Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/252

 240 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ety, is another of those cardinal realities in which we find clues to the mysteries of human experience. From the savage, who is merely a wolf in the human pack, to the court circle of London or Berlin or Vienna or the Vatican, every individual is carried along, partly by his own desires, partly in spite of them, in the current of the social ends pursued by the society to which he belongs. All human experience is thus not merely a fabric of personal desires, but those personal desires oper- ate in a very large measure impersonally. That is, the desires get organized into institutions, and those institutions then in turn make requisitions upon persons, just as though the institu- tions actually had an existence of themselves, outside of and above the desires of the persons who make the institutions. We have just seen this in the case of the family. As members of the family the man and the woman composing it enforce demands upon both which may sharply antagonize each. These institutionalized demands become the ends which associations of persons pursue. The acts which individuals perform would be unaccountable if we did not know the social ends that domi- nate individual ends. Why do I obey the laws ? Why do I perform jury service ? Why do I pay taxes ? Why do I observe certain conventional proprieties ? My strictly individual prefer- ences may take up arms against each of these every time it demands my conformity. To remain in society at all, or to remain in good standing in society, which may seem to me more important, I must subordinate some of my individual ends to the social ends.

Later chapters of sociology have to consider a great number of relations which depend upon the fact here involved; e. g., when are social ends and when are individual ends progressive, or retrogressive ? Our present object is merely to give the fact of social ends its proportionate emphasis.

Since social ends are organizations of the desires of persons, since they are the demands enforced by common elements in the desires of numbers of persons increasing with the size of the society, the presumption is strong that the social ends which control at any time correspond more closely with the real inter-