Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/204

 1 90 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

which is involved in cultivation and enjoyment of music for its own sake. In both cases, as we have said in another con- nection, 1 the physical is the necessary vehicle of the spiritual, but it is unconsciously involved, and a negligible factor so far as the character of the paramount desire is concerned.

There are enlargements of life aside from advantages that spring from use of the material things which men create. Those that we have now to consider proceed directly from spiritual reactions with other men. In our philosophies of justice we have confined our calculations too closely to relations which might be expressed or measured in material terms. Moral the- orists have treated social relations almost exclusively as different arrangements into which men are assorted by care for their bodies and by pursuit of purchasable goods. We have had individual ethics, or the principles of physical and mental well- being considering the person as an isolated group of related operations. We have had the ethics of business, of politics, of religion. We have even had the ethics of social intercourse considered as a means to one of these other ends ; but no one has made it evident that there is an important section of life made up of conditions in which personality pure and simple reacts upon personality, and immediately assists or retards nor- mal satisfaction. No one, surely, has taken the further step of codifying the just balance of these purely spiritual relations.

When we observe that affinities for certain personal relations are manifested by some men, and when we discover the proba- bility that these affinities are latent, if not patent, in all men, we thereby reach another specification in our analysis of the real individual. The fact is that all men tend normally to desire contacts with other men of a sort to gratify their pure sense of personality. We mean by sociability, then, those elements in the relations of persons which correspond with this desire.

A primary and simple demand of the sociability desire may be illustrated by analogy with the leadings of the health desire. Parallel with the desire for bodily integrity is an equally naive and persistent desire for personal integrity. Each man embodies

1 Vid. above, p. 48.