Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/421

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spheres, is that of rival parties that come together for the purpose of choosing an arbiter, and very properly fix their choice upon one who is standing completely apart from both. The more the latter is the case the more willingly will both submit to his decision. It is to be kept in mind as decisive in this case that the contending parties must be coördinate, if the type is to appear in its purity. If there already rules between them any sort of superiority and inferiority, this will all too easily create a special connection of the judge with the one party, and to that extent non-partisanship will be destroyed. Even when the referee is quite removed from either contestant’s circle of specific interests, he will often nevertheless bring to his judgment a prejudice in favor of the superior, in many cases also in favor of the inferior. From the other point of view the nomination of an unpartisan arbiter is, for the reason just mentioned, a sign that the contestants concede to each other a certain coördination. Thus when in England at the present time, in the case of conflicts between laborers and employees, arbitrations frequently occur, an incident of which is mutual agreement to submit to a non-partisan—who must be neither laborer nor employer—it is evident that only recognized coördination between the contestants could induce the employers to give up participation of their own class in the arbitration, and to admit a wholly outside party.

Accordingly a further example, altogether different in material, may teach us that the common relation of many elements to a superior, whatever be the contained differences, the more certainly presupposes or produces coördination among their elements, the higher the superior power stands above them. To specify:—it is obviously very weighty for the socializing significance of the religion of wide circles that the Divinity is to be found at a certain distance from the believers. The immediate local proximity, so to speak, to the devotees, which is presumed in the case of the divine principles of all totemistic or fetichistic religions, and of the God of the ancient Jews as well, makes these religions entirely unfit to control wide areas. The