Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/470

 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

still remain problems that the wisest cannot solve, and upon these men will divide and debate and reflect and experiment until one by one they, too, reach their solution and give way to still subtler, more delicate and more ennobling subjects of dis- cussion and emulation.

But if the purpose of sociology is the betterment of society it becomes necessary to inquire what constitutes social better- ment. This may at first sound puerile, because everybody is supposed to know. But let anyone undertake to formulate it and he will not find it so easy. When we specify civilization, enlightenment, morality, progress, etc., as the criteria of social improvement we only multiply the number of terms requiring definition. There is really only one test of the comparative goodness, i. e. t the better or worse, in anything, and that is what may be called the ethical test, viz., the degree of satisfaction that it yields. One thing is better than another if it yields a greater amount of satisfaction. It comes down to the agreeable and the disagreeable as the positive and negative states. What is more agreeable is better. What is more disagreeable is worse. The agreeable is the good. The disagreeable is the bad. Look- ing at the condition of society as a whole we see that this is the test of utility and the basis of economics. The positive social state is the "pleasure economy" of Patten. The "end in view" of Cunningham is the " greatest happiness" of Bentham. Social betterment is the passage out of a pain economy into a pleasure economy, or from an economy that yields only the satisfaction of physical needs to one that fills out the higher spiritual aspira- tions. Social progress is that which results in social betterment as thus defined, and all the other supposed ends are either simply means to this end or they are names for the various aspects of it.

Now, "social evolution " is the term commonly employed for the general spontaneous movement in the direction above indicated. There may be races that have degenerated. Empires have declined and fallen. But new races and new empires in other parts of the world, usually recruited from the tlite of the