Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/664

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650 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

reviews the possible experiences that beckon to him and passes upon them various judgments of approval or disapproval, attaches to them different degrees of esteem. And as are these valuations, so will be his choices and conduct. 1

Now the ascendency of the rational faculty and the growing habit of letting "I would" wait upon "I approve" gives society a new opening in its perpetual struggle with the anti-social nature of the individual. If it can get him to adopt its valua- tions of the goods of life, the problem of control will be con- siderably narrowed.

Civilization is not wholly the progress of the arts, the dis- covery of new and better ways of satisfying wants ; it is also the evolution of wants in number and variety, and the shifting of the accent from type to type. Food, drink, shelter, sex make up the animal group of wants. To this are added in the higher mammals curiosity and the desire for play and for com- panionship. Early man begins to be urged on by love of colors, of ornament, of noise, of rhythmic action in unison (dancing), by desires for festivity, converse, collective excitement, and social esteem. In the historic period the scale of wants is gradually extended by the spread of new habits of pleasure friendship and the higher forms of love, sympathetic pleasures, music, the delight of power, the charm of the beautiful, poetic and religious feeling, intellectual activity, the quest for truth, the thrill of the onlooker, cosmic emotion, and a multitude of others hard to name or classify. Now this development of wants has been hastened by a development of values largely due to the social factor. The visible evolution which results in the civilized man has not been a spontaneous ascent of the individual, but, in its later stages especially, has been assisted and presided over by society.

II.

How comes that mounting of desire that gives us moral civ- ilization ? How is it men come to spend themselves for excel-

1 Most illuminating on this point is Professor Giddings (Principles, Bk. IV, chap. 3), to whose exposition I am much indebted.