ups it is not always easy to apply with
certainty the distinction between rivalry and conflict made here. The
sect is a conflict group. In its struggle for survival and success with
other groups, its aim is the highest welfare of the inclusive society.
Actually, however, sectarian warfare may be against the moral, social,
and religious interests of the community. The denomination, which is an
accommodation group, strives through rivalry and competition, not only
to promote the welfare of the inclusive society, but also of its other
component groups.

In cultural and political conflict the function of conflict in social
life becomes understandable and reasonable. The role of mental conflicts
in the life of the individual is for the purpose of making adjustments
to changing situations and of assimilating new experiences. It is
through this process of conflict of divergent impulses to act that the
individual arrives at decisions--as we say, "makes up his mind." Only
where there is conflict is behavior conscious and self-conscious; only
here are the conditions for rational conduct.

d) _Race conflicts._--Nowhere do social contacts so readily provoke
conflicts as in the relations between the races, particularly when
racial differences are re-enforced, not merely by differences of
culture, but of color. Nowhere, it might be added, are the responses to
social contact so obvious and, at the same time, so difficult to analyze
and define.

Race prejudice, as we call the sentiments that support the racial
taboos, is not, in America at least, an obscure phenomenon. But no one
has yet succeeded in making it wholly intelligible. It is evident that
there is in race prejudice, as distinguished from class and caste
prejudice, an instinctive factor based on the fear of the unfamiliar and
the uncomprehended. Color, or any other racial mark that emphasizes
physical differences, becomes the symbol of moral divergences which
perhaps do not exist. We at once fear and are fascinated by the
stranger, and an individual of a different race always seems more of a
stranger to us than one of our own. This naive prejudice, unless it is
re-enforced by other factors, is easily modified, as the intimate
relations of the Negroes and white man in slavery show.

A more positive factor in racial antagonism is the conflict of cultures:
the unwillingness of one race to enter into personal competition with a
race of a different or inferior culture. This tu