Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/212

 198 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sense of duty does not at first apply in the region of known utili- ties. " Ought" is an oracle out of the unknown, and satisfactions within this sphere arise from belief that somehow the self has adjusted inscrutable conditions that insure the desirable surplus of well-being beyond that which can be specifically imagined, or which can be procured by conduct whose relation to ends is supposed to be a matter of course. 1

It turns out that both naive and reflective men have sooner or later come to cherish the idea of a sphere of human activity the content of which is a Tightness that has an existence inde- pendent of other departments of human conduct or condition. Even today it is in comparatively rare instances only that right- ness is thought as a quality of conduct proper to all action that deserves any place in human life, and as having no content apart from such ordinary action. The savage, performing mummeries which are senseless except for the fiction that they are agreeable to the fetich, is merely a less intellectual Immanuel Kant finding the oughtness of the ought simply in its being categorical. We have only lately learned, and only a few of us have learned yet, that there is no supposed imperative, whether from the assumed source of absolute obligation or elsewhere, which can be obeyed without setting in motion antecedents and consequents within the known realm of health or wealth or sociability or knowledge or beauty. This fact, however, is steadily recasting the precepts of formal morality in terms of demonstrable utility. It remains true that with all the past men of whom record survives, and with all living men in the civilized world, the conception of a distinct Tightness sphere, separated not merely in quality but in content from other spheres of human conduct, has been a tremendous positive, or at least negative, influence. It is not at all necessary to an understanding of the human individual up to date to decide whether there is an actual realm for Tightness apart from conduct in the spheres where men gain health, wealth, sociability, knowl- edge, and beauty satisfactions. This is a capital problem in its

1 RATZENHOFER (Sociologische Erkenntnis, p. 64) uses the term the " transcen- dental interest." His analysis does not precisely coincide with the above, but the differences are probably unimportant.