GEORGE'S concern with poverty did not lie within the realm
of pity or of charity, as is the case with many of our prac-
tical sociologists; that is, his concern was not an msthetic one.
Neither did his interest in economics have a detached, "sci-
entific" character. And if it be said that this concern of his
was "ethical," that word must be understood as implying
nothing of the nature of pious exhortation. By an ethical
interest in the phenomenon of poverty and in the processes
of economic life, there is meant the frank realization that
human life, with all its ideals and hopes, all its "values," is
conditioned by the social setting in which it finds itself.
Morality, if it means anything, is an effort to enlarge and
enrich the dimension of human personality, to integrate the
individual so that his status as a social organism will be-
come more intelligible, more self-conscious. The ethical
concepts are concepts of expansion, attempts to widen the
boundaries of individual personality, to socialize that per-
sonality -- to personalize social forces. These ethical values,
then, these judgments that seek to develop and to direct
personality, can they be operative without a definite social
orientation?

Must it not be clear, that is, that the individual, with whom
ethics busies itself, is not something complete in himself? Is
not individuality rather a potentiality, a capacity for de-

-516-