Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/525

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 5 1 1

continuous process of realizing an increased aggregate and better proportions of the health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and Tightness satisfactions. Analysis of associations so consid- ered should be in accordance with the teleological criterion. Associational activities must be classified with reference to their respective relations to different parts of this complex end.

In other words, human association is always, from smallest to largest, from lowest to highest, a process of producing utili- ties of one sort or another ; i. e., of catering to human desire for satisfactions of varying degrees of complexity. We have only two relatively developed examinations of associational activities from this point of view, viz., economics and philosophical civics. The latter may be said to organize a conspectus of social activi- ties on the basis of their relation to a certain sort of moral utility, in brief and in chief the maintenance of conventional order, i. e., utilities which are in form apparently referable to the sociability interest ; in content, however, they distribute themselves among all the interests. The former attempts to set forth all human activities on the basis of their relation to the production of utilities that have a material measure. Hardly an overt act performed by human beings escapes the notice both of civics and of economics, but from the point of view of either the same acts fall into an order of importance quite different from that which would emerge if we should attempt to scale the value of the same activities with reference to either of the other utilities.

For instance, if we were to name the most important activi- ties of the last century, or thereabouts, the different human satis- factions being in turn the standard, we might decide that, from the point of view of health, all that men have done scales down from the value of the discoveries of anaesthesia, and of the pro- cesses of disease propagation. We might say that the wealth interest has been most served by the engineering and mechanical workshops, from James Watt's tea-kettle to Edison's laboratory; and we might rank all else that men have done in proportion to its share in applying or inventing wealth-producing devices. We might say that sociability utilities have ranged in value from the new impulse launched into the world by the American Declaration