oys the conception of
social distance in his statement of the stranger as the combination of
the near and the far. It is interesting and significant to determine the
different types of the union of intimacy and externality in the
relations of teacher and student, physician and patient, minister and
layman, lawyer and client, social worker and applicant for relief.

A complete analysis of the bearing upon personal and cultural life of
changes from a society based upon contacts of continuity and of primary
relations to a society of increasing mobility organized around secondary
contacts cannot be given here. Certain of the most obvious contrasts of
the transition may, however, be stated. Increasing mobility of persons
in society almost inevitably leads to change and therefore to loss of
continuity. In primary groups, where social life moves slowly, there is
a greater sense of continuity than in secondary groups where it moves
rapidly.

There is a further contrast if not conflict between direct and intimate
contacts and contacts based upon communication of ideas. All sense of
values, as Windelband has pointed out,[119] rests upon concrete
experience, that is to say upon sense contacts. Society, to the extent
that it is organized about secondary contacts, is based upon
abstractions, upon science and technique. Secondary contacts of this
type have only secondary values because they represent means rather than
ends. Just as all behavior arises in sense impressions it must also
terminate in sense impressions to realize its ends and attain its
values. The effect of life in a society based on secondary contacts is
to build up between the impulse and its end a world of means, to project
values into the future, and to direct life toward the realization of
distant hopes.

The ultimate effect upon the individual as he becomes accommodated to
secondary society is to find a substitute expression for his primary
response in the artificial physical environment of the city. The
detachment of the person from intimate, direct, and spontaneous contacts
with social reality is in large measure responsible for the intricate
maze of problems of urban life.

The change from concrete and personal to abstract and impersonal
relations in economic and social life began with the Industrial
Revolution. The machine is the symbol of the monotonous routine of
impersonal, unskilled, large-scale production just as the hand tool is
the token of the int