Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/253

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 241

ests of the persons in the association than their individual desires. That this has been the case, in the aggregate, more than the contrary, is evident if we believe that real human interests have, on the whole, been promoted by the course of events thus far in history. It would be a generalization much too sweeping, how- ever, if we should say that social ends are an expression of genuine human interests, while individual ends express merel} apparent or approximate interests. The contrary is often the case. It is more nearly true to say that the social ends are more likely to express the demands of essential interests when they emphasize functional wants, and less likely to correspond with these interests when they converge upon social structure.

Without attempting to reach an equation of the social and the individual ends, we may further illustrate the existence of the former by use of a diagram.

The interests implicit in every individual are scheduled in the horizontal line at the bottom of the diagram. Each of these interests may assert itself in desires that form a rising scale, through innumerable gradations. The diagram merely indicates these variations of the desires within the six interest-realms represented by the capital letters A-F, by the small letters a-f, with exponents from ' to xiv.

The left-hand column of the diagram follows Ratzenhofer. It means that there is a visible scale of progress in human society at large. To state Ratzenhofer's thesis we must use terms which come later in our schedule. But, in brief, the proposition is that men arrange themselves from the beginning in groups, which are at first small and exclusive. These groups grow larger, both by growth from within and by various sorts of assimilations and mergings. Starting at the bottom of the column, there are two distinguishable lines of development : first, that in which conflict between groups is the cardinal activity; second, that in which reciprocal interests of groups are recognized. These two lines of development are not absolutely separable in time. In general, the former is first in historical order; but, after a certain stage of progress, the latter develop- ment begins to overlap the former.