Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/364

 348 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

is, belongs to the unity, the dynamic unity, to the will of society.

No doubt, for all this talk about what offers resistance par- ticipating in the resisted activity, and about a divisible unity and about self-opposition, I shall get no thanks but that of the fly to the spider whose parlor was not more dangerous than my web of words. But the spider won finally by flattery, and, with the proper apologies for saying so, I mean to win too. These things to which I have given such uninviting names are really only mirrors in which all thinking people can see their own pet con- ceits. Thus the peculiar division of society which has been declared necessary to its unity shows itself in two quite familiar ways : first in the way of the single person standing in opposi- tion to his fellows; and, secondly, in the way of such general distinctions as good and bad, rich and poor, ruler and subject, religious and irreligious, civilized and uncivilized, conservative and radical, with which in each case distinct and opposed social classes are always associated ; and both of these ways of division are not only commonly recognized, but also commonly recog- nized as conditions of a really social life of a social life that is social without being dull or empty, and single and consistent without being finished and dead. Nor is either my meaning here, or what I take to be the general meaning, that the oppo- nents which these divisions make are parties to a social life only in a negative sense, that is to say, only as opponents ; on the contrary, in spite of or because of the opposition, they live not with but in each other, determining and liberating, and even adapting and adopting, each other's lives.

The single person, for example, however apart from his fel- lows nay, just for being apart from his fellows is but a reve- lation, a defined overt expression of something hidden, or at best only imperfectly known or expressed in their nature, if not in their positive activity; and, being this, he cannot but have a real share in their life as conscious and voluntary. He is openly, publicly, what in general they are privately; and, however unlike or hostile he may be or seem, his social function in no small part is the self-consciousness that he thus awakens among them.