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, however, if we should say that social ends are an expression of genuine human interests, while individual ends express merely 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 i to xiv.

in

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 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 development begins to overlap the former.

Human groups, then, begin early to be conscious of distinct group-ends. The lowest in the scale is that of the horde, and then presently of the race. Each may be hard pressed in the struggle for food. It has, consequently, an intense group-desire to keep the group intact, as the means of defending the sources of food; and, for the same reason, to weaken and beat off or destroy all rival hordes or races.

The ends which the groups pursue, as they develop from the horde, vary in two ways, which we may call extension and content. The former is represented somewhat ideally by the rising scale in the left-hand column. The latter may be represented by combinations of terms in the other columns.

We may find a group at Stage III of conflict-development, for instance. Suppose we take Sparta or Athens as our illustration. The society leads a very close and exclusive life. Its purposes are bounded by its own political confines. People beyond these boundaries are slightly esteemed. When accident brings the Spartans or Athenians into intercourse with outside individuals or states, the standard of conduct toward them is distinctly less sympathetic and humane than the public and private standards which the state or the population shows in domestic intercourse. Thus the social end, as such, is restricted in its extent. Meanwhile, in Athens, at the age of Pericles, many individuals have desires which we might represent as follows:

Desire=a+b+c+d+exiv + f vii.

Accordingly, the social end of Athens, compounded of many individual desires, might be symbolized, as to its content, in this way:

Social end = a+b+c+dvill+exii+fiv.

I. e., every society whatsoever will have, in addition to its primary social end of self-existence, a qualitative end, which is the algebraic sum, so to speak, or, better, a chemical compound, of the desires cherished by its individual members within the realm of the several great interests.

Having thus pointed out the meaning of the phrase "social ends" in general, and having indicated that every human

association, however minute, has its peculiar social ends, subordinate, as the members and the association itself may be, to a hierarchy of more inclusive ends, we are prepared to see that identification of the precise ends cherished and pursued by any society is a very considerable item in the program of getting an understanding of that society. The desires of individuals and of societies, from least to greatest, give us, on the one hand, our means of interpreting the social process as a whole; and, on the other hand, our conception of the social process as a whole gives us a basis of comparison by which to pass judgment upon the wisdom or the unwisdom, the progressiveness or the obstructiveness, of the social ends actually in view in the particular societies with which we are dealing.'

All that has been said thus far in this paper is an argument to the effect that, for a long time to come, the chief value of sociology will be derived from the use of its distinctive point of view, rather than from a subject-matter to which sociology can maintain an exclusive claim. Our argument is that human life cannot be seen whole and real unless it is construed in the terms which we have discussed. We do not know anything unless we know it in its relationships. The details of human experience are as meaningless as a form of type knocked into pi, unless we have the clues which enable us to distribute and reset the events. We have called the terms treated in this paper "the primary concepts of sociology." It is hardly worth while to offer here a justification of that designation. In brief, it will be found, after a little experience in studying society with the use of these concepts, that the others to which we now turn, are either details which are met so soon as analysis grows precise, or they are notions necessarily implied by the larger conceptions. Indeed, we have used most of them already, whether they have been named or not.

It is not necessary to offer any general principle about the relative importance of the different concepts. It is sufficient to

'A group of hypothetical illustrations of social ends of different grades, in the case of states, is proposed in AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. VI, pp. 512-31. Formulas of the social end in general are proposed loc. cit., pp. 201-3.

say that every one of those named in our schedule is actually present, in some degree or other, in every stage or part or episode of the social process large enough to be observed. Analysis of a given section of experience involves use of these categories, then, not in any mechanical way, as though they were equally prominent and equally significant. It involves their use just as the different phases of reaction known to chemistry are employed in analyses of physical substances, i. e., in precisely the proportions in which they prove to have significance in the case in hand. We proceed to mention a series of concepts which are not of one and the same order of generality. Indeed, we have been obliged to employ most of them in the foregoing discussion. Although it would be desirable to place them more definitely in hierarchical relations, we must be content merely to schedule them provisionally.

11. Contact.—This concept has been emphasized earlier in this series. We have said that the most general and inclusive way in which to designate the subject-matter with which sociology must deal is by saying that it is concerned with all human contacts. One detail which cannot possibly be eliminated from the social condition, or from the idea of the social, is contact of one person with others.'

12. Differentiation.-We might recall Spencer's formula of evolution, viz.:

Evolution is an integration of matter and a concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the relative motion undergoes a parallel transformation (First Principles, sec. 145). Reduced to a single word, this formula would be that evolution is differentiation. The rest of the formula merely characterizes certain features of this differentiation.

The social process, as a part of the world-process in general, is likewise a collection of differentiations. One way of telling the story of every individual life, or of universal history, or of anything intermediate, would be to narrate the differentiations

Vid. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. V, pp. 798, 799, and Vol. VI, pp. 328, 329.