ess, we
could not endure relations with people who betray such characteristics.
We should be driven to deeds of desperation which would put the
relationships to an end. This follows not alone for the self-evident
reason--which, however, is not here essential--that such disagreeable
circumstances tend to become intensified if they are endured quietly and
without protest; but, more than this, opposition affords us a subjective
satisfaction, diversion, relief, just as under other psychological
conditions, whose variations need not here be discussed, the same
results are brought about by humility and patience. Our opposition gives
us the feeling that we are not completely crushed in the relationship.
It permits us to preserve a consciousness of energy, and thus lends a
vitality and a reciprocity to relationships from which, without this
corrective, we should have extricated ourselves at any price. In case
the relationships are purely external, and consequently do not reach
deeply into the practical, the latent form of conflict discharges this
service, i.e., aversion, the feeling of reciprocal alienation and
repulsion, which in the moment of a more intimate contact of any sort is
at once transformed into positive hatred and conflict. Without this
aversion life in a great city, which daily brings each into contact with
countless others, would have no thinkable form. The activity of our
minds responds to almost every impression received from other people in
some sort of a definite feeling, all the unconsciousness, transience,
and variability of which seem to remain only in the form of a certain
indifference. In fact, this latter would be as unnatural for us as it
would be intolerable to be swamped under a multitude of suggestions
among which we have no choice. Antipathy protects us against these two
typical dangers of the great city. It is the initial stage of practical
antagonism. It produces the distances and the buffers without which this
kind of life could not be led at all. The mass and the mixtures of this
life, the forms in which it is carried on, the rhythm of its rise and
fall--these unite with the unifying motives, in the narrower sense, to
give to a great city the character of an indissoluble whole. Whatever in
this whole seems to be an element of division is thus in reality only
one of its elementary forms of socialization.

A struggle for struggle's sake seems to have its natural basis in a
certain formal impulse