Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/648

636 used in some very peculiar senses and applied to the lower animal organisms. Scattered through this chapter, however, are to be found indications that the conception of the biological origin of mind, including the higher intellectual faculties, and its natural genesis as an aid to survival, which is a somewhat recent conception, has gained access to the writer's thought, notwithstanding "the failure of biologic sociology." There is also here developed a somewhat original explanation of the gradual supplementing of anthropomorphic conceptions by rationalistic ones, as the natural consequence of the growing intelligence applied to inanimate objects. But this scarcely differs from the necessary results of a full discussion of the origin and development of the inventive faculty, and it falls far short of this in philosophic thoroughness.

Without much apparent connection with the rest there has also been worked into this chapter the germ of what I have called the second essay of this work, and I am glad to emerge from the dense fog of the first essay into the clear sunlight of the second.

It occasionally happens that the world finds itself worked up to a high point of tension on some great question before it has any name for the movement itself. In such cases the one who first launches the right word becomes a general benefactor in concentrating attention on the living issue and thus preventing the waste that results from scattered forces and desultory and sporadic thinking. Comte's "Altruism," and especially his "Sociology," are cases in point. Darwin's "Natural Selection," and Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest" are further examples, while Huxley's "Neurosis and Psychosis" in psychology, his "Homotaxis" in geology, and his "Agnosticism" in philosophy have done incalculable service in crystallizing ideas. It is in this class, and scarcely below any of these, that I would place the "Pain Economy" and "Pleasure Economy" of Patton as introduced and defined in this essay. They embody the professional economist's view of one of the deepest and at the same time just now most pressing of all the problems of practical philosophy. This is nothing less than the problem of whether "Life is Worth Living." The biologist seizes the new terminology as eagerly as Darwin seized Malthus' "Principle of Population," for it throws a flood of light upon the whole "Struggle for Existence." The psychologist must see in it the key to the solution of many psychic puzzles; the sociologist reads into it both the statics and the dynamics of his science, while to the moral philosopher as well