Conscious Rivalry 2 1 9 



§ 3. Conscious Rivalry 



The second of these, personal conscious rivalry, is the 

 relation between two persons, or more, which arises from 

 their mutual intention or effort to excel each other in 

 attaining an end which they have in common. It is dis- 

 tinguished from biological struggle by two marks, at least. 



In the first place, it is for the sake of a further or remote 

 conscious end that this form of rivalry is usually indulged in; 

 the competition itself is a means to another end. There 

 may be cases, indeed, notably in autonomic functions such 

 as play, in which no end apart from the function itself is 

 set up ; but even in these cases the element of rivalry — as 

 in the contests of a boy's game — is an incident of the game, 

 not a thing indulged in for its own sake. And even in the 

 extreme case of games of rivalry as such, in which the 

 competition is the main motive, the fact of its being play 

 destroys its analogy to struggle for existence in the biologi- 

 cal sense. 



A second difference is in respect to the immediateness 

 or mediateness of the results. As pointed out above, 

 struggle for existence is really biologically effective only 

 if reproduction and physical heredity ensue to clinch and 

 further the results of the struggle. If the individuals which 

 remain do not produce young, they have not survived bio- 

 logically. So the effectiveness of struggle for existence is 

 secured only through the medium of the further vital 

 function of reproduction. In personal rivalry, on the con- 

 trary, this is not the case. The results are immediate. 

 The rivalry furthers the end for which the conscious com- 

 petition takes place. 



In personal rivalry, in fact, we have all forms of individ- 



