THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 183
human individual corresponding with the concept "the economic man." The economic man, however, although but a segment of the actual man of whom we have record or experience, is by no means a mere alias of the wealth desire as we apprehend it. The economic man is a relatively very advanced and complex social product, not a simple social element. The economic man is not a plain affinity for wealth. Perhaps he is a more expert and persistent scatterer than accumulator of wealth. Perhaps wealth is almost altogether a means with him, and scarcely to any appreciable degree an end. Perhaps he plays the economic game just as another plays whist or billiards or golf. Perhaps he wants wealth because his wife wants society. Perhaps he wants wealth in order to propagate his creed, or to punish his enemy, or to win a maid, or to buy a title, or to control a party. In either case the economic man is a man of highly mixed motives, and it is curious that there has been in all our economic literature so little analysis of the wealth desire in distinction from the forms of economic action in which the wealth motive is largely mediate. The fact that most of the things deemed desirable in highly developed society are to be accomplished only with the aid of wealth obscures more than it reveals the intimate nature of the wealth desire proper. When men want wealth for reasons extrinsic to itself they are specimens of "the economic man," to be sure, but they are exemplifying the fact that the economic man is prompted by desires other than the wealth desire. Some men indeed the primal animal in each one of us want wealth for the sake of the physical sensations that come from consuming it. Dialecticians might find it easy to maintain that in this case the health stimulus rather than the wealth stimulus is primary. At all events, when men want wealth for its own sake the impulse appears to be an instinct of a creative sort, a desire to control nature or to conform nature to the agent's ideas.
In one fraction of his nature man is an eagerness to be a god. If autonomy, in the most restricted sense, satisfied this urgency, health would be a realization of the human ambition of sover- eignty, i. e., complete autonomy of the physical organism. Man
