Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/509

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 495

permutations of individual interests. There is no way, therefore, to represent interests without representing or misrepresenting the individuals who are the ultimate repositories of the interests.

This particular case brings to view the rock on which the profoundest attempts to analyze human associations may split ; viz.: When we try to divide human associations in accord- ance with the impulses that create and maintain and move them, we soon confront the apparent dilemma that we must either give up the attempt in despair, or we must find a way of dis- membering individuals and of distributing the parts among the associations that they compose.

The same individual, for example, might schedule himself as a farmer for his health ; a lawyer for his wealth ; a member of a "four hundred " for his sociability ; of an academy of sciences for his knowledge ; of a musical society or an art league for his beauty ; of a lodge, or ethical-culture society, or reform club, or church for his Tightness. Unhappily for the purposes of science, our live individual is not accommodating enough to get all the satisfactions of any single desire in the activities which answer primarily to that desire. On the contrary, each of these desires may satisfy itself in part in every activity that answers to each other desire. Accordingly, there are very few individual activities, and perhaps still fewer associa- tions, that can be referred exclusively, even in a superficial way, to a single desire. More than this, if we think of individual interests as merged into the interests of associations, we find that the actual persons in whom the interests have their local lodg- ment are bodily in one association and spiritually in a dozen or a thousand other associations at the same time. Moreover, there seems to be no way of so bringing the different phases of their interest together that interests and the personnel of asso- ciations will coincide.

For instance, the members of a dairy association may be divided in health programs between Christian Science and Mor- monism, and Ann Leeism and frank libertinism. In response to social impulses they may distribute themselves between the Republican, Democratic, Populist, Prohibitionist, and Socialist