Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/533

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 519

With analysis of civic states carried to this point we are surely in a position to see that the relation of this civic analysis to the previous economic analysis, and then to the antecedent biologic analysis, is precisely like the relation previously described between the economic and the biologic. With reference to the civic ends the subdivisons of the economic and of the biologic factors involved in procuring the ends are significant in ways that give them a civic standing entirely different from their logical place in their peculiar hierarchy. At every step we encounter the questions of fact : Does the civic association domi- nate the economic and the biologic, or does the biologic or the economic element dominate the civic ? Assuming that we have states in which the civic motive dominates i. e., the intention to maintain order for the sake of order the facts of economic or biologic modification of the associations and subassociations so motived would as before constitute varieties and subvarieties of the civic associations.

Let us imagine now that we have states which may be described as ethical in the special sense above indicated, i. e., they have posited a certain estimate of conduct values as making for some conception of life, in the individuals and in the whole, that is held to be superior to civic order or to economic success, or to both combined. In fact, we would neither claim nor admit that such states exist today. The category is highly specu- lative, but we shall hereafter attempt to justify it as a category. In the hypothetical quality of state now in question the motive which is foremost and uppermost and undermost is realization of the controlling conception of life. We may suppose that one of these ideas of the social end is the assurance of felicity after death ; another, the development of maximum justice among the members of the association ; another, the production of a few of the most highly evolved individuals possible; another, the pro- duction of a population as large as possible composed of indi- viduals all of whom exercise the franchise of self-expression in the highest measure permitted by their endowment. Again, and to the degree in which the several motives dominate, we shall have four distinct types of the ethical state, and we might at last