Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/79

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 65

the series of events between the latent existence of human inter- ests, and the achievement of partial satisfaction. Human inter- ests, then, are the ultimate terms of calculation in sociology. On the human side the whole life-process, whether viewed in its individual or in its social phase, is at last the process of develop- ing, adjusting, and satisfying interests.

Two corollaries are suggested. They anticipate later stages of the argument, but it may be well to record them before they can be developed in detail. First, if we accept the foregoing descriptions as our formal expression of the social universal, we have in the reality so formulated a prescription of sociological tasks, and less directly of methods. Our problems are to classify and interpret human activities in terms of the desires that stimu- late them. Deeper philosophical problems at once come within the field of view in this connection, viz., tasks of interpreting the activities so analyzed in terms of the substratum of the desires which we have called interests. As sociologists, however, our competence does not extend into this field. Second, if the whole life-reality is the development, adjustment, and satisfaction of desires, the last standard of measure that we can apply in our judgments of conduct values is the effect of any activity in ques- tion upon the integrity of the process so described. Here is the clue to the ethics immanent in sociology. Conduct is good or bad in accordance with its value in promoting or retarding the total process of developing, balancing, and satisfying the desires potentially present among the associated persons. We judge that conduct to be good which seems likely to promote more than it hinders, or more than an available alternative would promote, all of this life-process which we are able to consider at one time. Conduct whose effect on the whole, considered by itself or in comparison with the effect of possible substitutes, is presumed to make against the going-on of this process we call bad. Our working scale of moral values is implicitly a record of the best estimates we have been able to form of the relative utility of different sorts of conduct for this life-process.

These corollaries will be elaborated in their proper place in our argument. Meanwhile the next chapter will proceed to