Against this deep pluralism thinkers have argued in vain. They have invented social organisms and national souls, and oversouls, and collective souls; they have gone for hopeful analogies to the beehive and the anthill, to the solar system, to the human body; they have gone to Hegel for higher unities and to Rousseau for a general will in an effort to find some basis of union. For though men do not think alike, nor want the same things, though their private interests are so distinct that they do not merge easily in any common interest, yet men cannot live by themselves, nor realize even their private purposes without taking into account the behavior of other people. We, however, no longer expect to find a unity which absorbs diversity. For us the conflicts and differences are so real that we cannot deny them and instead of looking for identity of purpose we look simply for an accommodation of purposes. When we speak, then, about the solution of a problem in the Great Society, we may mean little more than that two conflicting interests have found a _modus vivendi_. It may be, of course, that they have really removed all their differences, that one interest has yielded to the other, or both to a third. But the solutions of most social problems are not so neat as this; everything does not fit perfectly as in the solution of a puzzle. The conflicting interests merely find a way of giving a little and taking a little, and of existing together without too much bad blood. They still remain separate interests. The men involved still think differently. They have no union of mind or purpose. But they travel their own ways without collision, and even with some reliance at times upon the others’ help. They know their rights and their duties, what to expect and what will be expected. Their rights are usually less than they claim, and their duties heavier than they like, yet, because they are in some degree enforced, conduct is rendered intelligible and predictable, and coöperation exists in spite of the conflicting interests of men. The _modus vivendi_ of any particular historical period, the system of rights and duties, has generally acquired some high religious or ideal sanction. The thinkers laureate of the age will generally manage to show that the institutions, the laws, the morality and the custom of that age are divinely inspired. These are tiresome illusions which have been exploded a thousand times. The prevailing system of rights and duties at any time is at bottom a slightly antiquated formulation of the balance of power among the active interests in the community. There is always a certain lag, as Mr. Ogburn calls it, so that the system of rights and duties men are taught is generally a little less contemporary than the system they would find most convenient. But, whether the system is obsolete or not, in its naked origin, a right is a claim somebody was able to assert, and a duty is an obligation somebody was able to impose. 3