The number becomes independent even of its arithmetic content: all it indicates is that the relation of the members to the whole is numerical; the number, which has become stable, represents this relation. To consist of a hundred elements remains, as it were, the idea of the subdivision, while empirical conditions reflect this idea only imperfectly. It has been said of the Germanic Hundreds that they were supposed to express only an indeterminate number somewhere between the single individual and the whole society; and, in fact, this very clearly describes the sociological phenomenon discussed here. The life of the group requires some medium between the One and the All, an agent of certain functions that neither the individual nor the totality can carry out, and the group designated for this task is called after its numerical determination.

DEFINE: Explains how a number like a Hundred serves not as accurate arithmetic but as a symbolic medium for intermediate group structures between individual and society.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simm…, loc. 3425