Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/515

 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFLICT 497

lived as his guests, and yet at the same time they were a semi class representation of the nobility. They championed the interests of the nobility against the prince. The community of interests with the king, the administration of which they incidentally served, and the action as a sort of opposition guarding the peculiar rights of their rank, took place in this social structure, not merely in an undifferentiated way side by side, but involved with each other. The position was surely felt to be a unity, however incompatible its elements may appear to us to have been. In England, at this time, the parliament of the barons can still hardly be distinguished from an extended royal council. Mem- bership in it and critical or partisan opposition are here still combined in embryonic unity. So long as the real process in hand is the working out of institutions which have the task of adjusting the increasingly complex relationships involved in the internal equilibrium of the group, so long will it often be unde- termined whether concurrence for the good of the whole shall take place in the form of opposition, competition, criticism, or in that of immediate unity and harmony. Accordingly, an original condition of indifference may exist, which, judged from the standpoint of the later differentiated condition, may seem logically contradictory, yet may quite harmonize with the unde- veloped character of the organism.

The subjective attitudes of persons toward each other develop, in many ways, in the opposite direction. The decisiveness of attachment or opposition is likely to be relatively great in rela- tively primitive culture-epochs. Indefinite relationships between persons, made possible by a sort of dawning condition of the sensibilities, the final word of which may mean almost as well love as hate; the indifference of which, indeed, often betrays itself in a sort of oscillation between the two sorts of feeling such relationships are much more characteristic of mature or of over ripe than of youthful periods. For instance, it is merely a reflec- tion of these forms of feeling when uncultured persons and belated art can see only angelic virtue or devilish malignity in men. Theo- retical judgment, like aesthetic taste, overcomes, as it advances, this entanglement between the alternative of love or hate. The