160 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
while there is not an equally significant difference between it and the union resulting in two or more children. To be sure, the difference in its essential nature which the second child pro- duces is again much greater than that springing from the arrival of the third. But this simply follows the above rule ; for a family with one child is still, in many respects, a relationship between two members ; namely, the parents as a unity, on the one hand, the child on the other. The second child is then in fact not merely a fourth, but, sociologically considered, at the same time also a third member in a relationship, and it exerts the peculiar influences of such third members ; for within the family, so soon as the actual age of minority is passed, the par- ents constitute much more frequently a working unity than do the children as a totality.
Furthermore, in the realm of the forms of marriage the decisive difference is whether, on the one hand, monogamy pre- vails, or, on the other, the man has a second wife. If the latter is the case, the third or the twentieth wife is relatively without significance for the structure of the union. Within the bound- aries of such a structure, the step to the second wife is here also, at least in one direction, richer in consequences than that to a still larger number, for precisely the duality of wives may give occasion, in the life of the man, to the sharpest conflicts and profoundest perplexities, which, in general, do not arise in the case of each higher number. For in the latter instance such a fundamental declassing and deindividualizing of the wives is involved, there is so decided reduction of the relationship to its sensuous basis (since every more spiritual union is always of a more individual nature), that in general it cannot lead to those profounder disturbances for the man which may flow directly and only from a dual relationship.
It is the same fundamental motive which reappears in the assertion of Voltaire about the utility of religious anarchy ; that is, two rival sects within a state produce, unavoidably, disturb- ances and difficulties such as never could arise in the case of two hundred. The meaning which the dualism of the one ele- ment in a combination of several members possesses, is, of course,
