Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/793

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOG Y 773

as socii. The moral judgments, imperatives, and ideals they emit, although in the main telic, do betray considerable admixture of crude sentiment. The general reprobation of vice, idleness, waste, sacrilege, or impiety does not voice concern for the cor- porate welfare. It merely voices common, private sentiments. Of some .of our judgments abhorrence of the unnatural, for instance the roots run far down into our ancient, pre-social instincts.

At a moment when ethicians, weary of juggling conscience, innate ideas of right and wrong, the Ten Commandments, and what-not out of the individual mind, are coming to perceive the social bases of morality, one would not lay a straw in their way. Yet it is well to recognize that, after all is said, ethics is more than a mere wing of sociology. Some of the piers that support it rest in biology, some in individual psychology, some in social psychology, and some in social morphology.

Politics, like ethics, has the double task of explaining what is and determining what ought to be. In so far as it aims to arrive at principles for the guidance of political action, it is more like an art than a science, but it may be termed a normative science. Still, it is possible to regard matters of government as phe- nomena, and to study them with a view to ascertaining the causes and laws of their occurrence. Political science of this aetiological sort will stand in some close relation to sociology. Whether it will stand to it as part to whole or as special to gen- eral, depends, as in the preceding cases, on the specificity of the forces and facts it deals with.

Now, government is not the sphere of operation of character- istic forces, but the meeting-place of nearly all the kinds of forces present in social life. "The functions of the state," it has well been remarked, "are coextensive with human interests." This is true only because the more important human desires greed, vanity, sympathy with the weak, love of truth, passion for homogeneity, craving for justice make themselves felt in mould- ing the policy of government. One motive leads to public relief of the poor, another motive inspires state endowment of research, a third impels to the artificial assimilation of the foreign ele-