Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/77

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 63

must be admitted at the outset that these assumed interests are like the atom of physics. They are the metaphysical recourse of our minds in accounting for concrete facts. We have never seen or touched them. They are the hypothetical substratum of those regularities of conduct which the activities of individuals display.

In this connection the term "interest" is to be understood not in the psychological but in a teleological sense. 1 The sense in which we use the term is antecedent to that which seems to be predominantly in Professor Baldwin's mind in the following passages :

The very concept of interests, when one considers it with reference to him- self, necessarily involves others, therefore, on very much the same footing as oneself. One's interests, the things he wants in life, are the things which, by the very same thought, he allows others also the right to want ; and if he insists upon the gratification of his own wants at the expense of the legitimate wants of the " other," then he in so far does violence to his sympathies and to his sense of justice. And this in turn must impair his satisfaction. For the very gratification of himself thus secured must, if it be accompanied with any reflection at all, involve the sense of the " other's " gratification also ; and since this conflicts with the fact, a degree of discomfort must normally arise in mind varying with the development which the self has attained in the dialectical process described above.

On the one hand we can get no doctrine of society but by getting the psy- chology of the " socius " with all his natural history ; and on the other hand we can get no true view of the "socius" without describing the social condi- tions under which he normally lives, with the history of their action and reac- tion upon him. Or, to put the outcome in terms of the restriction which we have imposed upon ourselves the only way to get a solid basis for social theory based upon human want or desire, is to work out first a descriptive and genetic psychology of desire in its social aspects ; and, on the other hand, the only way to get an adequate psychological view of the rise and development of desire in its social aspects is by a patient tracing of the conditions of social environment in which the child and the race have lived and which they have grown up to reflect. 2

1 Here again we have a term which has insensibly grown into force in sociology, and it would require long search to trace its history. It may be found almost indis- criminately among the sociologists. Its use sometimes leaves the impression that the author attaches to it very little importance. In other cases it seems to be cardinal. No writer has made more of it than RATZENHOFER, Sociologische Erkenntnis, chap, ii, et passim.

3 Social and Ethical Interpretations, pp. 15, 16, 21, 22.