Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/276

260 entirely different from that found in social values as to account for the relative indifference of the two series that we have described. First of all, it becomes immediately clear that affirmation and negation in the same personality are aspects of the same volitional energy. Progressive systematization and assimilation of tendencies, dispositions, involve a corresponding progressive inhibition. And all inhibition presupposes organization. It is constantly becoming clearer, both from the logical and the psycho-logical standpoint, that these are reverse sides of the same process, and that it is out of these two moments that the meaning or value for consciousness must be constructed. The extension of a concept is as significant for what it excludes as for what it includes. An increase of habit, or expansion of a conative or affective disposition, is as significant for what it rejects as for what it assimilates. Complete harmonization and systematization of the subject's affective and volitional dispositions would involve an equally systematized inhibition, only that then the opposing tendencies which were scattered evils within the personality become projected as external to the subject. The system of negative tendencies is not in the personality. It becomes externalized in opposing social groups, or, in certain cases, in a symbolized personality. The conception of the relation of Christ to Satan in the temptation is typical of this extreme of externalization. Thus progressive realization of inner value becomes possible through the externalization of the negative moments. The ideal of progressive harmonization may be realized, and yet the negative moment be present in equal strength as an externalized opposition.

In the light of this conception of the role of the negative moment, it becomes clear how an intensification of social oppositions may go on side by side with a reduction of internal oppositions in personalities. An inner harmony of disposition may increase indefinitely, and with it the person's sense of value, which gets its intensity not from inner contradictions but from the contrast between his system of values and the great social group that stands over against him representing the negation or lack of that which he values. Tarde, in his Social Laws, proposes as a law of social development the conception that it