Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/369

 THE SOCIAL WILL 353

each is of conflicts and adaptations, is but the development in will and consciousness of the single life that all have led and are leading. The social will, present in the conscious adaptive activities of all individuals and constraining them even when they are most at war, is at once the positive effort and the resist- ance of this development ; in short, the expression and mainte- nance of the dynamic and divided unity of society.

If someone still insists, after the habit of many, that time and again the stress of special circumstances, for example in the case of great national danger, has brought out what seems unequivocally to be a group-will single and undivided, it is only necessary to say that this is perhaps creditably sentimental, but, like most sentiment, also almost inexcusably blind. E pluribus unum; in unity is strength ; and other things equally stirring ; but, as a matter of simple fact, which sometimes sentiment and sometimes distance conceals, stress of circumstances never involves either foreign or civil disruption without involving the other. In a foreign war attention may be proudly fixed upon the war itself, the people even wilfully shutting their eyes to the rising issues at home ; but the double danger is not less real on that account, and at least the recent history of England or the United States suggests in an emphatic way that the very zeal of a war, to say nothing of its prior causes or of its effects, depends in no small measure on internal divisions. Moreover, any stress of circumstances involves also a more strenuous division of labor, and this, of course, is never free from jealous competition. So, conclusively, that "group-will single and undivided" must be set down as possibly a useful superstition in some quarters, say among politicians, who have a cause to uphold, or among propa- gandists of any sort with a thesis to defend, but as not even presentable among those whose concern is with real things. The most and best that can be said for it is that it stands for a real aspect of the social will ; but any aspect, however real what it stands for may be, if taken abstractly cannot be literally real itself. Abstraction distorts and disguises reality. Thus the real social will is a unit, yet not an undivided unit ; to its real unity division is essential.