Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/196

 1 82 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

is impossible to substitute a formula that will correctly express the ratio between the health desire and the other desires, because the ratio is infinitely variable. Sometimes a man will forego all else for the privilege of continuing to exist. Again he will jauntily throw away his life for a principle or a sentiment or a passion. Today he will give his kingdom for the ransom of his body, and tomorrow he will stake life and fortune against tribute of a penny. We need not at present raise any of the baffling questions about the comparative significance of the several ele- ments of human desire. Our emphasis now is upon the fact that the actual individual of real life is made up of some proportion or other of the six desires which we have scheduled. One or more of these may be negligible quantities in exceptional cases, but in the average man each of them is always present, and occasions may arise when either of them will become dominant We do not know the real individual, then, until we recognize him as a resultant of these six desires in some power and proportion The health desire is the least questionable of all.

At this point we can indicate only a formal standard and application of this fact in sociological theory and in social praxis. There will always exist an implicit minimum standard of the health satisfactions. As in the case of each of the other constituent desires, this standard will vary with individuals and with groups. Whenever the individual or group status falls below a certain minimum of health condition, the life-process in the individual or the group is to that extent turned destructively against itself. The practical bearings of this and similar abstract generalizations that are to follow should suggest themselves. We must confine this part of the argument, however, to pure sociological theory. A later portion of the discussion will deal with the question, in the case of each of these desires in turn : What is the most and the best indicated by the known condi- tions of life, as available for men in each of these realms of satisfaction ?

The wealth desire. After a century and a quarter of the economic abstraction recommended by Adam Smith there is little call for debate over the existence of something in the