Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/539

 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFLICT $21

not only by their egoistic interest, so to speak, but by the interest which goes much farther than that and attaches itself to the unity of the ego, for which this struggle means dismember- ment and destruction, if it does not end with a victory for unity. Accordingly, struggle within a closely integrated group often enough grows beyond the measure which its object and its immediate interest for the parties could justify. The feeling accumulates that this struggle is an affair, not merely of the party, but of the group as a whole ; that each party must hate in its opponent, not its opponent merely, but at the same time the enemy of its higher sociological unity.

Finally there is an apparently quite individual fact, which in reality is sociologically very significant, and which may unite the most extreme intensity of antagonistic excitement to close- ness of personal association. This fact is jealousy, the universal significance of which it is now worth while to formulate. Our ordinary use of language is not unequivocal in dealing with this conception. We frequently fail to distinguish jealousy from envy. Both sentiments are undoubtedly of the widest signifi- cance for the molding of human relationships. With both there comes into question an object of value which a third party either actually or symbolically hinders us in attaining or controlling. When it is a case of attaining, we may more properly speak of envy; if it is a matter of retaining, jealousy is the passion involved. In this case, of course, the definitive division of the goods is quite insignificant, and only the discrimination of the psycho- sociological procedures is of importance. It is peculiar to the pas- sion called jealousy that the subject claims to have a claim to the possession in question, while envy is concerned, not with the claim, but simply with the desirability of the withheld object. In the case of envy it is a matter of indifference whether the object is withheld because the third party possesses it, or whether even loss or renunciation of the object on the part of this third party would still fail to put the envious person in possession of it. Jealousy, on the contrary, is directly determined in its subjective direction and shading by the fact that the possession is withheld from it, because it is in the hands of a third party, and with the