Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/525

 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFLICT 507

stances of the situation; feelings which bring us, through psy- chical association, the energies necessary for discharging the momentary task and for defeating the opposing impulses. Accordingly, no serious struggle can long continue without being supported by a complex of psychic impulses. These may, to be sure, gradually develop into effectiveness in the course of the struggle. The purity of conflict merely for conflict's sake, accordingly, undergoes adulteration, partly through the admixture of objective interests, partly by the introduction of impulses which may be satisfied otherwise than by struggle, and which, in practice, form a bridge between struggle and other forms of reciprocal relationship. I know in fact only a single case in which the stimulus of struggle and of victory in itself con- stitutes the exclusive motive, namely, the war game, and only in the case that no further gain is to arise than is included in the outcome of the game itself. In this case the pure sociological attraction of self-assertion and predominance over another in a struggle of skill is combined with purely individual pleasure in the exercise of purposeful and successful activity, together with the excitement of taking risks with the hazard of fortune which stimulates us with a sense of mystic harmony of relationship to powers beyond the individual as well as the social occurrences. At all events, the war game, in its sociological motivation, contains absolutely nothing but struggle itself. The worthless markers, for the sake of which men often play with the same earnestness with which they play for gold pieces, indicate the formalism of this impulse which, even in the play for gold pieces, often far out- weighs the material interest. The thing to be noticed, however, is that, in order that the foregoing situations may occur, certain sociological forms in the narrower sense, unifications are pre- supposed. There must be agreement in order to struggle, and the struggle occurs under reciprocal recognition of norms and rules. In the motivation of the whole procedure these unifica- tions, as said above, do not appear, but the whole transaction shapes itself under the forms which these explicit or implicit agreements furnish. They create the technique. Without this, such a conflict, excluding all heterogeneous or objective factors,