THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 377
about every community that has not forfeited its birthright in the human family. Our generation is a parliament of timeless persons of whom we, the living, are the least. By the fiction of death those are supposed to be absent who actually hold the balance of power. This immortality of personal influence is mediated within and through association. Social effects vary in visible force with the character and constancy of the associations which are their vehicles. The fortuitous association of the matinee audience merely scatters a few impressions that are presently diffused beyond trace in the multitude. The associa- tion that maintains certain forms of religious worship at a given point may for generations affect the community with a philoso- phy of life radically opposed to the conception prevalent in the population at large. The State may so extend the time-con- sciousness of the citizens that the now of their thought may include many centuries of national life.
In this incident we have another of those insights into the social process which are symbolized by that pregnant phrase "the organic concept." The implications of this detail are too extensive even for preliminary suggestion within our present limits. It must suffice merely to reserve for the item of " con- tinuity" its proper place in social analysis.
XVII. Mobility of type. Any change marks a difference of social type which consists of (a] reorganization of the constitu- ent parts of the association, or (^) redistribution of power among the different elements of the association, or (^) shifting of the prevailing principles in the association, or [d] substitution of qualitatively different aims of the association. The social state, that is, the fact of human beings in contact with each other, is inseparable from constant procession of these changes. They are going on while men wake or sleep. If men imagine that social order is fixed, they deceive themselves. If they imagine that by taking thought they can arrest variation of balance and of type, they show their ignorance of the terms with which they theorize. The very opposition of a person or a group to a social tendency is in itself an accomplished change of greater or less importance in the equilibrium or type of the group in which the effort occurs.
