THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP 211
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he know his customers and the more is his interest exclusively
directed toward the price that he can make them
pay. The more impersonal his relations are with the consumers,
the more are his efforts directed toward the purely
financial results of his labor. Apart from the widest spheres
for which the work can be done only with labor that derives
its stimulus from an abstract idealism, the worker
will put less of his own person into his work and have less
of an ethical interest in it in proportion as the relation to
his customers becomes less intimate. With the expansion
of the group for which he works, he becomes more indifferent
about his personal relations to that group, and there
disappear a great many factors which might counterbalance
his individual economic egoism.
It seems that human nature and human relationships
are so constituted that the individual must rely on himself
and is thrown back on his own resources if his relationships
surpass a certain number. This holds not only for the
quantitative extension of the circle, which must necessarily
reduce the personal interest of the individual in each point
of the circle. It holds also for the qualitatively increasing
manifoldness within the circle, which also prevents the personal
interest from attaching itself to one point. This mutual
paralyzation of conflicting demands on the social sympathy
leaves the individual egoism as sole survivor in the
field. It is, however, an exceptional case, which occurs
only if the group surpasses a certain limit.!
It will be sufficiently evident from the foregoing examples
that the correlation between individual differentiation
and sociological expansion is manifest in countless social
situations. The relationships which it synthesizes may be
found coexisting, in sequence, or alternating; but these are
but minor variations of the same fundamental correlation.
! Soz., pp. 746-59.
