motives of individuals are often so different that their unification is possible in the degree in which their content is merely negative and destructive. The unrest which leads to great revolutions is always nursed from so many, and often directly opposing, sources that their focalization upon a positive

aim would be impossible. The erection of the latter is usually the task then of the smaller circles, and of the energy of individuals who separate from each other in countless private undertakings, while these individuals united in a mass have worked in sweeping and destructive fashion. The same trend appears in the results of wide appeals to popular suffrage, which are so often, and almost incomprehensively, negative. For example, in Switzerland in the year 1900 a law with reference to sickness and accident insurance within the federation was summarily rejected by the referendum, after it had been unanimously adopted by both representative bodies, the Nationalrat and the Ständerat. The same has usually been the fate of most measures subject to the referendum. Rejection is the simplest action, and consequently great masses can combine in it. The positive standpoints of the separate groups from which this law was rejected were extremely various; they were particularistic and ultramontane, agrarian and capitalistic, technical and partisan; and consequently nothing could be common to them but negation. On that account, to be sure, in case many small circles agree at least in negative provisions, this may, on the contrary, indicate or prepare their unity. It has been observed that, while the Greeks exhibited wide culture-differences among themselves, yet even when we compare the Arcadian and the Athenian with the contemporary Carthaginians or Egyptians, Persians or Thracians, they still had many sorts of negative characteristics in common. Nowhere in historic Greece were there human sacrifices, or intentional mutilations; nowhere polygamy, or the sale of children into slavery; nowhere unlimited subjection to a single person. With all the positive differences, this common possession of the merely negative must necessarily have made the persons contained in such a community conscious that they belonged together, in a culture area extending beyond the boundaries of the single state.

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The negative character of the bond which area into a unit appears primarily in its norms. for by the phenomenon that, other things being equal, combining determinations of every sort must be the more simple and

the less comprehensive, the larger the circumference of their application. Illustrations might extend from the rules of "international courtesy," which are much fewer in number than those to be observed in every narrower circle; to the fact that the individual states of the German empire have, as a rule, a less comprehensive constitution the larger they are. Expressed in the form of a theorem: With increasing extent of the circle, the common elements which bind each with each into the social unity are decreasingly circumstantial. It is consequently (although at first paradoxical) possible to hold a great circle together with a smaller minimum of norms than would be required for a small circle. Of course, the aggregate of norms will be greater in the former than in the latter, but it consists of the special norms of the subdivisions of the circle, whereas the circle as a totality makes up for its size by deficit of many generally applicable norms. In qualitative respects, moreover, the modes of conduct which a community, in order to exist as such, must demand of its members are usually the more prohibitive and limiting in nature as extension increases. The positive combinations which, proceeding from element to element, give the group-life its proper content must at last be left to the individuals. The manifoldness of the persons, the interests, the occurrences, becomes too great to be regulated from one center. To this center, therefore, there is left only the prohibitive function, the determination of those things which under no circumstances may be done; the bounding of freedom rather than the direction of it—wherewith, of course, is meant only the trend of a development which is perpetually crossed and turned aside by other tendencies. Thus, where a great number of divergent circles of religious feeling or interest are to be composed into a unity. For example, from the decline of Arabian polytheism Allah arose as the universal concept, so to speak, of God in general. Polytheism produces necessarily a cleavage of the area included within the faith, because the components of the same will in different ways, according to the variety of their subjective and practical tendencies, turn to the various divinities. The abstract and unifying character of Allah is consequently in

the first instance of a negative sort. It is his original nature "to restrain from the evil," not, however, to incite to the good. He is only the "restrainer." The Hebrew God, who, in contrast with separatistic polytheism, and quite unsocial monism, like that of India, brought into being or expressed a unification of the religio-social synthesis unknown to antiquity, gives his most sharply emphasized practical norms in the form, "Thou shalt not." In the German empire the positive relations of life which are subject to the civil law did not find their unifying form in the civil statute book until about thirty years after the founding of the empire. On the other hand, the penal statute book, with its prohibitive regulations, was brought together, and to that extent made the empire a unity, in 1872. That which especially fits prohibitions to generalize smaller circles into a larger one is the circumstances that the counterpart of the forbidden is by no means always the forbidden, but often only the allowed. Thus, if in the circle A no a may occur, but B, y, 8; in B no B, but a, y, 8; in C no y, but a, ß, d, etc., the unified structure may be formed from A, B, and C, upon the prohibition of a, B, y. The unity is only possible if in A ẞ and y are not forbidden, but merely allowed, so that it also may be omitted. If, instead of that, B and y are as positively forbidden as is a, and correspondingly in B and C, the consequence would be that no unit could be created which included all the positive grouplimitations, because then there would always be on the one side direct prescription of that which on the other side is directly forbidden. The same is the case in the following example: From ancient times the eating of a given species of animal was forbidden to every Egyptian, namely, that species which was sacred to his own village. The doctrine that holiness demands abstinence from all animal food arose then as the result of the amalgamation of a collection of local cults into a national religion, at the head of which stood a priesthood ruling as a unit. This unification could occur only through the synthesis or universalization of all those prohibitions; for, if the eating of all animals, which was allowed in every village (that is, which also could be abstained from), had been positively commanded,

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