Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/514

 4Q6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

love and the instinct of dominance, or a clinging disposition. What the observer, or even the subject himself, analyzes thus as two commingling streams is in reality often only a single cur- rent. In the relationship, as it finally exists, the total person- ality of the one party works upon that of the other, and its reality is independent of the consideration that, if this particular relationship did not exist, the persons concerned would still be at least moved to respect or sympathy, or the opposite. We very often characterize such a combination as a mixed feeling or a mixed relationship, because we construe the consequences which the qualities of the one party would produce upon the other, if they operated separately ; which, however, is not the case. It should also be remembered that this mixture of feelings and relation- ships, even when we may be most justified in using the expres- sion, always remains a problematical phrase. In the expression we transfer an occurrence visible in space, by the use of some- what thoughtless symbolism, to quite heterogeneous mental rela- tionships.

In many respects the like is the case with the so-called com- mingling of converging and diverging currents in a society. The relationship is in such cases either entirely sui generis; that is, its motive and form is in itself quite unitary, and only in order to describe and classify it do we subsequently construct it out of a monistic and an antagonistic current; or these two factors are present from the beginning indeed, but so to speak before the relationship came into being at all. In this relationship itself they have grown into an organic unity, in which the separate factor with its specific energy is no longer observable at all. In saying this we, of course, do not overlook the enormous number of rela- tionships in which the antithetical partial relationships actually persist side by side, and are constantly to be recognized within the total situation. It is a special shade of the historical develop- ment of relationships that the same frequently in an early stadium show undifferentiated tendencies which only later separate into complete difference. As late as the thirteenth century there were at the courts of central Europe permanent assemblages of noblemen who constituted a kind of council of the prince. They