For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness.
Secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transition stadium between being and not-being.
Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release.
Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor.
The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members.
In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief.