Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/218

 206 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

parts each of which can and does move of itself, and indeed the only way to get these personal units to move as persons is to call upon the motor machinery which is located in each person. When the engineer wants the locomotive to do its work, he does not appeal to trucks and driving-wheels and connecting-rods and boiler-pipes, etc., to exert motor energy of their own. He supplies an external energy. When society acts, it has no source of energy outside of the consciousness of the personal units who compose it. Thoughts and feelings in these units must set the units in motion. Thoughts and feelings in one unit must correspond with thoughts and feelings in many others in order that there may be positive social action. If the thoughts and feelings in the units fail to co-operate, there is simply negative or destructive reaction between them.

A profounder psychological analysis of the individual than is necessary for our purpose is both possible and necessary before we reach ultimate theorems of conscious action. We may con- tent ourselves, however, for sociological purposes, with going simply thus far, viz.: persons are centers of likes and dislikes, of sympathies and antipathies, of wants and aversions, of demands and of rejections, of desires and of disgusts. All action that goes on in society is the movement and counter- movement of persons impelled by the particular assortment of these feelings which is located in each. Society is what it is at any time as the resultant of all the efforts of all the personal units to reach each its own peculiar sort of satisfaction.

We have found it most convenient to group the wants which all men feel under six heads. Every desire which men betray may be analyzed down to elements which fall into these groups, viz.: (a) health, wealth, (<:) sociability, (d] knowledge, (e) beauty, (/) Tightness. 1 Our main proposition with reference to this analysis of the personal units is this : In order to have an adequate analysis of any social situation, past or present, it is neces- sary to have an account of the precise content and proportions of these several wants, both in typical persons of the society and in the group as a whole ; i. e., what proportion do the physical desires, for

1 Vid. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. VI, pp. 177-93.