Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/213

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 199

proper place, but its solution would not in the least affect the terms of the analysis that describes today's individual. If we discover that the only possible content for the formal concept "Tightness" is fit conduct within the other realms, it remains true that men have very seldom so distributed the idea. To most men, whether they merely acquiesce in authority or reason for themselves, Tightness is an activity with a content as peculiarly its own as in the case of the health activities. The conception has nevertheless played and does play as important a part among human impulses as though there were no question about its per- fect coordination with the other objects of human desire. How- ever we construe the content appropriate to the Tightness desire, more precise analysis of the desire as such will ratify its authority and reinforce its sanctions. It will discover its sphere more and more definitely, however, within the ascertained scope of definable utility.

We may now add a little to the distinctness of the propo- sitions at the close of the last chapter. 1 So far as we have any knowledge of human experience, the career of men, either as individuals or as groups, has always been a process of getting content, correlation, and satisfaction for the desires after health and wealth and sociability and knowledge and beauty and right- ness. A first consequence of this perception, so far as it affects method, is that it sets us the task of learning how to find the real individuals concerned, when we undertake to investigate a social situation, past or present. It furthermore sets the task of discovering the actual output of the institutions maintained by the association in question for the service of these desires. It is doubtful if these conditions have ever been satisfied in any single instance of first-rate importance. Our historical exhibits are, consequently, as a rule, utterly inadequate sources for the sort of conclusions that the sociologists, and even the historians, want to draw. In order to be justified in assuming causal expla- nations, we must in every case be able to make out the approximate content and combination of these variable desires in the particular

Above, p. 65.