Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/366

 350 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

between man and man, or even divine law as mediating between man and God is very far from being the lifeless, wholly objective thing that it is sometimes imagined ; it is, instead, a sort of poise of opposing interests, a modus vivendi, a sign and a program of an unstable equilibrium or of armed neutrality; in fine, the terms of an agreement to differ between contesting wills or powers. A law of any sort may be dead on paper, but, as a law in the consciousness of men, it is quick with the thrusts and counter- thrusts of strife. Every struggle must have its arena. Through the candle-flame, fixed and defined as it appears to be, there is ever passing in and out, out and in, the action and the reaction of what one has called the war of the combustible and the incombustible, and the law is a light of the same sort. In the law, then, as thus a vital incident of conflict, as an agreement to differ, or as the constant light that marks at once the poise and the interaction of opponents, we have a witness, not only to the fact, but also to the nature, of the social will, and, above all, to the division of society as a condition of the unity and the will of society.

But here we must pass to the second assertion about the social will, namely, that the social will has and must have for its constant business only the actual social life, and that to this end it is and must be one with that life, not in any way outside of it or peculiar to any isolated part of it. Like will in general, the social will is not to be "taken for the deed." Like will in gen- eral, the social will is adaptive activity that is at once con- scious of its meaning and constrained by its consciousness ; and because, as has been shown, even opponents are parties to each other's activity and to each other's consciousness, and so are the co-operating agents of a single life, the social will can reside only in this life as a whole, and it must reside there being impossible as resident either in anything outside or in any special indi- vidual or class of individuals within. Briefly, whatever society does, or, rather, whatever is doing in society, society wills, and recognizes itself responsible for, and emphatically the will and responsibility belong to all. In the same sense that the personal individual is responsible for whatever he has found to be pos-