762 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the absence of normal opportunities and copies for imitation, would have turned out card or confidence men, keepers of gambling establishments, or thugs. There is, in fact, psycho- logically no more a sporting class than there is a class of col- lege men or a class of horse-breeders. The artist class, the business class, the sporting class, and the professional classes all contain a variety of psychic dispositions ; they are, in fact, rather trades than classes. That this is so is well illustrated by the case of college men. Many of these find their way into college because of special aptitude, but still more, perhaps, are born with a chance of going to college. Their parents recog- nize that it gives them an advantage, and can afford to let them have it ; and yet the fact of going to school, and especially to college, evidently predisposes a man to certain occupations, and pretty certainly closes others to him. He may very naturally become a teacher or physician, for instance, but he will hardly become a policeman, a pickpocket, or a farmer.
The instincts of man are congenital ; the arts and industries are acquired by the race and must be learned by the individual after birth. We have seen why the instinctive activities are pleasurable and the acquired habits irksome. The gambler rep- resents a class of men who have not been weaned from their instincts. There are in every species biological "sports" and reversions, and there are individuals of this kind among sporting men who are not reached by ordinary social suggestion and stimuli. But granting that what we may call the instinctive interests are disproportionately strong in the sporting class, as compared with say the merchant class, yet these instincts are also strongly marked in what may roughly be called the artist class ; and in spite of a marked psychic disposition for stimuli of the emotional type, and precisely because of this disposition, the artist class has a very high social value. Art products are, indeed, perhaps more highly esteemed than any other products whatever. The artist class is not, therefore, socially unmanage- able because of its instinctive interest, though perhaps we may say that some of its members are saved from social vagabond- age only because their emotional predisposition has found an
