THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 201
individual is, in its origin, a phenomenon of association. The nurture of the young is an episode of association. The daily life of the vast majority of men, civilized or uncivilized, is in part activity within one or more associations. We may think of separate persons as pursuing a career that is an affair of their own isolated individuality, or strictly between themselves and nature, or between themselves and God. If we put this construction upon the life of any person, however, we falsify his life. Every man is what he is as a resultant in part of the pressure of the human associations within which his personality has its orbit. The concept " human life," whether we try to construct it for individuals or for the race at large, is a fictitious and unreal pic- ture unless it includes the notion "association." Association is the universal medium in which the individual comes to separate existence. Association is the universal activity in which the individual completes his existence by merging it into the larger life of all individuals.
5. The teleological assumption. It is probably true that we cannot fully think anything without construing it in some teleo- logical relation. Whether we think of men in the most transient and limited associations, or whether we think of the experience of the race as a single inclusive associational process, we are compelled to think sooner or later of the end indicated in the nature of the reality in question. That human conditions may be interpreted with reference to an endless variety of ends, innumerable philosophies and philosophies of history prove. Human associations have over and over again been thought as having their ultimate purpose beyond and outside of themselves. Again they have been thought as having implicitly in themselves their own end and reason. Between these two latter concep- tions it is not necessary for the sociologist as such to choose, particularly if he is content to think of human associations both as having a proximate end in themselves, and also as probably having more ultimate ends beyond .the range of sociological vision. Some conception, however, of the proximate or ultimate goal toward which society tends is a necessary finial of sociological theory. No one can speak with authority at this point for the
