Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/541

 THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFLICT 523

On this general basis is to be found the significance which jealousy has for our particular problem, that is, especially when the content of the jealousy is a person or the relationship of a subject to a person. It appears to me, furthermore, as though verbal usage does not recognize jealousy on account of a purely impersonal object. What we are now concerned with is the relationship between the jealous person and the person on whose account the jealousy is aroused toward a third person. The relationship to this third person has quite another, much less peculiar and complicated, sociological form. For toward this third person there arise scorn and hatred, contempt and cruelty, on the stimulus of the presupposition of reciprocal rela- tionship, that is, of an external or internal, actual or supposed, claim to love, friendship, recognition, or consensus of some sort or other. In this case the tension of antagonism, whether reciprocal or one-sided, becomes the stronger and more compre- hensive, the more unlimited the unity is from which it proceeds, and the more passionately its conquest is sought. If the consciousness of the jealous person often seems to vibrate between love and hate r this means that these two strata, of which the second is built upon the first over its whole extension, in turn gain the preponderance in consciousness. Very important is the limitation suggested above ; namely, the right which one claims to the psychical or physical possession, to the love or the respect, of the person who is the object of the jealousy. A man may envy another the possession of a woman ; he only is jealous, however, who has some sort of a claim to the possession of her. This claim may, to be sure, consist in the mere passion of the desire. From this to derive a claim is a very general touch of human nature. The child excuses himself for disobeying a command with the formula with reference to the forbidden thing, " I wanted it so much." The adulterer, supposing him to possess any trace of conscience at all, could not claim the right of meeting the aggrieved husband in a duel, if he did not see in his love for the wife a right which he might so defend against the mere legal right of the husband. Since everywhere mere possession counts as right to the possession, so