214 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the members of the community. The real problems involved are, first, to discover whether the law or the violation most nearly corresponds with the actual desires lodged in the persons; and, second, to devise ways and means of changing the balance of desires in the persons, in case immorality proves to be the community choice.
It is both a social and a sociological blunder to proceed as though the law were something precise, invariable, and absolute. The law is an approximate verbal expression of social choices which are mixed, variable, and accommodating in a very high degree. The law has no existence, as a real power, outside of the continued choices of the community that gives it effect. In a very real and literal sense it is necessary to get the algebraic sum both of the law-abiding and of the law-violating interests, in order to know just what the psychological choice of the com- munity, as distinguished from the formal law, really is.
This illustration has been carried out at such length because it is a kind of problem with which all of us are more or less in contact, and our ways of dealing with it so frequently show practical disregard of the elementary significance of the opera- tive interests concerned. The main point is that for theoretical or practical dealing with concrete social problems we need to be expert in detecting and in measuring the precise species of inter- ests that combine to form the situation. To carry the illustra- tion a little farther, most of the states in the American union agree to prohibit both intemperance and ignorance. In general, all of us, both communities and individuals, condemn both vices. We put our condemnation in the shape of laws regulating the liquor traffic, on the one hand, and laws establishing free and perhaps cprnpulsory education, on the other hand. When we attempt to define intemperance and ignorance, however, we find that we have infinitely varied points of view, and that our desires are correspondingly varied. We consequently lend very differ- ent elements of meaning and force to the formal laws. Some of us think that intemperance begins only when a man gets physi- cally violent, or fails to pay for the liquor he consumes; and that ignorance means inability to read and write. Others of us
