Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/181

 NUMBER AS DETERMINING FORM OF GROUP 169

express himself more objectively than in the case of immediate confronting of the contestant. For now it is an object to each party to win over the mediator also to its standpoint. Where the third party is not arbitrator, but merely the leader of the attempted reconciliation, and must constantly hold himself this side of actual decision, whereas the arbitrator finally takes a decided position on one side, this winning of the mediator's approval can be hoped for only on the basis of the most real grounds. Within the range of sociological technique there is nothing which so effectively promotes the uniting of conflicting parties as their objectivity ; that is, the attempt to let the bare material-content underneath the complaints and demands speak for itself to put it in philosophic terms, to let the objective spirit of the party standpoint speak so that the persons appear only as the irrelevant vehicles of the same. The personal form in which objective contents are subjectively living must pay for its warmth, its shading, its depth of feeling, with the keenness of the antagonism which it produces in cases of conflict ; the toning down of this personal factor is the condition upon which agreement and understanding are attainable between the oppo- nents ; and this is the case especially because only under such conditions does each party actually perceive what the other must insist upon. Psychologically expressed, the problem is that of reducing the volitional form of antagonism to the intellectual : the understanding is everywhere the principle of consensus ; upon it as a basis there may be accommodation of those things which, upon the basis of feeling and of final appeal to the will, irreconcilably repel each other. The mediator's office is, then, to promote this reduction, to represent it at the same time in himself, or, otherwise expressed, to constitute a sort of central station which, in whatever form the controverted material may come in from one side, may give it out to the other side only in objective form, and may hold back everything over and above the objective which needlessly encourages strife carried on without mediation.

For the analysis of community life it is important to make clear that the constellation just characterized constantly occurs