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 200 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

individuals concerned. We must know, on the other hand, the workings of the several groups of institutions that have their rea- son for existence in their service to these desires. More than this, we cannot avoid valuation of the life-processes, past and present. We are bound to make the whole process, as we observe it, pass judgment upon those kinds and proportions of satisfaction which the persons concerned enjoy in the health and wealth and sociability and knowledge and beauty and Tightness realms. The form of judgment which sociology aims at authority to pass upon any piece of social conduct is this : The conduct in question does or does not make for the most and the best development, adjust- ment, and satisfaction of the six divisions of desire known to be typically human. If none but responsible men presumed to represent sociology, it would be gratuitous to point out that social science is at present very far from competence to sanction such appraisals except on the most restricted scale, and even then in cautiously tentative shape. The judgment of the most mature sociologist about the tendency of concrete social conditions is at least no more certain to be correct than the prediction of an experienced sailor about tomorrow's weather.

4. The associational assumption? It is true in more than one sense that "none of us liveth to himself." We live and move and have our being as parts of each other. There is no such phenomenon within the range of our knowledge as an absolute individual. Every member of the human race gets his personality through direct and immediate partnership with other members of the human race, and through indirect contact with all the human family. We are what we are by virtue of association with other men. This association is conscious or unconscious. It is constant or variable. It is intimate and inclusive, or casual and exclusive. It is friendly and conservative and constructive, or it is hostile and subversive and destructive. If there are any other absolutely universal facts in the world of people beside the existence of the people themselves, surely one of those facts is the existence of associations between the people, or the exist- ence of the people in associations. The physical life of each

1 Cf. above, pp. 45, 47, 60.