Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/457

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SCOPE AND METHOD OF FOLK-PSYCHOLOGY.
445

6. Animism (Religion, Myth, Superstition).

7. Jurisprudence, Politics (Formal control).

Morality, like intelligence, is a function of each of the foregoing captions. It represents predominantly the affective, as intelligence represents the intellectual, phase of consciousness. Language, reflecting the content of consciousness, and pathological conditions, marking the failure of normal corollations and instincts (unfitness, immorality), are valuable aids at every point.

Food and sex, like the foci of an ellipse, are the points about which the whole process turns. These were the great original stimuli to action and culture, and "making war, making love, and making things" have been very aptly called by Miss Simcox man's chief occupation. War has been primarily with reference to territory on which to find food; and in connection with this, and with that other form of war which we call "the struggle for existence," systems of law, politics, morals and religion have indirectly arisen. Technology, in its relation both to war and to industry, has been connected with food. Art reflects the affective side of the life process, and it has shown in its whole course a predilection for love and war. No very considerable body of art except architecture would remain, indeed, if we omitted these motives.

A statement of life in terms of food and sex is as crass, when applied to culture conditions, as the chemical definition of man as "forty pounds of carbon and nitrogen scattered through five pailfuls of water." But it is important to recognize that food and sex are the irreducible factors of social life; and beginning with these, we may hope to understand the meaning of the different variables of society: ideas, institutions, beliefs, sentiments, language, arts, literature—and to trace the "red thread" of consciousness through them.

The University of Chicago