to permit themselves to be judged only by their peers that it becomes retroactive—they are afraid of lowering themselves to the level of others by permitting themselves to become the judges of the latter. This is drawing the logically fallacious, but for the psychological basis of social formation very significant conclusion, that since only our equals are to be judged by us, therefore everyone upon whom we pass a judicial verdict is to a certain degree our equal.
Just as in this case a relation of such definite inferiority as that of an accused to his judge may still be regarded as placing the two upon a certain level of equality, so on the contrary may equality be sometimes regarded as subordination. Sir Henry Maine once said that the principle of nationality, as it is often presented, appears to assert that men of one race suffer an invasion of their rights, if they are obliged to have political arrangements in common with men of another race. Thus if two different social characters are in consideration, A and B, A appears to be subordinated to B, so soon as a constitution is thought of for the former like that belonging to the latter; although this constitution may contain nothing which connotes such lower standing or subordination. Thus, in the case of the Lords just cited, subordination seemed coördination; here coördination seems to be subordination.
Finally there belongs under this rubric the very important observation that subordination under a somewhat remotely stationed personage seems to be most serviceable when the group itself consists of heterogeneous and dissimilar elements. In this case the members of a group that is subordinated to a superior personage are related to each other precisely as the particular representations, which go to make up a general conception, are related to each other. That is to say, this conception must be the higher and the more abstract, in other words it must stand at the greater distance from each particular representation, the more unlike each other these latter are, which the general conception must comprehend. The most familiar and typical case of this sort, which recurs with formal similarity in a thousand
