Inner conflict

“ This is the struggle of the will which each one knows for himself; for who has not had a raging battle of motives occupy the center of the field while all else, even the sense of time, place and existence, gave way in the face of this conflict! This struggle continues until the decision is made, when suddenly all the stress and strain drop out and other objects may again have place in consciousness. ”

“ This rest is won through the man's prior discipline in the toils of strife, in order that when the tumult of disturbance ceases, his mind, through the grace of contemplation, may be translated to gaze upon the face of truth. But since one attains to this rest only through labour and conflict, how can one reach it who has not gone down into the strife? ”

“ Nay, more, in any situation the more nearly the conflict is shown to be absolutely inevitable, arising out of the very nature of life as we know it,—completely justified, or at least FELT as inevitable on both sides,—the more are we shaken by the distinctive tragic emotion. The conflict of duties to one's self and to the world is the sharpest of tragedies. ”

“ But often there was conflict within the soul before it acquiesced in what it felt compelled to recognize; and sometimes there was clear revolt against current convictions, or practical insistence that a larger volume of the elements of human nature were fit for life eternal. ”

“ Where's the fire? Where's the individuality? Where's the conflict, the fighting and snarling and raging that makes living. All this is apathy, this is death! You don't grow by being agreeable, but by conflict. ”

“ And so, with marvellous love-born wisdom and courage, the conflict is left open, for men's sake.
It is a spirit conflict. The earth is swung in a spirit atmosphere. There are unnumbered thousands of spirit beings good and evil, tramping the earth's surface, and filling its atmosphere. ”

“ The reality cannot be thus simplified. We have to reckon with a mental and spiritual climate full of the most baffling contradictions. It would indeed be true to say that the most characteristic feature of the modern mood is precisely the unresolved tension between opposing forces. Here we touch the very nerve of the preacher's problem. There are three directions in which this element of tension, of radical paradox and spiritual conflict, of thrust and counter-thrust, is manifesting itself dramatically in the world we face to-day. ”

“ We, the so-called living, are in fact merely beset by a series of stormy visions which constitute life; all our efforts are expended upon mere phantoms, and are therefore profitless; our mental conflict is an act of trance, exercised upon mere nothings. ”

“ Absurd as it sounds, "nerves" turn out to be a question of morals; a neurosis, an affair of conscience; a nervous symptom an unsettled ethical struggle. The ethical struggle is not unusual; it is a normal part of man's life, the natural result of his desire to change into a more civilized being. The people in the world may be divided into three classes, according to the way they decide the conflict. ”

“ Men are consequently attacking the resisting material and moral environment at more points than ever before. In this conflict mind wields the balance of power, and mind is swinging over into alliance with man. ”

“ The interior discord which so often finds place in men is nothing but this conflict of outside spirits who wish to get possession of his will, his reason, in short, his whole innermost being. As the man feels the agreement of spirits within him as rest, clearness, harmony, and safety, he is also conscious of their discord as unrest, doubt, vacillation, confusion, enmity, in his heart. ”

“ So there was conflict in his mind; but only a disturbing conflict. Reason acted too feebly on the side of these new-coming convictions. A desire to be at once, and to escape daily work and daily troubles, was stronger than any cold judgement of the case. ”

“ Here are a thousand impulses and instincts drawing us, with infinite further possibilities suggesting themselves to reflection; the more developed our natures the more frequently do our desires conflict. Why is any one better than another? ”

“ Cognition and emotion are parted even in this last retreat,—who shall say that their antagonism may not just be one phase of the world-old struggle known as that between the spirit and the flesh?—a struggle in which it seems pretty certain that neither party will definitively drive the other off the field. ”

“ Within the fixed circle of its stern natural and moral laws there is a hidden field of conflict where the soul is free to discern and choose its own cause, and to fight for it or betray it. However small that field may be, while it exists life has a meaning, and personalities are real, and the results of their striving or surrendering, though rarely seen complete or final, are worth following and thinking about. ”

“ The real stress and strain in life arises from the difficulty of applying principles to special cases in hand, and it is just this difficulty that is experienced amid the shock of the conflict by many souls, even those who are illuminated by the Holy Ghost. ”

“ Throughout the history of civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery. ”

“ Nor are we concerned here with conduct which pertains more properly to social psychology. Our task is much more limited and simple, namely to inquire into the immediate conscious phenomena provoked by emotion, just as we have studied the physiological phenomena. We have seen that one such phenomenon is inhibition or repression of antagonistic instincts and sentiments provoked by conflict. (We shall see later that a conflict may arise 460between a conscious and an entirely subconscious sentiment with similar resulting phenomena.) ”

“ By an analysis of the moral phenomena associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of the conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itself absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man's fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual and the race from the fulfilment of this tendency, – Mr. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The course of the disorder appears to be that the rationalisations, developed by the subject to explain his inferiority, become so intimately connected with the affective basis of his trouble that they attain a reality and effectiveness which greatly relieve, or even wholly remove, the painfulness of the conflict. ”

“ The individual soul offers an analogy. The feeling that a conflict between sensuous and ascetic feelings, or selfish and moral impulses, or practical and intellectual ambitions, within us not merely lowers the claims of one or both parties and permits neither to come to quite free self-realization but also threatens the unity, the equilibrium, and the total energy of the soul as a whole—this feeling may in many cases repress conflict from the beginning. ”

“ The conflict may end through the subsidence of either antagonist. Years, other instincts, or grosser passions may moderate the intensity of ungratified love or take away the sharpness from the sight of in­com­pre­hen­sible pain. ”

“ And where a struggle springs up from sheer formal love of fighting, which is also entirely impersonal and indifferent both to the material at issue and to the personal opponent, hatred and fury against the opponent as a person unavoidably increase in the course of the conflict, and probably also the interest in the stake at issue, because these affections stimulate and feed the psychical energy of the struggle. ”

“ And yet, I had an instinctive feeling that all would be well, that I need not worry. Such is the complex mystery of the human mind, battling within itself against its own knowledge, its own decisions, its own instincts. ”

“ Where experience is contradictory, then, there is movement, whether for that which is known or for him that has the knowledge. In your character or mine, so like a lover's unselfish selfishness in its apparent inconsistencies, in our double views about reality or unity or law, in a subjective-objective science, in an agnostic philosophy, in all these the contradictions are only the marks of essential unrest, of necessary movement, that make the picture possible. For a world of opposites there can be no peace. ”

“ The network of suffering, which is woven behind the scenes, is not of any pattern set by the Scriptures, nor of our own devising. Hence the frequent discords between the inner and the outer life—discords that hurt, and wail forth in tears. ”

“ Be comforted, however, by this consideration, that, conflict being the only means of forming the character into excellence, and your natural amiability averting from you many of the usual opportunities for exercising self-control, you would be in want of the former essential ingredient in spiritual discipline did not your very virtues procure it for you. ”

“ The conflict is produced by some important task or duty which is essential biologically and practically for the fulfilment of the ego of the individual, but before which an obstacle arises from which he shrinks, and thus halted cannot go on. ”

“ To heighten the danger of a conflict between natures essentially incompatible, both were in a morbid and nervous state, consumed with discontent, sensitive to the most trifling injury, abandoned to a fierce egoism, which the course of their lives and the circumstances of their profession kept constantly inflamed. ”

“ The inner is the conquest of the evil within his own nature; the outer is the struggle against the evil forces of the world—the constructive task of building up, under warring conditions, the spiritual kingdom of God. ”

“ The double feeling—tenderness and hostility—against the deceased, which we consider well-founded, endeavors to assert itself at the time of bereavement as mourning and satisfaction. A conflict must ensue [97] between these contrary feelings, and as one of them—namely, the hostility, is altogether, or for the greater part, unconscious, the conflict cannot result in a conscious difference in the form of hostility or tenderness, as, for instance, when we forgive an injury inflicted upon us by some one we love. ”

“ There is thus no one social tendency that, as it comes to us in the course of our ordinary social experience, gives us sufficient guidance to tell us how to escape self-defeat. For my love and pity war with my social greed and with my rivalries. I am so far left to my chaos. ”

“ When peace is practised, and possessed, and known, then sin and remorse, grasping and disappointment, craving and temptation, desiring and grieving—all the turbulence and torment of the mind—are left behind in the dark sphere of self to which they belong, and beyond which they cannot go. ”

“ Such a persisting repression may be brought about either directly by volitional conflict or indirectly through the cultivation of antagonistic sentiments. The cultivation of an instinct is a common enough observation. Every one can point to some one of his acquaintance who has so fostered his instinct of anger or fear, has so cultivated the habit of one or the other reaction that he has become the slave of his emotion. ”

“ In what manner this conflict of opinions and purposes becomes transformed into physical combat and culminates in bloody war, is to be easily understood when the relations of human intellect [Pg 700] and passion are duly considered. ”

“ But on the other hand, the daily life of every one of us teems with occasions which will try the temper of our courage as searchingly, though not as terribly, as battle-field or fire or wreck. For we are born into a state of war; with falsehood and disease, and wrong and misery in a thousand forms lying all around us, and the voice within calling on us to take our stand as men in the eternal battle against these. ”

“ Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. ”

“ When the social and sane instincts lose in the conflict, interest in the present may decline to indifference, and the obsessions may focus on real or fancied errors of the past—duty to a dead child, a business failure, etc. At any rate, there is a tendency to indulge temperament. ”

“ Hence the struggle, insistent, ever more pressing, between two sets of desires within the man himself; the feud between the past and the present, between the natural and the social, between the selfish and the ideal. On one side, there is the demand for instinctive satisfaction ”

“ If we bear in mind that emotion means discharge of force, an adequate explanation of such phenomena in a great many instances, at least, is to be found in the principle of conflict and dissociation. The conflict is between the impulsive forces of the emotions pertaining either to antagonistic instincts or to sentiments organized within different systems. With the excitation of emotion, instincts and sentiments which have opposing conative tendencies are inhibited, repressed, or dissociated, 501and with them the systems with which they are organized. ”

“ This energetic defensive lies deep in unconscious existence, but, as being the first impulse that genuinely projects soul and world as parted and opposed, it marks the threshold of personal conduct of life. ”