Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/64

 I come back, herewith, to the starting point of this discussion. Enmities and strifes are, in their significance for the self-preservation of the group, the characteristic examples for the value which variability of group life, change of its forms of activity, possess for this purpose. For, although antagonism, in general, never entirely and universally dies out, yet it accords with its nature to build only a spatially and temporally limited section between the operations of the forces that make for coherence and unified harmony. In its peculiar nature, antagonism presents one of those contrast-stimuli, evidently demanded by the innermost needs of the unifying social bond, because there, as elsewhere, the permanent can emerge and come to conscious force only as a function of the changeable. Social unity is the abiding form, or element, or whatever we may call it, which asserts itself as the substantial in all changes of its peculiar, special shape, its content, its relations to the social interests and destinies; and asserts itself the more, the livelier the change of these factors. The depth (Vertiefung), intensiveness (Festigkeit), and unity of the marriage relationship, for example, is surely, ceteris paribus, a function of the manifoldness and changeableness of the destinies, the experience of which stands out in distinction from the unchangeability of the matrimonial communion.

It is the essence of the human that the condition of the existence of its separate factors is the existence of their opposites. The manifoldness of formations, of changes, of contents, is so essential for the self-preservation of the group, not only because in each limited period the unity of the group stands out in contrast with the passing variations, but especially because the unity always recurs as the same, while the formations, the changes, the contents, from which it is distinguished are each time different. It therefore gains thereby, as against all interruptions, those chances of confirmation and effectiveness which truth possesses over error. Little as the truth, in and of itself, in the isolated case, possesses an advantage, or a mystic power of prevalence, over error, yet its ultimate victory is probable for the reason that truth is only one, while errors about the same subject are