Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/526

 5 1 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of Independence to the quietest " pleasant Sunday afternoon " in any slum district in England. We might decide that, from the point of view of knowledge utility, the center of human action has been Darwin's collection of observations, and all other actions have had rank according to their relation to the emerging evolutionary concept. Without presuming to imagine what would be a plausible theory of aesthetic graduation, we may suppose, in the case of the Tightness utilities, that the transfer- ence of the moral meridian from heaven to earth, and the sub- stitution of positive for speculative criteria of values, will prove to be the summit from which to scale the relative significance of other activities in this realm.

What is the meaning of the actions of associated men, the different utilities in which men are interested being in turn the criterion ? What then is the meaning and value, at any given time, of the whole plexus of activities carried on by an associa- tion, in view of the interest of each and all of the members in each and all of these distinguishable utilities ? These are the questions that set the tasks of distinguishing and classifying associations.

Our present limits permit only a sketch of the plan of classi- fication to which these suggestions point. In the first place, we would distinguish four phases which human association on a large scale presents :

1. Biologic association.

2. Economic association.

3. Civic association.

4. Ethic association.

Whether these phases are in any association chronologically separable is not a capital question. They mark associations with different ratios of prominence at different stages of socie- tary evolution. In phase I there may or may not be marks of distinction from the associations of lower animals. At all events it is the phase in which the physical and physiological factors predominate, in contrast with the factors that hold the balance in the other phases. It is the kind of association in which the classifications of physical anthropologist and ethnolo- gist are of paramount importance.