Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/797

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 777

properties of the external world and certain properties of human nature. The latter are the desire for wealth, the aversion to labor, and the reluctance to postpone present gratifications. The first of these calls into being productive energies, the second and third limit this energy, the one in respect to labor, the other in respect to capital. All three co-operating distribute productive energy among places, seasons, occupations, and enterprises in a way that is termed "economic."

It would be a mistake to regard these subjective foundations of economics as simple traits of human nature. The aversion to labor has in it, indeed, an element of organic repugnance to sustained effort. But it also contains a social factor, namely a conventional disesteem of labor derived from the stigma that a leisure class attaches to the functions of the industrial class.

As to the desire for wealth, it is exceedingly complex. It has a three-fold tap-root in hunger, or the craving for food, want, or the craving for clothing and shelter, and the love of bodily ease which expresses itself in a demand for comfort. Its side roots, moreover, connect it with nearly all the specific desires we have considered in the foregoing pages. The passion for sex spurs a suitor to amass the riches that can win him his bride. The lust of power is a demand for the wealth that procures power. The craving for beauty is a demand for costly artistic products. The religious impulse gives off a demand for the material accessories of worship. Even the most spiritual wants demand leisure for their satisfaction, and wealth is a means to leisure. The acquisi- tive lust is further whetted by the honor that attaches to profuse consumption and conspicuous waste.

Thus sooner or later all the cravings of human nature put in a requisition for wealth, and the confluence of these tributaries with the main stream of desire rolls down a veritable Nile-flood of greed which beslimes, yet stimulates, nearly every profession and function in society. This generic virtue of wealth it is, which makes it stand for desirability in the abstract, and gives rise to the myth that the lust of acquisition is the sole motive of human endeavor, the direct or remote cause of all social phenom- ena, the single force that holds together the social frame even