Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/521

 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFLICT 503

in the total situation. Even if we should characterize this as in reality an instinct of protection as many animals, upon mere touch, bring their protective or defensive apparatus automatically into action yet this would still tend to prove the primary, fundamental character of opposition ; for it shows that the per- sonality, even in case it is not at all attacked, but merely encountering purely objective manifestations of a third party, cannot assert itself otherwise than through opposition ; in other words, that the first instinct with which it affirms itself is nega tion of the other party.

Finally, it seems to me that the suggestibility of the hostile temper, which is often so faint that it is uncanny, points to a primary need of hostility. It is much more difficult to influence the average man in general to take an interest in, or to feel an inclination of sympathy for, a third person previously indiffer- ent, than to develop in him mistrust and antipathy. It seems to be particularly decisive that this difference is relatively crass in cases of the lower grades of either sentiment, of the first betrayals of feeling or judgment for or against a person. Over the higher grades of feeling, which approach precision, these fugi- tive impulses, betraying, nevertheless, the fundamental instinct, are not so decisive, but they are rather more conscious antipa- thies. The same fundamental reality is exhibited, only in another phase, in the fact that those indefinite prejudices with reference to another, which cross our minds sometimes like a shadow, may often be suggested by quite indifferent persons, while a favorable prejudice requires a source in some person of authority or one whose relation to us is that of agreeable confidence. Perhaps this aliquid haeret would not win its tragic truthfulness without this facility or frivolity with which the average man reacts precisely upon suggestions of an unfavorable sort. Observation of many antipathies and partisanships, alienations and open quarrels, might surely cause hostility to be classified among those primary human energies which are not set free by the external reality of their objects, but which spontaneously create their object. Thus it has been said that man does not have religion because he believes in God, but because he has religion as an attitude of the soul, con-