eans dismemberment 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
an opponent merely, but at the same time the enemy of its higher
sociological unity.

c) _Litigation._--Moreover, what we are accustomed to call the joy and
passion of conflict in the case of a legal process is probably, in most
cases, something quite different, namely, the energetic sense of
justice, the impossibility of tolerating an actual or supposed invasion
of the sphere of right with which the ego feels a sense of solidarity.
The whole obstinacy and uncompromising persistence with which parties in
such struggles often maintain the controversy to their own hurt has,
even in the case of the aggressive party, scarcely the character of an
attack in the proper sense, but rather of a defense in a deeper
significance. The point at issue is the self-preservation of the
personality which so identifies itself with its possessions and its
rights that any invasion of them seems to be a destruction of the
personality; and the struggle to protect them at the risk of the whole
existence is thoroughly consistent. This individualistic impulse, and
not the sociological motive of struggle, will consequently characterize
such cases.

With respect to the form of the struggle itself, however, judicial
conflict is, to be sure, of an absolute sort; that is, the reciprocal
claims are asserted with a relentless objectivity and with employment of
all available means, without being diverted or modified by personal or
other extraneous considerations. The judicial conflict is, therefore,
absolute conflict in so far as nothing enters the whole action which
does not properly belong in the conflict and which does not serve the
ends of conflict; whereas, otherwise, even in the most savage struggles,
something subjective, some pure freak of fortune, some sort of
interposition from a third side, is at least possible. In the legal
struggle everything of the kind is excluded by the matter-of-factness
with which the contention, and absolutely nothing outside the
contention, is kept in view. This exclusion from the judicial
controversy of everything whi