Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/193

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 179

But we shall be very far from taking for granted the real individual with whom sociology has to reckon, if we picture either subjective or objective desires as fixed in quantity or in quality. Human desires are not so many mathematical points. They may rather be represented to our imagination as so many contiguous surfaces, stretching out from angles whose areas presently begin to overlap each other, and whose sides extend indefinitely.

This phase of the facts carries inspiring teleological implica- tions. We shall return to them in later papers. We shall try to show that in the facts to which we now refer there is a clue to a more precise content for a philosophy of life, individual and social, than we have hitherto attained, and that sociology must at last undertake to trace out the indications already partly legible in these known human desires. At present, however, we are concerned neither with prophecy nor with history, but with discrimination of what actually is. We are recording our per- ception of certain marks which, to the best of our present knowl- edge, always characterize the human individual, and which always, sooner or later, combine to carry on the human part of the social process. In brief, either the social process in the large, or that portion of the process which is comprised within the limits of an individual life, is a resultant of reactions between the six desires, primarily in their permutations within the individual, secondarily in their permutations between individuals, and always in their varied reciprocity with the non-sentient environ- ment. Each of these desires is incessantly conditioning and conditioned by each of the others. In scheduling them we are constantly tempted to digress into examination of their recipro- cal relations. Our aim in this section, however, is to keep the attention as steadily as possible upon these six desires in turn, as the ultimate human factors with which pure sociology has to deal.

To recapitulate : The sociological form of study of human association sets out from the point where physiology and psy- chology stop ; or rather it is more accurate to say that socio- logical study begins where physiology and psychology would