Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/194

 1 82 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

turbances and conflicts in the larger and smaller political areas, the one stable power, which for its own sake was already honored or feared by each party, must necessarily have gained an incompa- rable prerogative. Times without number it is only the stability of the third party, in the changing stadia of the struggle, its indifference to the material in controversy, about which the parties oscillate up and down, which brings to it superiority and chances for gain. The more violently, and especially the longer, the struggle of parties keeps their positions in doubt, the more superior, respected, and advantageous will firmness and persist- ence, purely as a formal fact, make the position of a third party, even when, beyond this superiority given by the sociological form, those struggles lead to accumulations of power and developments of worth which are not assured by the stability and greater or less inflexibility of the third. Of this everywhere observable constellation there is probably no more gigantic example than that of the Catholic church. For the universal characterization of the tertius gaudens, applicable to all its forms, it is to be added that among the causes of his prerogative belongs the mere difference of psychical energies which he and the two others bring into the relationship. What I mentioned above in connection with the nonpartisan in general, namely that he represented rather the intellectuality, the contestants rather the feeling and the willing, gives him, in case he wants to exploit the situation egoistically, a controlling situation, as it were enthroned upon an ideal height, with that external advantage which in every complication he possesses who is not concerned with it on the affective side. And even where he declines prac- tical exploitation of his more unprejudiced insight, and of his not previously engaged but always disposable powers, his situa- tion brings him at least the feeling of an easy ironical superiority over the parties who for such an indifferent price, as it seems to him, risk so very much.

3. Divide et impera. In these combinations of the triad scheme we have to do with an existing or an emerging conflict of two elements, from which the third derives an advantage ; it is now a variation to be regarded as separate, although it is in