Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/776

 762 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

cognition among the population is desirable which, in turn, depends on our theory of personality. In order to perfect the oscillatory movement which is central in our theory of person- ality, the movement of consciousness should be upward and not downward ; therefore, the attentive process should be developed. Hence a high degree of equality is desirable.

Professor Thomas, in his Source Book for Social Origins, reaches a similar conclusion as to the importance of attention but by a different method. He brings forward a fundamental con- cept under the term "control" which he defines as follows :

Control is not a social force but is the object realized or unrealized of all purposive activity. Food and reprduction are the two primal neces- sities, if the race is to exist. The whole design qf nature with reference to organic life is to nourish the individual and to provide a new generation before the death of the old, and the most elementary statement, as I take it, which can be made of individual and social activity is that it is designed to secure that control of the environment which will assure these two results."

He then selects as the important cognitive process, "attention," because "control is the end to be secured and attention is the means of securing it."^® The word "control" involves, then, the presupposition of race continuity. It is purposive activity directed to the securing of the two things necessary for race con- tinuity. Motive processes including attentive cognition are valued deductively according to their relation to control. Of this deductive treatment of motive processes the criticism may be made that those processes are more fundamental than the concept from which their value is deduced. Though the race will be perpetuated through the action of the two appetites mentioned so that all individuals must inherit those appetites, yet, in a large proportion of those who survive, those appetites may be inhibited by stimuli of other kinds and by social beliefs. Though these inhibiting forces are comparatively recent, the literature of social origins being largely a description of practices which have grown up around the appetites for food and

and Sciences, Vol. V. "P. 16.
 * P. 14. See also, "The Province of Social Psychology," Congress of Arts