Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/309

 THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 297

the economic interest may be so circumscribed that attention is restricted to an economic mechanism merely as such, an endless chain composed of the main links, capital, labor, production, con- sumption. In proportion as this latter is the case, the economic activities of life are wrested by an intellectual tour de force from the real social process, and are looked upon as an entity suffi- cient unto itself. From the sociological view-point, economic activities are merely a division of the manifestations of the human process as a whole. That process begins with the power of indi- viduals to feel wants, and to act in response to the stimulus of wants. It continues through limitless cycles of differentiation of wants, of individual types characterized by variations of wants, of groupings of individuals incidental to effort to satisfy the wants, and of institutions and other achievements deposited in the course of this incessant endeavor. To the sociologist every type of indi- vidual, every combination of activities, every institution, whether economic, political, artistic, scientific, or religious, is of interest, not for its separate self, but so far as it can shed or reflect light about the articulations and the motivations of the process as a whole, in which each detail in its own degree is an incident. With- out involving ourselves in a boundary dispute with the psycholo- gists, we may repeat that the sociological interest begins with individuals feeling wants. How do those wants bring them into contact with other individuals feeling wants? How do the indi- viduals thus in contact modify each other's wants? How do the wants of the separate individuals become a species of environment, conditioning all the individuals? How does the reaction between the elements, i. e., individuals, physical environment, and social environment, become complex, and ever more complex, in the pro- gressively varying reaction of cause and effect within the com- bination? How do types of want, and of individual and social contact, and of environment result from the different stages of this process? What significance, at any stage of the process, have

Gedankenreihen, die heute ganz aus der Mode gekommen zu sein scheinen. Der Theoretiker von heute bastelt fast immer ein beobachtetes Phanomen an die nachstliegende Ursache an, wenn er es nicht vorzieht, durch Messung an einem bereitgehaltenen (tneist ethischen) Massstabe seiner Herr zu werden, etc., etc."