ABSTRACT
First we must note that communal Hfe is not confined within those associational moulds which answer to specific types of common interest. The life of community encompasses those forms and as it were clothes with living flesh and blood that associational skeleton. When, therefore, we have shown how associations are coordinated, we shall not have revealed the whole unity of community. We shall have shown merely the structure of its framework. To understand the whole reality of community we must keep in mind also the endless unformulated relations into which men enter, relations of infinite variety and of every degree of complexity, by
whose means every man is brought into nearer or remoter contact with every other, joined in a solidarity and interdependence which none can ever fully estimate. This important truth has been well expressed by Simmel in the following passage :
"Men regard one another, and men are jealous one of another; they write one another letters or dine together; they meet in sympathy or ahtipathy quite apart from all tangible interests; their gratitude for altruistic service weaves a chain of consequences never to be sundered; they ask the way of one another and they dress and adorn themselves for one another ;-these are fnstances chosen quite at random from the thousand relations momentary or lasting, conscious or unconscious, transitory or fraught with consequences, which, playing from person to person, knit us incessantly ~ogether. Every moment such threads are spun, are dropped and again caught up, replaced by others, woven up with others. These ,a,re the reciprocities between the atoms of society, reciprocities that only the piercing vision of psychology can investigate, which determine all the tenacity and elasticity, all the variegation and unity of this so intelligible and yet so mysterious life of society." (Soziologie, p. 19.)
Associations are the definite forms under which the more permanent and specific types of Rocial activity, of relation between will and will, are co-ordinated. They are as it were the various lines and figures standing out on the web of community. They form an integral pattern, as we shaH see, but the integrity of the pattern is as nothing to the integrity of the web. Community is the whole incalculable system of relations between wills; an association is the 'fYI'e-willed form under which a definite species of relation between wills is ordered. A university. for instance, is a definite organisation ordeJing the research and communication of knowledge. Men study and teach
association~, the industrial associations, the church, the State.
