Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/512

 494 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

into the practical, the latent form of conflict discharges this service: i.e., aversion, the feeling of reciprocal alienation and repulsion, which in the moment of a more intimate contact of any sort is at once transformed into positive hatred and conflict. Without this aversion life in a great city, which daily brings each into contact with countless others, would have no thinkable form. N/The whole internal organization of this commerce rests on an extremely complicated gradation of sympathies, indiffer- ences, and aversions of the most transient or most permanent sort. The sphere of indifference is in all this relatively restricted. The activity of our minds responds to almost every impression received from other people in some sort of a definite feeling, all the unconsciousness, transience, and variability of which seems to remain only in the form of a certain indifference. In fact, this latter would be as unnatural for us as it would be intolerable to be swamped under a multitude of suggestions among which we have no choice. Antipathy protects us against these two typical dangers of the great city. It is the initial stage of practical antagonism. It produces the distances and the buffers without which this kind of life could not be led at all. The mass and the mixtures of this life, the forms in which it is carried on, the rhythm of its rise and fall these unite with the unifying motives, in the narrower sense, to give to a great city the character of an indissoluble whole. Whatever in this whole seems to be an element of division is thus in reality only one of its elementary forms of socialization.

If accordingly the hostile relationships do not of themselves alone produce a social structure, but only in correlation with unifying energies, so that only by the co-working of the two can the concrete life-unity of the group arise, yet the former are to the above extent scarcely to be distinguished from the other forms of relationship which sociology abstracts from the mani- foldness of actual existence. Neither love nor division of labor, neither good fellowship with a third person nor hostility to him, neither adhesion to a party nor organization into superiority and inferiority, could alone produce a historical unification or per- manently support it; and wherever this result has come about,