Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/78

 64 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The somewhat different concept of this element "interest" which we posit may be indicated at first with the least possible technicality. We may start with the familiar popular expres- sions "the farming interest," "the railroad interest," "the packing interest," " the milling interest," etc, etc. Everyone knows what the expressions mean. Our use of the term "inter- est" is not strictly parallel with these, but it may be approached by means of them. All the "interests" that are struggling for recognition in business and in politics are highly composite. The owner of a flour mill, for example, is a man before he is a miller. He becomes a miller at last because he is a man ; i. e., because he has interests in a deeper sense than that of the popular expressions which impel him to act in order to gain satisfactions. The clue to all social activity is in this fact of individual interests. Every act that every man performs is to be traced back to an interest. We eat because there is desire for food, but the desire is set in motion by a bodily interest in replacing exhausted force. We sleep because we are tired, but the weariness is a function of the bodily interest in rebuilding used-up tissue. We play because there is a bodily interest in use of the muscles. We study because there is a mental interest in satisfying curiosity. We mingle with our fellow-men because there is a mental interest in matching our personality against that of others. We go to market to supply an economic interest, and to war because of some social interest of whatever mixed or simple form.

With this introduction we may venture an extremely abstract definition of our concept "interest." In general an interest is an unsatisfied capacity, corresponding to an unrealized condition, and it is predisposition to such rearrangement as would tend to realize the indi- cated condition? Human needs and human wants are incidents in

1 Professor Dewey's formula is : " Interest is impulse functioning -with reference to self-realization" Our formula attempts to express a conception of something back of consciousness, and operating more generally than in facts of consciousness. Whether this philosophical conceit is defensible or not is unessential for the remainder of our analysis. All that is strictly necessary for sociology proper is the later analysis, which might be performed in terms of " interest," either in our own or in the psycho- logical sense, or of " desires " in a more empirical sense. Indeed, the latter is the method to be applied in the following discussion.