Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/216

202 sociologists in general. Possibly they have no teleological conceptions in common. Very few of them, if any, however, would dissent from the following propositions, viz.:

We think of the life of men, from first to last, as a somehow related whole.

We think of the whole made up by the procession of human lives from generation to generation as a process accomplishing certain results.

We regard the ongoing of this life-process as itself sufficient end and reason for intelligent cooperation by thinkers and actors within the process.

We have the conception that maximum completeness either of the individual or of the social process depends upon the highest degree of reinforcement of each aspect of the process by the other.

It is not equally certain that all sociologists would indorse our more specific propositions about the content and the indicated end of the life-process. Whatever variations they may propose in detail, living sociologists are not likely to assume that the social reality is essentially different in composition and in tendency from our previous description, viz., it is a progression, beyond any limit which we can imagine, in quantitative and qualitative developing, apportioning, and satisfying health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness desires.

Since teleological assumptions must necessarily play an important role in all sociological thinking, we venture a slightly varied repetition of the foregoing statement, viz.:

The life of the individual is a process of achieving the self that is potential in the interests which prompt the health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness desires.

The same perception in its social scope dictates this formula: Society, or human association, is a continuous process of realizing a larger aggregate and better proportions of the health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness desires.

This is the end which is visible to us as interpretation and justification of the whole life-process. All that goes on among men actually is valued by them with conscious or unconscious