here manifested itself, not in the performance of miracles, but in a constant engenderment of new motives out of the interaction of existing motives with changing external conditions of life. In consequence of this constant change of motives and of existing conditions, even totemic culture made numerous attempts in the direction of political organization. Such steps were taken particularly by the semi-cultural peoples of America, who possess a relatively high civilization. It is precisely in the case of these peoples that it is instructive to notice the contrast between this political tendency and the original tribal organization. The difference between the two fundamental forms of society, the totemic and the political, is most strikingly evident in the case of their most external characteristic--namely, in the _numbers_ according to which society as a whole, as well as in its parts, is organized and divided. These numbers are the expression of inner motives; hence they form a basis from which we may draw conclusions concerning the latter. In the case of totemic tribal organization, these motives are apparently very simple; natural expansion over a broader territory leads to separation into groups, and this of itself gives rise to the customary division into two, four, and eight parts. How different and more complicated from its very beginnings is the organization of political society! Here also the development proceeds according to law, and yet there is not a constant recurrence of the same motive as is in the case of totemic tribal organization. On the contrary, we find a continuous fluctation between contradictory phenomena, and the frequent appearance of new motives. Early, and still partly legendary, tradition tells us of an organization of society on the basis of the number _twelve_. This mode of organization seems to have emanated from the Babylonians. They were the people who first attempted to govern human affairs in accordance with celestial phenomena. These they observed, not in the unsystematic, imaginative, mythological manner of the natural peoples of Polynesia and America, but with the aid of astronomical instruments. True, the science of the Babylonians was also still based on mythological foundations. These mythological features, however, were combined with the idea of an all-embracing, divine rule of law. The endeavour to find this law and order in the starry sky, the greatest and most sublime sight that the human eye may behold, resulted in observations that were scientific and exact. Thus, the union of the two ideas led with a sort of inner necessity to the acceptance of the number twelve as a norm. The application of this norm to human relations was a direct result of the belief that it was of divine origin. The Babylonian calendar, whose fundamental principles, in spite of numerous reforms, have retained their authority even down to the present, was the first to emphasize the principle of