828 SOCIAL STRUCTURE 



piece of the soil, and a certain group of men who dwell in that 

 place and have intercourse with each other, although the place 

 itself grows with the number of its inhabitants, and although even 

 among these inhabitants there be, for instance, not one direct de- 

 scendant of those who occupied the place, say, a hundred years 

 ago. We may, it is true, take it to be the rule that at least a cer- 

 tain nucleus of direct descendants keeps alive through many gen- 

 erations a rule so much more certain if it is a large place, a whole 

 region, or even a country that we have in mind. Still we shall not 

 hold this to be a conditio sine qua non for acknowledging the vil- 

 lage or the city to be the same; it being in this respect much more 

 relevant that the nucleus of the place, of the "settlement," has 

 endured and has preserved itself through the ages. Now, since 

 place and region, air and climate, have a very considerable effect 

 upon the intelligence and sentiment of the inhabitants, and see- 

 ing that a considerable change may not justly be expected with 

 respect to this, except when the minds as well as the external con- 

 ditions of the newcomers are totally different from those of the 

 older strata, we may consider the identity of a place, in so far as 

 it is founded upon the social connection of men with a part of the 

 soil, as a psychological identity, and call this aspect of social life 

 a psychological aspect. There can be no doubt that this psycho- 

 logical aspect is in great part dependent upon the biological aspect, 

 and is, as a rule, closely interwoven with it. Yet it needs but little 

 reflection to recognize that both are also to a certain extent sep- 

 arate and independent of each other. The subject-matter of a 

 social psychology is different from the subject-matter of a social 

 biology, though there exist a great many points of contact be- 

 tween them, and though both, apart from the foundations here 

 given to them, may be applied to animal as well as to human 

 societies. 



;/'; \^t; 



II 



Neither of the above-mentioned conceptions of a continuous 

 unity or whole implies that the essential characteristic of the unity 

 is perceived and recognized by those who belong to it, much less 

 that it is perceived by others, by outsiders. And this is the third 

 idea, by far the most important one for the present consideration 

 the idea of what I purpose to designate by the name of a cor- 

 poration, including under it all social units whatever, in so far as 

 they have this trait in common, that the mode of existence of the 

 unity or whole itself is founded upon the consciousness of its ex- 

 istence, and consequently that it perpetuates itself by the concep- 

 tion of its reality being transmitted from one generation to the 



