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 494 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

prejudicial to our perception. We are not bent on filling out a schedule of sciences that shall be schematically uniform. All we want is to find a way of reporting what actually is. If one of these elements absorbs more life-force than another, we cer- tainly do not want it to figure in sociology as equal to each of the other terms in the social equation. Our starting-point is that men carry into all their associations tacit or express requisitions for all these kinds of satisfaction. All the activities that go on among associated men are the actual response that action makes thus far to these implicit desires. The associational activities are the process of satisfying these desires in so far as the process goes on at all. If we are right in our hypothesis that associated human life is to be understood in the large only as the entire system of functionings with reference to the ends indicated by the six desires which we detect ; and if we are right in presup- posing that associated human life will become a process that approaches completeness in proportion as it functions with refer- ence to the several satisfactions in accordance with some ratio not yet discovered, we should expect to find, meanwhile, that the several ends are very unequally and disproportionately pro- vided for in present society. Specific exhibits of the actual situation, however, will serve not merely to describe what is. They will at the same time amount, at least in a general way, to teleological indications.

The foregoing suggestions afford another view of the appall- ing complexity of our subject-matter. It may be further indi- cated with the help of an illustration drawn from one of Herbert Spencer's doctrines. In discussing the ethics of voting Spencer declares that equity would be most fully realized in a state in which " there is not a representation of individuals, but a repre- sentation of interests." 1

The obvious reply is that interests are essentially individual. All human interests are primarily individual interests. They are inseparable, in fact, from the individuals to whom they pertain. Interests that are more than individual get that plus character, not by differing in kind from individual interests, but by being

1 Principles of Ethics, Vol. II, p. 192.