Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/787

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 767

social system such as law, politics, and morality derive from underlying economic conditions. The desire for wealth is the sole architect of ethical standards, legal norms, and the consti- tution of the state. As Loria takes the economic regime, so Vico and Fustel de Coulanges and Mr. Kidd take religion, Condorcet, Buckle, and Du Bois Reymond take science, as the primunt mobile of the social world. All this, however, reads into human events a unity and simplicity that is not really there. There is more than one desire operating in society. The endeavor to reduce all kinds of social facts to a single cause is vain.

An adequate ground for creating an inclusive science lies in none of the foregoing considerations. Let us, then, attack the problem from another side. Let us consider under what con- ditions the established social sciences might vindicate the sacred- ness of their ancient boundaries and successfully withstand any scheme of merger into a more general science.

Suppose that the desires that constitute the springs of human action and the causes of social phenomena resolved into certain basic cravings, each distinct from the others in its object, and each stimulating men to a particular mode of activity in order to satisfy it. Suppose, furthermore, these specific desires never crossed or modified one another and were intractable to the uni- fying control of any world-view or ideal of life. Suppose, finally, that each craving, or set of cravings, operating on a large scale, generated in society certain appropriate dogmas, creeds, activi- ties, and institutions, which remained separate from and unmixed with the collective manifestations of other cravings. Religious phenomena would then be unalloyed by ethical or political con- siderations. The forms of the family would be unaffected by industrial changes. The fine arts would run their course heed- less of revolutions in the sphere of ideas.

Under these conditions there might exist for each set of crav- ings at work in social life an independent body of knowledge. The craving for wealth would mark out a sphere for economics. The sex and parental cravings would do the same for genetics or the science of the family. The lust for power would define poli- tics. The sentiment of the wronged would fix the scope of juris-