Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/362

346 duel; in short, it must be the mediation of real and always active, sometimes very active, differences; and to deny to society the vitality that this gives would be to make the social life as empty and unreal as that of souls at church without competitive worldly interests and without clothes, or as attendance upon an exhibition of pictures with all the lights off. The social life, if real, whether as consciousness or as will, needs the mutual resistance as well as the mutual dependence, the rivalry as well as the sympathy, of individuals.

Then, what is the unity of society? What is that unity of the life of society that was even emphatically insisted upon but a few moments ago? To some I shall seem to have destroyed it. It is, however, in the activity, the life itself. Unity as static and unity as dynamic are two very different conceptions, and the former I do not myself find even thinkable. Unity is a spirit, not a material being; a principle, not a thing; a force, not a status. Make it material, make it thing or status, and what would become of the unity of human history or the unity of life today? Make the unity of life a certain status, capable of reduction to a certain fixed creed or formula, and you at once deny the life. So, instead of destroying social unity by retaining the differences of individuals and making them intrinsic to it, we are really turning the tables upon those who would identify it with some particular form or condition of life, for they become the real destroyers. Once more, then, unity cannot be fixed and static, it must be dynamic; in society it cannot be one person or being or one life among others, be this sent from heaven or not sent from heaven, the vice-regent or not the vice-regent of deity; rather it must be the tension or relating force in the adaptive activities of all; and in other things, too, besides society—in the solar system, or the human body, or a table—unity is of the same character—a force or principle, not a special motion, not a special organ, not a special part.

And in this nature of the unity of society we must see, if indeed we have not already seen, the nature of the social will. The will of society, neither common nor aggregate, is, or dwells in, the conscious adaptive activities of individuals, where in every