So our use of the word "society" is not sentimental. Society means conflict. It is just the natural sphere of life and reality as for ever a divided labour, as for ever divided and laborious--divided even between the powers for supposed good and for adjudged evil, and through the conflicts, in which the division is expressed, what is true and good and vital is being forever kept real. Or, to repeat, society is the natural medium through which movement, unity or integrity, poise and reality, and practicality are secured and realized in human experience; it is that which makes the individual's division against himself manifestly real and positively and progressively effective for a life, yes, for his life, at once of vitality and perfect wholeness. But now that the five things are said, now that the contradictions of experience have been seen to serve experience by giving it movement, unity, poise, practical reality and social character, somebody is sure to remark facetiously that on the evidence contradiction is something we should all cultivate assiduously, and [p.151] that henceforth to face both ways, the butt of so much opprobrium, should be one of man's greatest ideals; in brief, that the inconsistent creatures in politics, morals, and theology are the coming examples for mankind. Verily the devil has been given his promised "character." But, alas! in the spirit of such startling humour one would have to conclude also that because crime has beyond all question been a means of social development, being all-important to the awakening of the social consciousness and conscience, all men should at once take thought and find it their duty to turn criminals; or, again, that because death has a fundamental part in the order of nature and is, moreover, of greatest spiritual worth and significance, we should all morbidly seek it, being successfully righteous only by being suicides. True, we do need to recognize the positive function of crime in the progress of civilization, or in the history of law, and also to be aware of crime as a possibility in our own lives, and we need to be ready to die and to feel besides that dying we are far from losing all that is worth having, but to court crime or to seek death would certainly be to deprive either of the very worth which has made it significant. And in much the same way we may very profitably recognize contradiction or controversy, whether personal or social, as a necessary condition of all valid experience, but not on that account are we to cultivate what is contradictory, to be always blindly spoiling for a contradiction. Like crime or death, if directly courted, contradiction would lose its peculiar effectiveness. The both-sidedness or the all-sidedness, which at once develops and conserves human life, is only [p.152] that which is maintained with a tenacious, even with a would-be consistent loyalty to each and every side.