Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/365

 THE SOCIAL WILL 349

And an exposure not unlike his belongs also to each of any two opposed social classes. To recall a metaphor already used here in a narrower sense, each of the two is the day of the other's night, or each is the antipodes of the other, and such a relation- ship surely makes them more than mere external opponents. Anyone who has read history, and studied particularly the great revolutions of history or the great party strifes, knows how double opponents always are, or how if I may change the metaphor, but not the sense each has its enemy as truly at its back as in the open field in front. In general history, as in per- sonal experience, it has often taken an opponent to develop in man and reveal to his consciousness the best or the worst that lies within himself. Once more, then, opposition, or the division which it implies, can be no discordant thing in society; on the contrary, it is an inner condition of the real unity, of the will, and, we can safely add, of the self-consciousness of society.

Opposition, furthermore, is positively social in its function because the conduct of it from sheer necessity must be through acts of adaptation. Cases of opposing parties virtually, if not openly, changing sides, their mutual adaptations being so emi- nently successful, are not so fanciful as might be imagined. To say no more, everyone has doubtless heard of the good man, a Presbyterian in religion, who married a Unitarian. The two loved each other ; they loved their religion ; they loved argu- ment; and they died happily each in the other's faith. And theirs was near to being an ideal social life. Through contro- versies, whether verbal or outwardly enacted, society, by virtue of the mutual adaptation of its parts, comes to recognize, and so to develop, the manifold possibilities that its life contains.

But no fact can be more suggestive of the presence of a really social will in the activity even of opponents than the very familiar fact that contemporarily with the progress of their con- flict, whether they be the individual and his competing fellows or two warring classes or peoples, a regulative, but at the same time always changing, law is formulated, and by each side recog- nized and followed. Or, conversely, law that is, natural law, as mediating between man and nature, or human law as mediating