Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/543

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY $ 2 9

have adopted a formal conception of an ethical criterion which presupposes rejection of all the other formal ethical conceptions that are inconsistent with it (p. 509). What we are now after is a content for our formal conception of the ethical. We want to find the marks by which we may be able to say of a given situation : This association is more highly moralized than that ; or this activity of the state makes more entirely for a wholly harmonized situation than another.

The program which we propose cannot be outlined in further detail in this paper, but some of the clues which it will follow are indicated in the following propositions : The order of asso- ciational development may be symbolized by the terms: one, struggle ; two, moralization ; three, socialization. The differentia observed in the series are quantitative rather than qualitative, i. e., we trace a passage from less to more integration in a common process. The symbolic terms chosen are selected, not because they are supposed to be exclusive, but because they are evidently nonexclusive. Each connotes something of the others. One involves a minimum of three. Three contains a minimum of one. Two is merely an arbitrarily chosen stadium between one and three. It is potentially and in part actually in one ; it is devel- oped and extended in three. Morality, as we propose to use the term, is the type of modus vivendi recognized at any given stage of the associational process by the persons conscious of associa- tion, as appropriate to their association. Not the persons pass- ing judgment, but the associational process itself which they implicitly judge, renders the last valuation of a morality which it is possible for men to justify. When struggle has become so moralized that it loses the outward marks of struggle in regularly coordinated interchange among all the persons in contact, under the prevailing idea that the good of the whole is paramount to the good of the parts considered as having an existence in antithesis with the whole, we have a quantitatively intense asso- ciation, with a modus vivendi of its own which contrasts sharply with all the previous mechanical regulations of categorical morality.

Again, the stages between struggle and socialization may be