Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/219

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 2O?

example, bear to all the desires, and in what form are physical satisfactions sought ? So of each of the other desires.

No better brief illustration is at hand than one furnished by Professor Dewey in the paper mentioned above. 1 His thesis is that occupations determine the fundamental modes of human activity, and that the occupation, presupposing different imme- diate and remote objects of desire, and requiring variations in fundamental modes of activity, produces variations of mental type, including variations of desires. For instance, the hunting life differs in turn from the agricultural, the pastoral, the mili- tary, the trading, the manually productive, and intellectual, etc. Each of these different kinds of life presents distinct classes of problems. Each stimulates its peculiar classes of desire. Each promotes the formation of peculiar habits, in adapting effort to satisfaction of the desires. Each of these types of habit formed by an earlier and necessary stage in conquering the conditions of life tends to persist, and it reappears as a modifier of the impulses and habits that survive and are more appropriate in a later stage.

Whether the illustration goes as far as necessary or not, we have sufficiently emphasized the main contention : All social problems are problems of the relations of personal units that have in themselves distinct initiative and choice and force. This personal equation must be assigned its real value, in order to reach a true for- mula of the social reaction.

3. Interests. No single term is of more constant use in recent sociology than this term interests. We must use it in the plural partly for the sake of distinguishing it from the same term in the sense which has become so familiar in modern pedagogy. The two uses of the term are closely related, but they are not precisely identical. The pedagogical emphasis is rather on the voluntary attitude toward a possible object of attention. The sociological emphasis is on attributes of persons which may be compared to the chemical affinities of different elements. 2


 * Vid. p. 200.

2 Probably it is needless to say that the term " interest " in this connection, whether used in the singular or the plural, has nothing to do with the economic term