Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/76

 62 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Comtes and I submit the main barrier to the successful understanding of society is removed.

At the same time there should be no difficulty in getting it understood that, while biology and psychology have to do with the individual when he is in the making, sociology wants to start with him as the finished product. There is a certain impos- sible antinomy about this, to be sure, for our fundamental con- ception is that the individual and his associations are constantly in the reciprocal making by each other. Nevertheless, there are certain constant aspects of the individual which furnish known terms for sociology. They are aspects which present their own problems to physiology and psychology on the one hand, and to sociology on the other ; but in themselves they must be assumed at the beginning of sociological inquiry.

Before discussing the more immediately sociological aspects of the individual assumption, then, a fragment of the author's philosophy of the individual may be stated. The subsequent analysis is not dependent upon these conceptions, but for pur- poses of exposition it is convenient to put them together.

To the psychologist the individual is interesting as a center of knowing, feeling, and willing. To the sociologist the indi- vidual begins to be interesting when he is thought as knowing, feeling, and willing something. In so far as a mere trick of emphasis may serve to distinguish problems, this ictus indi- cates the sociological starting-point. The individual given in experience is thought to the point at which he is available for sociological assumption, when he is recognized as a center of activities which make for something outside of the will. These activities must be referred primarily to desires, but the desires themselves may be further referred to certain universal inter- ests. In this character the individual becomes one of the known or assumed terms of sociology. The individual as a center of active interests may be thought both as the lowest term in the social equation and as a composite term whose factors must be understood. These factors are either the more evident desires, or the more remote interests which the indi- vidual's desires in some way represent. At the same time it