Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/220

 208 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

To distinguish the pedagogical from the sociological use of the term "interest," we may say pedagogically of a supposed case : "The boy has no interest in physical culture, or in shop-work, or in companionship with other boys, or in learning, or in art, or in morality." That is, attention and choice are essential elements of interest in the pedagogical sense. On the other hand, we may say of the same boy, in the sociological sense: " He has not discovered his health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and Tightness interests." We thus imply that interests, in the sociological sense, are not necessarily matters of attention and choice. They are rather affinities, latent in persons, pressing for satisfaction, whether the persons are conscious of it or not; they are indicated spheres of activity which persons enter into and occupy in the course of realizing their personality.

Accordingly we have implied, and to some extent expressed, all that is involved in the fact of interests, in what was said in the previous section about the personal units. Interests are merely specifications in the make-up of the personal units. We have several times named the most general classes of interests which we find serviceable in sociology, viz.: health, wealth, socia- bility, knowledge, beauty, and Tightness. These have been suf- ficiently commented on in the passage already cited. 1 In that passage these interests were treated as elements of personality.*

We need to emphasize, in addition, several considerations about these interests which are the motors of all individual and social action: First, there is a subjective and an objective aspect of them all. It would be easy to use terms of these interests in speculative arguments in such a way as to shift the sense falla- ciously from the one aspect to the other ; e.g., moral conduct, as an actual adjustment of the person in question with other per- sons, is that person's "interest," in the objective sense. On the other hand, we are obliged to think of something in the person himself impelling him, however unconsciously, toward that moral conduct, z. *r., interest as "unsatisfied capacity," in the subjective

1 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. VI, pp. 177-200.

a For a somewhat more highly generalized expression of them as interests, vid. ibid., Vol. VI, pp. 60-66.