Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/210

 1 96 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

may recognize the aesthetic desire, and we may be familiar with some of the conduct which it prompts, without venturing to expound its implications. A literature of the beauty interest is rapidly developing; and the psychology and the sociology of feeling will doubtless be as thoroughly examined in the future as the psychology and sociology of knowing and willing. Mean- while a sociologist who is most painfully aware of his own incompleteness in this section of life may register the bare intel- lectual perception that life, at its largest, involves feeling of the aesthetic type, and conduct aimed at satisfaction of the feel- ing. In this case again the element in question is both a means to other elements of life, and an activity to be regarded as hav- ing a distinct and self-sufficient value in the scheme of factors that compose the individual.

(/) The tightness desire. It would be easy to make this item in our schedule a pretext for an excursion into the metaphysics and the psychology of ethics and religion. Sociology will at last contribute in its own way to these subjects, but it is a far cry from the elements with which we are now dealing to the con- clusions sought by ethical and religious philosophy. We should defeat our present purpose if we attempted to anticipate results in these territories. Our present proposition is not speculative. Like the substance of our claim under each of the preceding five heads, it is simply a generalization of facts that appear to be universal in the human individual. If they are not universal, the variations are to be accounted for by conditions which do not affect the fact that the traits so specified belong to the typical human person. We have seen that men act with reference to ends which prove to be health or wealth or sociability or knowledge or beauty, or their possible compounds. But this schedule does not include all the groups of stimuli that procure conscious human action. There remain activities which traverse the territory of each of these desires, but to the consciousness of the actors the activi- ties are not at the same time for the sake of satisfactions of either sort yet specified. In brief, men always manifest some species of premonition of a self somehow superior to their realized self, or of a whole outside of themselves with which it is desirable to