ses conflict has once broken out, it is in reality the way to
remove the dualism and to arrive at some form of unity, even if through
annihilation of one of the parties. The case is, in a way, illustrated
by the most violent symptoms of disease. They frequently represent the
efforts of the organism to free itself from disorders and injuries. This
is by no means equivalent merely to the triviality, _si vis pacem para
bellum_, but it is the wide generalization of which that special case is
a particular. Conflict itself is the resolution of the tension between
the contraries. That it eventuates in peace is only a single, specially
obvious and evident, expression of the fact that it is a conjunction of
elements.

As the individual achieves the unity of his personality, not in such
fashion that its contents invariably harmonize according to logical or
material, religious or ethical, standards, but rather as contradiction
and strife not merely precede that unity but are operative in it at
every moment of life; so it is hardly to be expected that there should
be any social unity in which the converging tendencies of the elements
are not incessantly shot through with elements of divergence. A group
which was entirely centripetal and harmonious--that is, "unification"
merely--is not only impossible empirically, but it would also display no
essential life-process and no stable structure. As the cosmos requires
_Liebe und Hass_, attraction and repulsion, in order to have a form,
society likewise requires some quantitative relation of harmony and
disharmony, association and dissociation, liking and disliking, in order
to attain to a definite formation. Society, as it is given in fact, is
the result of both categories of reactions, and in so far both act in a
completely positive way. The misconception that the one factor tears
down what the other builds up, and that what at last remains is the
result of subtracting the one from the other (while in reality it is
much rather to be regarded as the addition of one to the other),
doubtless springs from the equivocal sense of the concept of unity.

We describe as unity the agreement and the conjunction of social
elements in contrast with their disjunctions, separations, disharmonies.
We also use the term unity, however, for the total synthesis of the
persons, energies, and forms in a group, in which the final wholeness
is made up, not merely of those factors which are unifying in the
nar