Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/520

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THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

which is at the outset merely a negation, a refusal to take any interest in a non-ego, the counterpoise of altruism, indicates that the former, considered with reference to its significance and its expressions in practical life, instigates radical enmity between men; indeed, is such enmity. Since men, however, live in society, the function of absolute egoism is nothing else than absolute hostility, which, through the necessity of calling into existence a transcendency to be the deus ex machina for its conversion to altruism, betrays itself as the natural basis of empirical human relationships. As such basis this hostility seems at least to take its place by the side of the other factor, the a priori sympathy between them. The notably strong interest, for example, which men take even in the sufferings of others, is merely a phenomenon to be explained as a mixture of the two motives. The not infre- quent phenomena of the spirit of contradiction point also toward this a priori antipathy. We refer by no means merely to the con- duct of those chronic objectors who in friendly and family circles, committees, or theater audiences, for instance, are the despair of their neighbors. What we have in mind by no means celebrates its most characteristic triumphs upon the political field, in the ranks of the opposition, whose classical type Macaulay describes in the case of Robert Ferguson : " His hostility was not to popery or to Protestantism, to monarchical government or to republican government, to the house of Stuart or to the house of Nassau, but to whatever was, at the time, established." All such cases, usually held to be types of pure opposition, need not necessarily be this. Such obstructors usually give themselves out as champions of threatened rights, protectors of the objectively ethical, knightly defenders of the minority as such. Much less striking occurrences appear to me to betray even more clearly an abstract impulse of opposition: the gentle, often scarcely con- scious, and even immediately vanishing inclination to answer with a negation an assertion or an appeal, especially when it is addressed to us in categorical form. Even in quite harmonious relationships, in the case of many altogether yielding natures, this impulse of opposition betrays itself with the inevitableness of reflex action, and it mingles, even if without very much effect,