Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/173

Rh a choice, as the outgoing reference of his wish toward the variety of objects and activities which his social environment affords him; (4) a command, as an expression of his wish to, or its tacit recognition by, a person competent in bodily and psychic powers and social equipment to obey; (5) a service, as the appropriation to the master through the slave of the social objects of his wish; (6) coercion, as the guarantee that his mere wish will be thus satisfied.

Coercion, therefore, is simply a means of commanding and securing for consumption the services of others. The same is also the aim of persuasion. We must now seek a criterion which will clearly distinguish the one from the other.

The word "sanction," originally applied to the binding religious quality of an oath, has been extended by the jurists to mean obedience enforced by law through rewards and penalties; then by the utilitarian moralists to mean the sources of pleasure and pain which, in turn, are the motives to conduct; and finally by the psychologists, like Baldwin, to mean "all the reasons which are really operative on the individual, in keeping him at work and at play in the varied drama of life." With so broad a definition, it is necessary to divide and subdivide the many sanctions of life according to some basis of classification. Baldwin marks off the "biological" sanction as the unconscious ground for action found in the functions of the physical organism. With these we have nothing to do. But the conscious sanctions are either "personal," "the reasons which a man sets before himself for the activities in which he engages," or "social," "the reasons for action which bear in upon the individual from the social environment." It is Baldwin's purpose to show that there is no antithesis between these two classes of sanctions, for both of them, including the sanctions of sovereignty, are really the personal sanctions of the "average man." Now, it is questionable whether much is gained by so broad a definition of sanctions. It is preferable to limit the word to the social sources of motives originating in the environment,