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 516 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

him. Hence the quite disproportionate intensity with which otherwise quite self-contained persons frequently allow them- selves to become moved in their conduct toward their most inti- mate associates. The whole happiness and the whole depth in the relationship to a person with whom we feel ourselves, so to speak, identical; the condition in which no single reaction, no single word, no single common doing or withholding remains actually single, but each is an affair of the whole soul which manifests itself and is perceived without subtraction in it all these make between such persons any outbreaking difference often so portentous. The persons in such a case are too much accustomed to put into the phase of their action which they pre- sent to each other the totality of their being and feeling, not to equip conflict also with emphasis, and at the same time with ulterior bearings, through which it extends far beyond its provo- cation and its objective significance, and betrays the whole of the two personalities into disunion. On the highest psychical plane of development this may be avoided, for on this level it is characteristic to combine loyalty of soul to a person with recip- rocal discrimination of the elements of the soul. While undiffer- entiated passion fuses the totality of a man with the excitement of a portion or an element, higher culture restrains one such portion or element from exerting an influence beyond its proper, definitely limited right. Culture consequently secures to the relationships of harmoniously developed personalities that, pre- cisely in the midst of conflict, they are aware how insignificant conflict is in comparison with the unifying forces. Apart from this, however, in the case of the deeper natures, refined suscepti- bility of differences will make attractions and repulsions the more intense when they arise from past tendencies in opposite directions. This will appear in the case of irrevocable determina- tions of their relationship, entirely distinguished from the above- discussed oscillations within the everyday experience of a com- mon condition, which on the whole is settled beyond question. Between husbands and wives a quite elemental aversion, or even more energetic repulsion, not traceable to specific grounds, but as the reciprocal reaction of the total personalities, is sometimes