CHAPTER VII

SOCIAL FORCES

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Sources of the Notion of Social Forces

The concept of interaction is an abstraction so remote from ordinary experience that it seems to have occurred only to scientists and philosophers. The idea of forces behind the manifestations of physical nature and of society is a notion which arises naturally out of the experience of the ordinary man. Historians, social reformers, and students of community life have used the term in the language of common sense to describe factors in social situations which they recognized but did not attempt to describe or define. Movements for social reform have usually met with unexpected obstacles. Public welfare programs have not infrequently been received with popular antagonism instead of popular support. Lack of success has led to the search for causes, and investigation has revealed the obstacles, as well as the aids, to reform embodied in influential persons, “political bosses,” “union leaders,” “the local magnate,” and in powerful groups such as party organizations, unions, associations of commerce, etc. Social control, it appears, is resident, not in individuals as individuals, but as members of communities and social groups. Candid recognition of the rôle of these persons and groups led popular writers on social, political, and economic topics to give them the impersonal designation “social forces.”

A student made the following crude and yet illuminating analysis of the social forces in a small community where he had lived: the community club, “the Davidson clique,” and the “Jones clique” (these two large family groups are intensely hostile and divide village life); the community Methodist church; the Presbyterian church group (no church); the library; two soft-drink parlors where all kinds of beverages are sold; the daily train; the motion-picture show; the dance hall; a gambling clique; sex attraction; gossip; the “sporting” impulse; the impulse to be “decent.”

“The result,” he states, “is a disgrace to our modern civilization. It is one of the worst communities I ever saw.”

The most significant type of community study has been the social survey, with a history which antedates its recent developments. Yet the survey movement from the Domesday Survey, initiated in 1085 by William the Conqueror, to the recent Study of Methods of Americanization by the Carnegie Corporation, has been based upon an implicit or explicit recognition of the interrelations of the community and its constituent groups. The Domesday Survey, although undertaken for financial and political purposes, gives a picture of the English nation as an organization of isolated local units, which the Norman Conquest first of all forced into closer unity. The surveys of the Russell Sage Foundation have laid insistent emphasis upon the study of social problems and of social institutions in their context within the life of the community. The central theme of the different divisions of the Carnegie Study of Methods of Americanization is the nature and the degree of the participation of the immigrant in our national and cultural life. In short, the survey, wittingly or unwittingly, has tended to penetrate beneath surface observations to discover the interrelations of social groups and institutions and has revealed community life as a constellation of social forces.

2. History of the Concept of Social Forces

The concept of social forces has had a history different from that of interaction. It was in the writings of the historians rather than of the sociologists that the term first gained currency. The historians, in their description and interpretation of persons and events, discerned definite motives or tendencies, which served to give to the mere temporal sequence of the events a significance which they did not otherwise possess. These tendencies historians called “social forces.”

From the point of view and for the purposes of reformers social forces were conceived as embodied in institutions. For the purposes of the historian they are merely tendencies which combine to define the general trend of historical change. The logical motive, which has everywhere guided science in formulating its conceptions, is here revealed in its most naïve and elementary form. Natural science invariably seeks to describe change in terms of process, that is to say, in terms of interaction of tendencies. These tendencies are what science calls forces.

For the purposes of an adequate description, however, it is necessary not merely to conceive change in terms of the interplay of forces, but to think of these forces as somehow objectively embodied, as social forces are conceived to be embodied in institutions, organizations, and persons. These objects in which the forces are, or seem to be, resident are not forces in any real or metaphysical sense, as the physicists tell us. They are mere points of reference which enable us to visualize the direction and measure the intensity of change.

Institutions and social organizations may, in any given situation, be regarded as social forces, but they are not ultimate nor elementary forces. One has but to carry the analysis of the community a little farther to discover the fact that institutions and organizations may be further resolved into factors of smaller and smaller denominations until we have arrived at individual men and women. For common sense the individual is quite evidently the ultimate factor in every community or social organization.

Sociologists have carried the analysis a step farther. They have sought to meet the problem raised by two facts: (1) the same individual may be a member of different societies, communities, and social groups at the same time; (2) under certain circumstances his interests as a member of one group may conflict with his interests as a member of another group, so that the conflict between different social groups will be reflected in the mental and moral conflicts of the individual himself. Furthermore, it is evident that the individual is, as we frequently say, “not the same person” at different times and places. The phenomena of moods and of dual personality has sociological significance in just this connection.

From all this it is quite evident that the individual is not elementary in a sociological sense. It is for this reason that sociologists have invariably sought the sociological element, not in the individual but in his appetites, desires, wishes—the human motives which move him to action.

3. Classification of the Materials

The readings in this chapter are arranged in the natural order of the development of the notion of social forces. They were first thought of by historians as tendencies and trends. Then in the popular sociology social forces were identified with significant social objects in which the factors of the situations under consideration were embodied. This was a step in the direction of a definition of the elementary social forces. Later the terms interests, sentiments, and attitudes made their appearance in the literature of economics, social psychology, and sociology. Finally the concept of the wishes, first vaguely apprehended by sociologists under the name “desires,” having gained a more adequate description and definition in the use made of it by psychoanalysis, has been reintroduced into sociology by W. I. Thomas under the title of the “four wishes.” This brief statement is sufficient to indicate the motives determining the order of the materials included under “Social Forces.”

In the list of social forces just enumerated, attitudes are, for the purposes of sociology, elementary. They are elementary because, being tendencies to act, they are expressive and communicable. They present us human motives in the only form in which we can know them objectively, namely, as behavior. Human motives become social forces only so far as they are communicable, only when they are communicated. Because attitudes have for the purposes of sociology this elementary character, it is desirable to define the term “attitude” before attempting to define its relation to the wishes and sentiments.

a) The social element defined.—What is an attitude? Attitudes are not instincts, nor appetites, nor habits, for these refer to specific tendencies to act that condition attitudes but do not define them. Attitudes are not the same as emotions or sentiments although attitudes always are emotionally toned and frequently supported by sentiments. Opinions are not attitudes. An opinion is rather a statement made to justify and make intelligible an existing attitude or bias. A wish is an inherited tendency or instinct which has been fixed by attention directed to objects, persons, or patterns of behavior, which objects then assume the character of values. An attitude is the tendency of the person to react positively or negatively to the total situation. Accordingly, attitudes may be defined as the mobilization of the will of the person.

Attitudes are as many and as varied as the situations to which they are a response. It is, of course, not to be gainsaid that instincts, appetites, habits, emotions, sentiments, opinions, and wishes are involved in and with the attitudes. Attitudes are mobilizations and organizations of the wishes with reference to definite situations. My wishes may be very positive and definite in a given situation, but my attitude may be wavering and undetermined. On the other hand, my attitude may be clearly defined in situations where my wishes are not greatly involved. It is characteristic of the so-called academic, as distinguished from the “practical” and emotional, attitude that, under its influence, the individual seeks to emphasize all the factors in the situation and thus qualifies and often weakens the will to act. The wishes enter into attitudes as components. How many, varied, ill-defined, and conflicting may be and have been the wishes that have determined at different times the attitudes and the sentiments of individuals and nations toward the issues of war and peace? The fundamental wishes, we may assume, are the same in all situations. The attitudes and sentiments, however, in which the wishes of the individual find expression are determined not merely by these wishes, but by other factors in the situation, the wishes of other individuals, for example. The desire for recognition is a permanent and universal trait of human nature, but in the case of an egocentric personality, this wish may take the form of an excessive humility or a pretentious boasting. The wish is the same but the attitudes in which it finds expression are different.

The attitudes which are elementary for sociological analysis may be resolved by psychological analysis into smaller factors so that we may think, if we choose, of attitudes as representing constellations of smaller components which we call wishes. In fact it has been one of the great contributions of psychoanalysis to our knowledge of human behavior that it has been able to show that attitudes may be analyzed into still more elementary components and that these components, like the attitudes, are involved in a process of interaction among themselves. In other words there is organization, tension, and change in the constituent elements of the attitudes. This accounts, in part, for their mutability.

b) Attitudes as behavior patterns.—If the attitude may be said to play the rôle in sociological analysis that the elementary substances play in chemical analysis, then the rôle of the wishes may be compared to that of the electrons.

The clearest way to think of attitudes is as behavior patterns or units of behavior. The two most elementary behavior patterns are the tendency to approach and the tendency to withdraw. Translated into terms of the individual organism these are tendencies to expand and to contract. As the self expands to include other selves, as in sympathy and in fellowship, there is an extension of self-feeling to the whole group. Self-consciousness passes over, in the rapport thus established, into group consciousness. In the expansive movements characteristic of individuals under the influence of crowd excitements the individual is submerged in the mass.

On the other hand, in movements of withdrawal or of recoil from other persons, characteristic of fear and embarrassment, there is a heightening of self-consciousness. The tendency to identify one’s self with other selves, to lose one’s self in the ecstasy of psychic union with others, is essentially a movement toward contact; while the inclination to differentiate one’s self, to lead a self-sufficient existence, apart from others, is as distinctly a movement resulting in isolation.

The simplest and most fundamental types of behavior of individuals and of groups are represented in these contrasting tendencies to approach an object or to withdraw from it. If instead of thinking of these two tendencies as unrelated, they are thought of as conflicting responses to the same situation, where the tendency to approach is modified and complicated by a tendency to withdraw, we get the phenomenon of social distance. There is the tendency to approach, but not too near. There is a feeling of interest and sympathy of A for B, but only when B remains at a certain distance. Thus the Negro in the southern states is “all right in his place.” The northern philanthropist is interested in the advancement of the Negro but wants him to remain in the South. At least he does not want him for a neighbor. The southern white man likes the Negro as an individual, but he is not willing to treat him as an equal. The northern white man is willing to treat the Negro as an equal but he does not want him too near. The wishes are in both cases essentially the same but the attitudes are different.

The accommodations between conflicting tendencies, so flagrantly displayed in the facts of race prejudice, are not confined to the relation of white men and black. The same mechanisms are involved in all the subordinations, exclusions, privacies, social distances, and reserves which we seek everywhere, by the subtle devices of taboo and social ritual, to maintain and defend. Where the situation calls forth rival or conflicting tendencies, the resulting attitude is likely to be an accommodation, in which what has been described as distance is the determining factor. When an accommodation takes the form of the domination of A and the submission of B, the original tendencies of approach and withdrawal are transformed into attitudes of superordination and subordination. If primary attitudes of expansion and of contraction are thought of in terms of lateral distance, then attitudes of superiority and inferiority may be charted in the vertical plane as illustrated by the following diagram:

Fig. 4.—A = tendency to approach; B = tendency to withdraw; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 = distance defining levels of accommodation; X = superordination; Y = subordination.

This polar conception of attitudes, in which they are conceived in terms of movements of expansion and contraction, of approach and withdrawal, of attraction and repulsion, of domination and submission, may be applied in an analysis of the sentiments.

A sentiment, as defined by McDougall, is “an organized system of emotional dispositions centered about the idea of some object.” The polarity of the sentiments is, however, one of its evident and striking characteristics. Love and hate, affection and dislike, attachment and aversion, self-esteem and humility have this character of polarity because each pair of sentiments and attitudes represents a different constellation of the same component wishes.

A significant feature of sentiments and attitudes is inner tension and consequent tendency to mutation. Love changes into hate, or dislike is transformed into affection, or humility is replaced by self-assertion. This mutability is explained by the fact, just mentioned, that the sentiment-attitude is a complex of wishes and desires organized around a person or object. In this complex one motive—love, for example—is for a moment the dominant component. In this case components which tend to excite repulsion, hostility, and disgust are for the moment suppressed. With a change in the situation, as in the distance, these suppressed components are released and, gaining control, convert the system into the opposite sentiment, as hate.

c) Attitudes and wishes.—The wishes, as popularly conceived, are as numerous as the objects or values toward which they are directed. As there are positive and negative values, so there are positive and negative wishes. Fears are negative wishes. The speculations of the Freudian school of psychology have attempted to reduce all wishes to one, the libido. In that case, the wishes, as we know them and as they present themselves to us in consciousness, are to be regarded as offshoots or, perhaps better, specifications of the one wish. As the one wish is directed to this or that object, it makes of that object a value and the object gives its name to the wish. In this way the one wish becomes many wishes.

Science demands, however, not a theory of the origin of the wishes but a classification based on fundamental natural differences; differences which it is necessary to take account of in explaining human behavior. Thomas’ fourfold classification fulfils this purpose. The wish for security, the wish for new experience, the wish for response, and the wish for recognition are the permanent and fundamental unconscious motives of the person which find expression in the many and changing concrete and conscious wishes. As wishes find expression in characteristic forms of behavior they may also be thought of in spatial terms as tendencies to move toward or away from their specific objects. The wish for security may be represented by position, mere immobility; the wish for new experience by the greatest possible freedom of movement and constant change of position; the wish for response, by the number and closeness of points of contact; the wish for recognition, by the level desired or reached in the vertical plane of superordination and subordination.

The fundamental value for social research of the classification inheres in the fact that the wishes in one class cannot be substituted for wishes in another. The desire for response and affection cannot be satisfied by fame and recognition or only partially so. The wholesome individual is he who in some form or other realizes all the four fundamental wishes. The security and permanence of any society or association depends upon the extent to which it permits the individuals who compose it to realize their fundamental wishes. The restless individual is the individual whose wishes are not realized even in dreams.

This suggests the significance of the classification for the purposes of social science. Human nature, and personality as we know it, requires for its healthy growth security, new experience, response, and recognition. In all races and in all times these fundamental longings of human nature have manifested themselves; the particular patterns in which the wish finds expression and becomes fixed depends upon some special experience of the person, is influenced by individual differences in original nature, and is circumscribed by the folkways, the mores, the conventions, and the culture of his group.

II. MATERIALS

A. TRENDS, TENDENCIES, AND PUBLIC OPINION

1. Social Forces in American History[157]

That political struggles are based upon economic interests is today disputed by few students of society. The attempt has been made in this work to trace the various interests that have arisen and struggled in each social stage and to determine the influence exercised by these contending interests in the creation of social institutions.

Back of every political party there has always stood a group or class which expected to profit by the activity and the success of that party. When any party has attained to power, it has been because it has tried to establish institutions or to modify existing ones in accord with its interests.

Changes in the industrial basis of society—inventions, new processes, and combinations and methods of producing and distributing goods—create new interests with new social classes to represent them. These improvements in the technique of production are the dynamic element that brings about what we call progress in society.

In this work I have sought to begin at the origin of each line of social progress. I have first endeavored to describe the steps in mechanical progress, then the social classes brought into prominence by the mechanical changes, then the struggle by which these new classes sought to gain social power, and, finally, the institutions which were created or the alterations made in existing institutions as a consequence of the struggle or as a result of the victory of a new class.

It has seemed to me that these underlying social forces are of more importance than the individuals that were forced to the front in the process of these struggles, or even than the laws that were established to record the results of the conflict. In short, I have tried to describe the dynamics of history rather than to record the accomplished facts, to answer the question, “Why did it happen?” as well as, “What happened?”

An inquiry into causes is manifestly a greater task than the recording of accomplished facts. To determine causes it is necessary to spend much time in the study of “original documents”—the newspapers, magazines, and pamphlet literature of each period. In these, rather than in the “musty documents” of state, do we find history in the making. Here we can see the clash of contending interests before they are crystallized into laws and institutions.

2. Social Tendencies as Social Forces[158]

The philosophy of the eighteenth century viewed external nature as the principal thing to be considered in a study of society, and not society itself. The great force in society was extraneous to society. But according to the philosophy of our times, the chief forces working in society are truly social forces, that is to say, they are immanent in society itself.

Let us briefly examine the social forces which are at work, either concentrating or diffusing the ownership of wealth. If it is true that, necessarily, there is going forward a concentration of property, that the rich are necessarily becoming richer, that wealth is passing into fewer and fewer hands, this gives a strong reason for believing that those are right who hold to the fact that every field of production must soon be controlled by monopoly. If, on the other hand, we find that the forces which make for diffusion are dominant, we may believe that it is quite possible for society to control the forces of production.

a) Forces operating in the direction of concentration of wealth: (1) The unearned increment of land, especially in cities, is no doubt a real force. (2) The trust movement is operating in its earlier phases, at least, in the direction of concentration. (3) In the third place, war, whenever it comes, carries with it forces which bring wealth to the few rather than to the many. (4) Arrangements of one kind and another may be mentioned by means of various trust devices to secure the ends of primogeniture and entail. (5) Another force operating to concentrate the ownership of wealth may be called economic inertia. According to the principle of inertia, forces continue to operate until they are checked by other forces coming into contact with them.

b) Forces which operate to diffuse wealth: (1) Education, broadly considered, should be mentioned first of all. (2) Next, mention must be made of the public control of corporations. (3) Changes in taxation are the third item in this enumeration of forces. (4) The development of the idea of property as a trust is next mentioned. (5) Profit-sharing and co-operation. (6) Sound currency is next mentioned. (7) Public ownership of public utilities is a further force. (8) Labor organizations. (9) Institutions, especially in the interest of the wage-earning and economically weaker elements in the community. (10) Savings institutions and insurance.

3. Public Opinion: School of Thought and Legislation in England[159]

Public legislative opinion, as it has existed in England during the nineteenth century, presents several noteworthy aspects or characteristics. They may conveniently be considered under five heads: the existence at any given period of a predominant public opinion; the origin of such opinion; the development and continuity thereof; the checks imposed on such opinion by the existence of counter-currents and cross-currents of opinion; the action of laws themselves as the creators of legislative opinion.

First, there exists at any given time a body of beliefs, convictions, sentiments, accepted principles, or firmly rooted prejudices, which, taken together, make up the public opinion of a particular era, or what we may call the reigning or predominant current of opinion, and, as regards at any rate the last three or four centuries, and especially the nineteenth century, the influence of this dominant current of opinion has, in England, if we look at the matter broadly, determined, directly or indirectly, the course of legislation.

Second, the opinion which affects the development of the law has, in modern England at least, often originated with some single thinker or school of thinkers. No doubt it is at times allowable to talk of a prevalent belief or opinion as “being in the air,” by which expression is meant that a particular way of looking at things has become the common possession of all the world. But though a belief, when it prevails, may at last be adopted by the whole of a generation, it rarely happens that a widespread conviction has grown up spontaneously among the multitude. “The initiation,” it has been said, “of all wise or noble things comes, and must come, from individuals; generally at first from some one individual,” to which it ought surely to be added that the origination of a new folly or of a new form of baseness comes, and must in general come, at first from individuals or from some one individual. The peculiarity of individuals, as contrasted with the crowd, lies neither in virtue nor in wickedness but in originality. It is idle to credit minorities with all the good without ascribing to them most, at least, of the evils due to that rarest of all human qualities—inventiveness.

The course of events in England may often, at least, be thus described: A new and, let us assume, a true idea presents itself to some one man of originality or genius; the discoverer of the new conception, or some follower who has embraced it with enthusiasm, preaches it to his friends or disciples, they in their turn become impressed with its importance and its truth, and gradually a whole school accepts the new creed. These apostles of a new faith are either persons endowed with special ability or, what is quite as likely, they are persons who, owing to their peculiar position, are freed from a bias, whether moral or intellectual, in favor of prevalent errors. At last the preachers of truth make an impression, either directly upon the general public or upon some person of eminence, say a leading statesman, who stands in a position to impress ordinary people and thus to win the support of the nation. Success, however, in converting mankind to a new faith, whether religious or economical or political, depends but slightly on the strength of the reasoning by which the faith can be defended, or even on the enthusiasm of its adherents. A change of belief arises, in the main, from the occurrence of circumstances which incline the majority of the world to hear with favor theories which, at one time, men of common sense derided as absurdities or distrusted as paradoxes. The doctrine of free trade, for instance, has in England for about half a century held the field as an unassailable dogma of economic policy, but a historian would stand convicted of ignorance or folly who should imagine that the fallacies of protection were discovered by the intuitive good sense of the people, even if the existence of such a quality as the good sense of the people be more than a political fiction. The principle of free trade may, as far as Englishmen are concerned, be treated as the doctrine of Adam Smith. The reasons in its favor never have been, nor will, from the nature of things, be mastered by the majority of any people. The apology for freedom of commerce will always present, from one point of view, an air of paradox. Every man feels or thinks that protection would benefit his own business, and it is difficult to realize that what may be a benefit for any man taken alone may be of no benefit to a body of men looked at collectively. The obvious objections to free trade may, as free traders conceive, be met; but then the reasoning by which these objections are met is often elaborate and subtle and does not carry conviction to the crowd. It is idle to suppose that belief in freedom of trade—or indeed in any other creed—ever won its way among the majority of converts by the mere force of reasoning. The course of events was very different. The theory of free trade won by degrees the approval of statesmen of special insight, and adherents to the new economic religion were one by one gained among persons of intelligence. Cobden and Bright finally became potent advocates of truths of which they were in no sense the discoverers. This assertion in no way detracts from the credit due to these eminent men. They performed to admiration the proper function of popular leaders; by prodigies of energy and by seizing a favorable opportunity, of which they made the very most use that was possible, they gained the acceptance by the English people of truths which have rarely, in any country but England, acquired popularity. Much was due to the opportuneness of the time. Protection wears its most offensive guise when it can be identified with a tax on bread, and therefore can, without patent injustice, be described as the parent of famine and starvation. The unpopularity, moreover, inherent in a tax on corn is all but fatal to a protective tariff when the class which protection enriches is comparatively small, whilst the class which would suffer keenly from dearness of bread and would obtain benefit from free trade is large, and, having already acquired much, is certain soon to acquire more political power. Add to all this that the Irish famine made the suspension of the corn laws a patent necessity. It is easy, then, to see how great in England was the part played by external circumstances—one might almost say by accidental conditions—in determining the overthrow of protection. A student should further remark that after free trade became an established principle of English policy, the majority of the English people accepted it mainly on authority. Men who were neither land-owners nor farmers perceived with ease the obtrusive evils of a tax on corn, but they and their leaders were far less influenced by arguments against protection generally than by the immediate and almost visible advantage of cheapening the bread of artisans and laborers. What, however, weighed with most Englishmen, above every other consideration, was the harmony of the doctrine that commerce ought to be free, with that disbelief in the benefits of state intervention which in 1846 had been gaining ground for more than a generation.

It is impossible, indeed, to insist too strongly upon the consideration that whilst opinion controls legislation, public opinion is itself far less the result of reasoning or of argument than of the circumstances in which men are placed. Between 1783 and 1861 negro slavery was abolished—one might almost say ceased of itself to exist—in the northern states of the American Republic; in the South, on the other hand, the maintenance of slavery developed into a fixed policy, and before the War of Secession the “peculiar institution” had become the foundation stone of the social system. But the religious beliefs and, except as regards the existence of slavery, the political institutions prevalent throughout the whole of the United States were the same. The condemnation of slavery in the North, and the apologies for slavery in the South, must therefore be referred to difference of circumstances. Slave labor was obviously out of place in Massachusetts, Vermont, or New York; it appeared to be, even if in reality it was not, economically profitable in South Carolina. An institution, again, which was utterly incompatible with the social condition of the northern states harmonized, or appeared to harmonize, with the social conditions of the southern states. The arguments against the peculiar institution were in themselves equally strong in whatever part of the Union they were uttered, but they carried conviction to the white citizens of Massachusetts, whilst, even when heard or read, they did not carry conviction to the citizens of South Carolina. Belief, and, to speak fairly, honest belief, was to a great extent the result, not of argument, nor even of direct self-interest, but of circumstances. What was true in this instance holds good in others. There is no reason to suppose that in 1830 the squires of England were less patriotic than the manufacturers, or less capable of mastering the arguments in favor of or against the reform of Parliament. But everyone knows that, as a rule, the country gentlemen were Tories and anti-reformers, whilst the manufacturers were Radicals and reformers. Circumstances are the creators of most men’s opinions.

Third, the development of public opinion generally, and therefore of legislative opinion, has been in England at once gradual, or slow, and continuous. The qualities of slowness and continuity may conveniently be considered together, and are closely interconnected, but they are distinguishable and essentially different.

Legislative public opinion generally changes in England with unexpected slowness. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776; the policy of free exchange was not completely accepted by England till 1846. All the strongest reasons in favor of Catholic emancipation were laid before the English world by Burke between 1760 and 1797; the Roman Catholic Relief Act was not carried till 1829.

The opinion which changes the law is in one sense the opinion of the time when the law is actually altered; in another sense it has often been in England the opinion prevalent some twenty or thirty years before that time; it has been as often as not in reality the opinion, not of today, but of yesterday.

Legislative opinion must be the opinion of the day, because, when laws are altered, the alteration is of necessity carried into effect by legislators who act under the belief that the change is an amendment; but this law-making opinion is also the opinion of yesterday, because the beliefs which have at last gained such hold on the legislature as to produce an alteration in the law have generally been created by thinkers or writers who exerted their influence long before the change in the law took place. Thus it may well happen that an innovation is carried through at a time when the teachers who supplied the arguments in its favor are in their graves, or even—and this is well worth noting—when in the world of speculation a movement has already set in against ideas which are exerting their full effect in the world of action and of legislation.

Law-making in England is the work of men well advanced in life; the politicians who guide the House of Commons, to say nothing of the peers who lead the House of Lords, are few of them below thirty, and most of them are above forty, years of age. They have formed or picked up their convictions, and, what is of more consequence, their prepossessions, in early manhood, which is the one period of life when men are easily impressed with new ideas. Hence English legislators retain the prejudices or modes of thinking which they acquired in their youth; and when, late in life, they take a share in actual legislation, they legislate in accordance with the doctrines which were current, either generally or in the society to which the law-givers belonged, in the days of their early manhood. The law-makers, therefore, of 1850 may give effect to the opinions of 1830, whilst the legislators of 1880 are likely enough to impress upon the statute book the beliefs of 1860, or rather the ideas which in the one case attracted the young men of 1830 and in the other the youth of 1860. We need not therefore be surprised to find that a current of opinion may exert its greatest legislative influence just when its force is beginning to decline. The tide turns when at its height; a school of thought or feeling which still governs law-makers has begun to lose its authority among men of a younger generation who are not yet able to influence legislation.

Fourth, the reigning legislative opinion of the day has never, at any rate during the nineteenth century, exerted absolute or despotic authority. Its power has always been diminished by the existence of counter-currents or cross-currents of opinion which were not in harmony with the prevalent opinion of the time.

A counter-current here means a body of opinion, belief, or sentiment more or less directly opposed to the dominant opinion of a particular era. Counter-currents of this kind have generally been supplied by the survival of ideas or convictions which are gradually losing their hold upon a given generation, and particularly the youthful part thereof. This kind of “conservatism” which prompts men to retain convictions which are losing their hold upon the mass of the world is found, it should be remarked, as much among the adherents of one religious or political creed as of another. Any Frenchman who clung to Protestantism during the reign of Louis the Fourteenth; any north-country squire who in the England of the eighteenth century adhered to the Roman Catholicism of his fathers; Samuel Johnson, standing forth as a Tory and a High Churchman amongst Whigs and Free Thinkers; the Abbé Gregoire, retaining in 1830 the attitude and the beliefs of a bishop of that constitutional church of France whereof the claims have been repudiated at once by the Church and by the State; James Mill, who, though the leader in 1832 of philosophic Radicals, the pioneers as they deemed themselves of democratic progress, was in truth the last “of the eighteenth century”—these are each and all of them examples of that intellectual and moral conservatism which everywhere, and especially in England, has always been a strong force. The past controls the present.

Counter-currents, again, may be supplied by new ideals which are beginning to influence the young. The hopes or dreams of the generation just coming into the field of public life undermine the energy of a dominant creed.

Counter-currents of opinion, whatever their source, have one certain and one possible effect. The certain effect is that a check is imposed upon the action of the dominant faith.

Fifth, laws foster or create law-making opinion. This assertion may sound, to one who has learned that laws are the outcome of public opinion, like a paradox; when properly understood, it is nothing but an undeniable, though sometimes neglected, truth.

B. INTERESTS, SENTIMENTS, AND ATTITUDES

1. Social Forces and Interaction[160]

We must guard at the outset against an illusion that has exerted a confusing influence. There are no social forces which are not at the same time forces lodged in individuals, deriving their energy from individuals and operating in and through individuals. There are no social forces that lurk in the containing ether, and affect persons without the agency of other persons. There are, to be sure, all the physical conditions that affect persons just as they affect all other forms of matter. So far, these are not social forces at all. They do not get to be social forces until they get into persons, and in these persons they take the form of feelings which impel them to react upon other persons. Persons are thus transmuters of physical forces into social forces; but all properly designated social forces are essentially personal. They are within some persons, and stimulate them to act upon other persons; or they are in other persons, and exert themselves as external stimuli upon otherwise inert persons. In either case social forces are personal influences passing from person to person and producing activities that give content to the association.

The conception of social forces was never challenged so long as it was merely an everyday commonplace. When it passed into technical forms of expression, doubts began to be urged. If anyone in the United States had questioned the existence of Mrs. Grundy fifty years ago, he would have been pitied and ignored as a harmless “natural.” Social forces in the form of gossip, and personified in Mrs. Grundy, were real to everybody. But the particular species of social forces which Mrs. Grundy represented were neither more nor less real than the other social forces which had no name in folklore. Persons incessantly influence persons. The modes of this influence are indescribably varied. They are conscious and unconscious, accidental and momentary, or deliberate and persistent; they are conventional and continuous, the result of individual habit, or of customs crystallized into national or racial institutions.

The simple fact which the concept “social forces” stands for is that every individual acts and is acted upon in countless ways by the other persons with whom he associates. These modes of action and reaction between persons may be classified, and the more obvious and recurrent among them may be enumerated. More than this, the action of these social forces may be observed, and the results of observation may be organized into social laws. Indeed, there would be only two alternatives, if we did not discover the presence and action of social forces. On the one hand, social science would at most be a subdivision of natural science; on the other hand, the remaining alternative would be the impossibility of social science altogether.

But social forces are just as distinctly discernible as chemical forces. The fact that we are not familiar with them no more makes against their existence and their importance than general ignorance of the pressure of the atmosphere takes that phenomenon out of the physical world. They are not only the atmosphere but they are a very large part of the moral world in general. If we could compose a complete account of the social forces, we should at the same time have completed, from one point of attention at least, a science of everything involved in human society.

“All beings which can be said to perform actions do so in obedience to those mental states which are denominated desires.” But we have gone back a step beyond the desires and have found it necessary to assume the existence of underlying interests. These have to desires very nearly the relation of substance to attribute, or, in a different figure, of genus to species. Our interests may be beyond or beneath our ken; our desires are strong and clear. I may not be conscious of my health interests in any deep sense, but the desires that my appetites assert are specific and concrete and real. The implicit interests, of which we may be very imperfectly aware, move us to desires which may correspond well or ill with the real content of the interests. At all events, it is these desires which make up the active social forces, whether they are more or less harmonious with the interests from which they spring. The desires that the persons associating actually feel are practically the elemental forces with which we have to reckon. They are just as real as the properties of matter. They have their ratios of energy, just as certainly as though they were physical forces. They have their peculiar modes of action, which may be formulated as distinctly as the various modes of chemical action.

Every desire that any man harbors is a force making or marring, strengthening or weakening, the structure and functions of the society of which he is a part. What the human desires are, what their relations are to each other, what their peculiar modifications are under different circumstances—these are questions of detail which must be answered in general by social psychology, and in particular by specific analysis of each social situation. The one consideration to be urged at this point is that the concept “social forces” has a real content. It represents reality. There are social forces. They are the desires of persons. They range in energy from the vagrant whim that makes the individual a temporary discomfort to his group, to the inbred feelings that whole races share. It is with these subtle forces that social arrangements and the theories of social arrangements have to deal.

2. Interests[161]

During the past generation, the conception of the “atom” has been of enormous use in physical discovery. Although no one has ever seen an atom, the supposition that there are ultimate particles of matter in which the “promise and potency” of all physical properties and actions reside has served as a means of investigation during the most intensive period of research in the history of thought. Without the hypothesis of the atom, physics and chemistry, and in a secondary sense biology, would have lacked chart and compass upon their voyages of exploration. Although the notion of the atom is rapidly changing, and the tendency of physical science is to construe physical facts in terms of motion rather than of the traditional atom, it is probably as needless as it is useless for us to concern ourselves as laymen with this refinement. Although we cannot avoid speaking of the smallest parts into which matter can be divided, and although we cannot imagine, on the other hand, how any portions of matter can exist and not be divisible into parts, we are probably quite as incapable of saving ourselves from paradox by resort to the vortex hypothesis in any form. That is, these subtleties are too wonderful for most minds. Without pushing analysis too far, and without resting any theory upon analogy with the atom of physical theory, it is necessary to find some starting-place from which to trace up the composition of sentient beings, just as the physicists assumed that they found their starting-place in the atom. The notion of interests is accordingly serving the same purpose in sociology which the notion of atoms has served in physical science. Interests are the stuff that men are made of. More accurately expressed, the last elements to which we can reduce the actions of human beings are units which we may conveniently name “interests.” It is merely inverting the form of expression to say: Interests are the simplest modes of motion which we can trace in the conduct of human beings.

To the psychologist the individual is interesting primarily as a center of knowing, feeling, and willing. To the sociologist the individual begins to be interesting when he is thought as knowing, feeling, and willing something. In so far as a mere trick of emphasis may serve to distinguish problems, this ictus indicates the sociological starting-point. The individual given in experience is thought to the point at which he is available for sociological assumption, when he is recognized as a center of activities which make for something outside of the psychical series in which volition is a term. These activities must be referred primarily to desires, but the desires themselves may be further referred to certain universal interests. In this character the individual becomes one of the known or assumed terms of sociology. The individual as a center of active interests may be thought both as the lowest term in the social equation and as a composite term whose factors must be understood. These factors are either the more evident desires, or the more remote interests which the individual’s desires in some way represent. At the same time, we must repeat the admission that these assumed interests are like the atom of physics. They are the metaphysical recourse of our minds in accounting for concrete facts. We have never seen or touched them. They are the hypothetical substratum of those regularities of conduct which the activities of individuals display.

We may start with the familiar popular expressions, “the farming interest,” “the railroad interest,” “the packing interest,” “the milling interest,” etc., etc. Everyone knows what the expressions mean. Our use of the term “interest” is not co-ordinate with these, but it may be approached by means of them. All the “interests” that are struggling for recognition in business and in politics are highly composite. The owner of a flour mill, for example, is a man before he is a miller. He becomes a miller at last because he is a man; i.e., because he has interests—in a deeper sense than that of the popular expressions—which impel him to act in order to gain satisfactions. The clue to all social activity is in this fact of individual interests. Every act that every man performs is to be traced back to an interest. We eat because there is a desire for food; but the desire is set in motion by a bodily interest in replacing exhausted force. We sleep because we are tired; but the weariness is a function of the bodily interest in rebuilding used-up tissue. We play because there is a bodily interest in use of the muscles. We study because there is a mental interest in satisfying curiosity. We mingle with our fellow-men because there is a mental interest in matching our personality against that of others. We go to market to supply an economic interest, and to war because of some social interest of whatever mixed or simple form.

With this introduction, we may venture an extremely abstract definition of our concept “interest.” In general, an interest is an unsatisfied capacity, corresponding to an unrealized condition, and it is predisposition to such rearrangement as would tend to realize the indicated condition. Human needs and human wants are incidents in the series of events between the latent existence of human interest and the achievement of partial satisfaction. Human interests, then, are the ultimate terms of calculation in sociology. The whole life-process, so far as we know it, whether viewed in its individual or in its social phase, is at last the process of developing, adjusting, and satisfying interests.

No single term is of more constant use in recent sociology than this term “interests.” We use it in the plural partly for the sake of distinguishing it from the same term in the sense which has become so familiar in modern pedagogy. The two uses of the term are closely related, but they are not precisely identical. The pedagogical emphasis is rather on the voluntary attitude toward a possible object of attention. The sociological emphasis is on attributes of persons which may be compared to the chemical affinities of different elements.

To distinguish the pedagogical from the sociological use of the term “interest,” we may say pedagogically of a supposed case: “The boy has no interest in physical culture, or in shopwork, or in companionship with other boys, or in learning, or in art, or in morality.” That is, attention and choice are essential elements of interest in the pedagogical sense. On the other hand, we may say of the same boy, in the sociological sense: “He has not discovered his health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness interests.” We thus imply that interests, in the sociological sense, are not necessarily matters of attention and choice. They are affinities, latent in persons, pressing for satisfaction, whether the persons are conscious of them either generally or specifically, or not; they are indicated spheres of activity which persons enter into and occupy in the course of realizing their personality.

Accordingly, we have virtually said that interests are merely specifications in the make-up of the personal units. We have several times named the most general classes of interests which we find serviceable in sociology, viz.: health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness.

We need to emphasize, in addition, several considerations about these interests which are the motors of all individual and social action. First, there is a subjective and an objective aspect of them all. It would be easy to use terms of these interests in speculative arguments in such a way as to shift the sense fallaciously from the one aspect to the other; e.g., moral conduct, as an actual adjustment of the person in question with other persons, is that person’s “interest,” in the objective sense. On the other hand, we are obliged to think of something in the person himself impelling him, however unconsciously, toward that moral conduct, i.e., interest as “unsatisfied capacity” in the subjective sense. So with each of the other interests. The fact that these two senses of the term are always concerned must never be ignored; but, until we reach refinements of analysis which demand use for these discriminations, they may be left out of sight. Second, human interests pass more and more from the latent, subjective, unconscious state to the active, objective, conscious form. That is, before the baby is self-conscious, the baby’s essential interest in bodily well-being is operating in performance of the organic functions. A little later the baby is old enough to understand that certain regulation of his diet, certain kinds of work or play, will help to make and keep him well and strong. Henceforth there is in him a co-operation of interest in the fundamental sense, and interest in the derived, secondary sense, involving attention and choice. If we could agree upon the use of terms, we might employ the word “desire” for this development of interest; i.e., physiological performance of function is, strictly speaking, the health interest; the desires which men actually pursue within the realm of bodily function may be normal or perverted, in an infinite scale of variety. So with each of the other interests. Third, with these qualifications provided for, resolution of human activities into pursuit of differentiated interests becomes the first clue to the combination that unlocks the mysteries of society. For our purposes in this argument we need not trouble ourselves very much about nice metaphysical distinctions between the aspects of interest, because we have mainly to do with interests in the same sense in which the man of affairs uses the term. The practical politician looks over the lobby at Washington and he classifies the elements that compose it. He says: “Here is the railroad interest, the sugar interest, the labor interest, the army interest, the canal interest, the Cuban interest, etc.” He uses the term “interest” essentially in the sociological sense but in a relatively concrete form, and he has in mind little more than variations of the wealth interest. He would explain the legislation of a given session as the final balance between these conflicting pecuniary interests. He is right, in the main; and every social action is, in the same way, an accommodation of the various interests which are represented in the society concerned.

3. Social Pressures[162]

The phenomena of government are from start to finish phenomena of force. But force is an objectionable word. I prefer to use the word pressure instead of force, since it keeps the attention closely directed upon the groups themselves, instead of upon any mystical “realities” assumed to be underneath and supporting them, and since its connotation is not limited to the narrowly “physical.” We frequently talk of “bringing pressure to bear” upon someone, and we can use the word here with but slight extension beyond this common meaning.

Pressure, as we shall use it, is always a group phenomenon. It indicates the push and resistance between groups. The balance of the group pressures is the existing state of society. Pressure is broad enough to include all forms of the group influence upon group, from battle and riot to abstract reasoning and sensitive morality. It takes up into itself “moral energy” and the finest discriminations of conscience as easily as bloodthirsty lust of power. It allows for humanitarian movements as easily as for political corruption. The tendencies to activity are pressures, as well as the more visible activities.

All phenomena of government are phenomena of groups pressing one another, forming one another, and pushing out new groups and group representatives (the organs or agencies of government) to mediate the adjustments. It is only as we isolate these group activities, determine their representative values, and get the whole process stated in terms of them that we approach to a satisfactory knowledge of government.

When we take such an agency of government as a despotic ruler, we cannot possibly advance to an understanding of him except in terms of the group activities of his society which are most directly represented through him, along with those which almost seem not to be represented through him at all, or to be represented to a different degree or in a different manner. And it is the same with democracies, even in their “purest” and simplest forms, as well as in their most complicated forms. We cannot fairly talk of despotisms or of democracies as though they were absolutely distinct types of government to be contrasted offhand with each other or with other types. All depends for each despotism and each democracy and each other form of government on the given interests, their relations, and their methods of interaction. The interest groups create the government and work through it; the government, as activity, works “for” the groups; the government, from the viewpoint of certain of the groups, may at times be their private tool; the government, from the viewpoint of others of the groups, seems at times their deadly enemy; but the process is all one, and the joint participation is always present, however it may be phrased in public opinion or clamor.

It is convenient most of the time in studying government to talk of these groups as interests. But I have already indicated with sufficient clearness that the interest is nothing other than the group activity itself. The words by which we name the interests often give the best expression to the value of the group activities in terms of other group activities: if I may be permitted that form of phrasing, they are more qualitative than quantitative in their implications. But that is sometimes a great evil as well as sometimes an advantage. We must always remember that there is nothing in the interests purely because of themselves and that we can depend on them only as they stand for groups which are acting or tending toward activity or pressing themselves along in their activity with other groups.

When we get the group activities on the lower planes worked out and show them as represented in various forms of higher groups, culminating in the political groups, then we make progress in our interpretations. Always and everywhere our study must be a study of the interests that work through government; otherwise we have not got down to facts. Nor will it suffice to take a single interest group and base our interpretation upon it, not even for a special time and a special place. No interest group has meaning except with reference to other interest groups; and those other interest groups are pressures; they count in the government process. The lowest of despised castes, deprived of rights to the protection of property and even life, will still be found to be a factor in the government, if only we can sweep the whole field and measure the caste in its true degree of power, direct or represented, in its potentiality of harm to the higher castes, and in its identification with them for some important purposes, however deeply hidden from ordinary view. No slaves, not the worst abused of all, but help to form the government. They are an interest group within it.

Tested by the interest groups that function through them, legislatures are of two general types. First are those which represent one class or set of classes in the government as opposed to some other class, which is usually represented in a monarch. Second are those which are not the exclusive stronghold of one class or set of classes, but are instead the channel for the functioning of all groupings of the population. The borders between the two types are of course indistinct, but they approximate closely to the borders between a society with class organization and one with classes broken down into freer and more changeable group interests.

Neither the number of chambers in the legislative body nor the constitutional relations of the legislature to the executive can serve to define the two types. The several chambers may represent several classes, or again the double-chamber system may be in fact merely a technical division, with the same interests present in both chambers. The executive may be a class representative, or merely a co-ordinate organ, dividing with the legislature the labor of providing channels through which the same lot of manifold interest groups can work.

It lies almost on the surface that a legislature which is a class agency will produce results in accordance with the class pressure behind it. Its existence has been established by struggle, and its life is a continual struggle against the representatives of the opposite class. Of course there will be an immense deal of argument to be heard on both sides, and the argument will involve the setting forth of “reasons” in limitless number. It is indeed because of the advantages (in group terms, of course) of such argument as a technical means of adjustment that the legislative bodies survive. Argument under certain conditions is a greater labor-saver than blows, and in it the group interests more fully unfold themselves. But beneath all the argument lies the strength. The arguments go no farther than the strength goes. What the new Russian duma will get, if it survives, will be what the people it solidly represents are strong enough to make it get, and no more and no less, with bombs and finances, famine and corruption funds alike in the scale.

But the farther we advance among legislatures of the second type, and the farther we get away from the direct appeal to muscle and weapon, the more difficult becomes the analysis of the group components, the greater is the prominence that falls to the process of argumentation, the more adroitly do the group forces mask themselves in morals, ideals, and phrases, the more plausible becomes the interpretation of the legislature’s work as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative process in terms of the discussion forms used by that anti-violence interest group is wholly inadequate.

4. Idea-Forces[163]

The principle that I assume at the outset is that every idea tends to act itself out. If it is an isolated idea, or if it is not counterbalanced by a stronger force, its realization must take place. Thus the principle of the struggle for existence and of selection, taking the latter word in its broadest sense, is in my opinion as applicable to ideas as to individuals and living species; a selection takes place in the brain to the advantage of the strongest and most exclusive idea, which is thus able to control the whole organism. In particular, the child’s brain is an arena of conflict for ideas and the impulses they include; in the brain the new idea is a new force which encounters the ideas already installed, and the impulses already developed therein. Assume a mind, as yet a blank, and suddenly introduce into it the representation of any movement, the idea of any action—such as raising the arm. This idea being isolated and unopposed, the wave of disturbance arising in the brain will take the direction of the arm, because the nerves terminating in the arm are disturbed by the representation of the arm. The arm will therefore be lifted. Before a movement begins, we must think of this; now no movement that has taken place is lost; it is necessarily communicated from the brain to the organs if unchecked by any other representation or impulse. The transmission of the idea to the limbs is inevitable as long as the idea is isolated or unopposed. This I have called the law of idea-forces, and I think I have satisfactorily explained the curious facts in connection with the impulsive actions of the idea.

The well-known experiments of Chevreul on the “pendule explorateur,” and on the divining rod, show that if we represent to ourselves a movement in a certain direction, the hand will finally execute this movement without our consciousness, and so will transmit it to the instrument. Table-turning is the realization of the expected movement by means of the unconscious motion of the hands. Thought-reading is the interpretation of imperceptible movements, in which the thought of the subject betrays itself, even without his being conscious of it. In the process that goes on when we are fascinated or on the point of fainting, a process more obvious in children than in adults, there is an inchoate movement which the paralysis of the will fails to check. When I was a lad, I was once running over a plank across the weir of a river, it never entering my head that I ran any risk of falling; suddenly this idea came into play like a force obliquely compounded with the straight course of thought which had up to that moment been guiding my footsteps. I felt as if an invisible arm had seized me and was dragging me down. I shrieked and stood trembling above the foaming water until assistance came. Here the mere idea of vertigo produced vertigo. A plank on the ground may be crossed without arousing any idea of falling; but if it is above a precipice, and we think of the distance below, the impulse to fall is very strong. Even when we are in perfect safety we may feel what is known as the “fascination” of a precipice. The sight of the gulf below, becoming a fixed idea, produces a resultant inhibition on all other ideas. Temptation, which is always besetting a child because everything is new to it, is nothing but the power of an idea and its motor impulse.

The power of an idea is the greater, the more prominently it is singled out from the general content of consciousness. This selection of an idea, which becomes so exclusive that the whole consciousness is absorbed in it, is called monoïdeism. This state is precisely that of a person who has been hypnotized. What is called hypnotic suggestion is nothing but the artificial selection of one idea to the exclusion of all others, so that it passes into action. Natural somnambulism similarly exhibits the force of ideas; whatever idea is conceived by the somnambulist, he carries into action. The kind of dream in which children often live is not without analogy to somnambulism. The fixed idea is another instance of the same phenomenon, which is produced in the waking state, and which, when exaggerated, becomes monomania, a kind of morbid monoïdeism; children, having very few ideas, would very soon acquire fixed ideas, if it were not for the mobility of attention which the ceaseless variation of the surrounding world produces in them. Thus all the facts grouped nowadays under the name of auto-suggestion may, in my opinion, be explained. Here we shall generalize the law in this form: every idea conceived by the mind is an auto-suggestion, the selective effect of which is only counterbalanced by other ideas producing a different auto-suggestion. This is especially noticeable in the young, who so rapidly carry into action what is passing through their minds.

The philosophers of the seventeenth century, with Descartes and Pascal, considered sentiments and passions as indistinct thoughts, as “thoughts, as it were, in process of precipitation.” This is true. Beneath all our sentiments lies a totality of imperfectly analyzed ideas, a swelling stream of crowded and indistinct reasons by the momentum of which we are carried away and swept along. Inversely, sentiments underlie all our ideas; they smoulder in the dying embers of abstractions. Even language has a power because it arouses all the sentiments which it condenses in a formula; the mere names “honor” and “duty” arouse infinite echoes in the consciousness. At the name of “honor” alone, a legion of images is on the point of surging up; vaguely, as with eyes open in the dark, we see all the possible witnesses of our acts, from father and mother to friends and fellow-countrymen; further, if our imagination is vivid enough, we can see those great ancestors who did not hesitate under similar circumstances. “We must; forward!” We feel that we are enrolled in an army of gallant men; the whole race, in its most heroic representatives, is urging us on. There is a social and even a historical element beneath moral ideas. Besides, language, a social product, is also a social force. The pious mind goes farther still; duty is personified as a being—the living Good whose voice we hear.

Some speak of lifeless formulas; of these there are very few. A word, an idea, is a formula of possible action and of sentiments ready to pass into acts; they are “verbs.” Now, every sentiment, every impulse which becomes formulated with, as it were, a fiat, acquires by this alone a new and quasi-creative force; it is not merely rendered visible by its own light to itself but it is defined, specified, and selected from the rest, and ipso facto directed in its course. That is why formulas relative to action are so powerful for good or evil; a child feels a vague temptation, a tendency for which it cannot account. Pronounce in its hearing the formula, change the blind impulse into the luminous idea, and this will be a new suggestion which may, perhaps, cause it to fall in the direction to which it was already inclined. On the other hand, some formulas of generous sentiments will carry away a vast audience immediately they are uttered. The genius is often the man who translates the aspirations of his age into ideas; at the sound of his voice a whole nation is moved. Great moral, religious, and social revolutions ensue when the sentiments, long restrained and scarcely conscious of their own existence, become formulated into ideas and words; the way is then opened, the means and the goal are visible alike, selection takes place, all the volitions are simultaneously guided in the same direction, like a torrent which has found the weakest point in the dam.

5. Sentiments[164]

We seldom experience the primary emotions in the pure or unmixed forms in which they are commonly manifested by the animals. Our emotional states commonly arise from the simultaneous excitement of two or more of the instinctive dispositions; and the majority of the names currently used to denote our various emotions are the names of such mixed, secondary, or complex emotions. That the great variety of our emotional states may be properly regarded as the result of the compounding of a relatively small number of primary or simple emotions is no new discovery. Descartes, for example, recognized only six primary emotions, or passions as he termed them, namely—admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness, and he wrote, “All the others are composed of some out of these six and derived from them.” He does not seem to have formulated any principles for the determination of the primaries and the distinction of them from the secondaries.

The compounding of the primary emotions is largely, though not wholly, due to the existence of sentiments, and some of the complex emotional processes can only be generated from sentiments. Before going on to discuss the complex emotions, we must therefore try to understand as clearly as possible the nature of a sentiment.

The word “sentiment” is still used in several different senses. M. Ribot and other French authors use its French equivalent as covering all the feelings and emotions, as the most general name for the affective aspect of mental processes. We owe to Mr. A. F. Shand the recognition of features of our mental constitution of a most important kind that have been strangely overlooked by other psychologists, and the application of the word “sentiments” to denote features of this kind. Mr. Shand points out that our emotions, or, more strictly speaking, our emotional dispositions, tend to become organized in systems about the various objects and classes of objects that excite them. Such an organized system of emotional tendencies is not a fact or mode of experience, but is a feature of the complexly organized structure of the mind that underlies all our mental activity. To such an organized system of emotional tendencies centered about some object Mr. Shand proposes to apply the name “sentiment.” This application of the word is in fair accordance with its usage in popular speech, and there can be little doubt that it will rapidly be adopted by psychologists.

The organization of the sentiments in the developing mind is determined by the course of experience; that is to say, the sentiment is a growth in the structure of the mind that is not natively given in the inherited constitution. This is certainly true in the main, though the maternal sentiment might almost seem to be innate; but we have to remember that in the human mother this sentiment may, and generally does, begin to grow up about the idea of its object, before the child is born.

The growth of the sentiments is of the utmost importance for the character and conduct of individuals and of societies; it is the organization of the affective and conative life. In the absence of sentiments our emotional life would be a mere chaos, without order, consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our social relations and conduct, being based on the emotions and their impulses, would be correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and unstable. It is only through the systematic organization of the emotional dispositions in sentiments that the volitional control of the immediate promptings of the emotions is rendered possible. Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source, for they are formed by our judgments of moral value.

The sentiments may be classified according to the nature of their objects; they then fall into three main classes: the concrete particular, the concrete general, and the abstract sentiments—e.g., the sentiment of love for a child, of love for children in general, of love for justice or virtue. Their development in the individual follows this order, the concrete particular sentiments being, of course, the earliest and most easily acquired. The number of sentiments a man may acquire, reckoned according to the number of objects in which they are centered, may, of course, be very large; but almost every man has a small number of sentiments—perhaps one only—that greatly surpass all the rest in strength and as regards the proportion of his conduct that springs from them.

Each sentiment has a life-history, like every other vital organization. It is gradually built up, increasing in complexity and strength and may continue to grow indefinitely, or may enter upon a period of decline, and may decay slowly or rapidly, partially or completely.

When any one of the emotions is strongly or repeatedly excited by a particular object, there is formed the rudiment of a sentiment. Suppose that a child is thrown into the company of some person given to frequent outbursts of violent anger, say, a violent-tempered father who is otherwise indifferent to the child and takes no further notice of him than to threaten, scold, and, perhaps, beat him. At first the child experiences fear at each exhibition of violence, but repetition of these incidents very soon creates the habit of fear, and in the presence of his father, even in his mildest moods, the child is timorous; that is to say, the mere presence of the father throws the child’s fear-disposition into a condition of sub-excitement, which increases on the slightest occasion until it produces all the subjective and objective manifestations of fear. As a further stage, the mere idea of the father becomes capable of producing the same effects as his presence; this idea has become associated with the emotion; or, in stricter language, the psychophysical disposition whose excitement involves the rise to consciousness of this idea, has become associated or intimately connected with the psychophysical disposition whose excitement produces the bodily and mental symptoms of fear. Such an association constitutes a rudimentary sentiment that we can only call a sentiment of fear.

In a similar way, a single act of kindness done by A to B may evoke in B the emotion of gratitude; and if A repeats his kindly acts, conferring benefits on B, the gratitude of B may become habitual, may become an enduring emotional attitude of B towards A—a sentiment of gratitude. Or, in either case, a single act—one evoking very intense fear or gratitude—may suffice to render the association more or less durable and the attitude of fear, or gratitude, of B toward A more or less permanent.

6. Social Attitudes[165]

“Consciousness,” says Jacques Loeb, “is only a metaphysical term for phenomena which are determined by associative memory. By associative memory I mean that mechanism by which a stimulus brings about not only the effects which its nature and the specific structure of the irritable organ call for, but by which it brings about also the effects of other stimuli which formerly acted upon the organism almost or quite simultaneously with the stimulus in question. If an animal can be trained, if it can learn, it possesses associative memory.” In short, because we have memories we are able to profit by experiences.

It is the memories that determine, on the whole, what objects shall mean to us, and how we shall behave toward them. We cannot say, however, that a perception or an object is ever wholly without meaning to us. The flame to which the child stretches out its hand means, even before he has any experience of it, “something to be reached for, something to be handled.” After the first experience of touching it, however, it means “something naturally attractive but still to be avoided.” Each new experience, so far as it is preserved in memory, adds new meanings to the objects with which it is associated.

Our perceptions and our ideas embody our experiences of objects and so serve as signs of what we may expect of them. They are the means by which we are enabled to control our behavior toward them. On the other hand, if we lose our memories, either temporarily or permanently, we lose at the same time our control over our actions and are still able to respond to objects, but only in accordance with our inborn tendencies. After all our memories are gone, we still have our original nature to fall back upon.

There is a remarkable case reported by Sidis and Goodhart which illustrates the rôle that memory plays in giving us control over our inherited tendencies. It is that of Rev. Thomas C. Hanna, who, while attempting to alight from a carriage, lost his footing, fell to the ground and was picked up unconscious. When he awoke it was found that he had not only lost the faculty of speech but he had lost all voluntary control of his limbs. He had forgotten how to walk. He had not lost his senses. He could feel and see, but he was not able to distinguish objects. He had no sense of distance. He was in a state of complete “mental blindness.” At first he did not distinguish between his own movements and those of other objects. “He was as much interested in the movements of his own limbs as in that of external things.” He had no conception of time. “Seconds, minutes, and hours were alike to him.” He felt hunger but he did not know how to interpret the feeling and had no notion of how to satisfy it. When food was offered him he did not know what to do with it. In order to get him to swallow food it had to be placed far back in his throat, in order to provoke reflex swallowing movements. In their report of the case the authors say:

The first word he learned was “apple” and for a time apple was the only word he knew. At first he learned only the names of particular objects. He did not seem able to learn words with an abstract or general significance. But although he was reduced to a state of mental infancy, his “intelligence” remained, and he learned with astonishing rapidity. “His faculty of judgment, his power of reasoning, were as sound and vigorous as ever,” continues the report. “The content of knowledge seemed to have been lost, but the form of knowledge remained as active as before the accident and was perhaps even more precise and definite.”

One reason why man is superior to the brutes is probably that he has a better natural memory. Another reason is that there are more things that he can do, and so he has an opportunity to gain a wider and more varied experience. Consider what a man can do with his hands! To this he has added tools and machinery, which are an extension of the hand and have multiplied its powers enormously. It is now pretty well agreed, however, that the chief advantage which mankind has over the brutes is in the possession of speech by which he can communicate his ideas. In comparatively recent times he has supplemented this means of communication by the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone. In this way he has been able not only to communicate his experiences but to fund and transmit them from one generation to another.

As soon as man began to point out objects and associate them with vocal sounds, he had obtained possession of a symbol by which he was able to deliberately communicate his desires and his intentions to other men in a more precise and definite way than he had been able to do through the medium of spontaneous emotional expression.

The first words, we may suppose, were onomatopoetic, that is to say, vocal imitations of the objects to which they referred. At any rate they arose spontaneously in connection with the situation that inspired them. They were then imitated by others and thus became the common and permanent possession of the group. Language thus assumed for the group the rôle of perception in the individual. It became the sign and symbol of those meanings which were the common possession of the group.

As the number of such symbols was relatively small in comparison to the number of ideas, words inevitably came to have different meanings in different contexts. In the long run the effect of this was to detach the words from the particular contexts in which they arose and loosen their connections with the particular sentiments and attitudes with which they were associated. They came to have thus a more distinctively symbolic and formal character. It was thus possible to give them more precise definitions, to make of them abstractions and mental toys, which the individual could play with freely and disinterestedly. Like the child who builds houses with blocks, he was able to arrange them in orders and systems, create ideal structures, like the constructions of mathematics, which he was then able to employ as means of ordering and systematizing his more concrete experiences.

All this served to give the individual a more complete control over his own experience and that of the group. It made it possible to analyze and classify his own experiences and compare them with those of his fellows and so, eventually, to erect the vast structure of formal and scientific knowledge on the basis of which men are able to live and work together in co-operation upon the structure of a common civilization.

The point is that the breadth of the experience over which man has control and the disinterestedness with which he is able to view it is the basis of the intellectual attainment of the individual, as of the race.

If human beings were thoroughly rational creatures, we may presume that they would act, at every instant, on the basis of all their experience and all the knowledge that they were able to obtain from the experience of others. The truth is, however, that we are never able, at any one time, to mobilize, control, and use all the experience and all the knowledge that we now possess and which, if we were less human than we are, might serve to guide and control our actions. It is precisely the function of science to collect, organize, and make available for our practical uses the fund of experience and of knowledge we do possess.

Not only do we already have more knowledge than we can use, but much of our personal and individual experience drops out and is lost in the course of a lifetime. Meanwhile, later experiences are constantly adding themselves to the earlier ones. In this way the meaning of the world is constantly changing for us, much as the surface of the earth is constantly under the influence of the weather.

The actual constellation of our memories and ideas is determined at any given moment not merely by processes of association but also by processes of dissociation. Practical interests, sentiments, and emotional outbursts—love, fear, and anger—are constantly interrupting the logical and constructive processes of the mind. These forces tend to dissolve established connections between ideas and disintegrate our memories so that they rarely function as a whole or as a unit, but rather as more or less dissociated systems.

The mere act of attention, for example, so far as it focuses the activities upon a single object, tends to narrow the range of associations, check deliberation, and, by isolating one idea or system of ideas, prepares us to act in accordance with them without regard to the demands of other ideas in the wider but now suppressed context of our experience. The isolation of one group of ideas implies the suppression of other groups which are inconsistent with them or hinder the indicated action.

When the fundamental instinct-emotions are aroused, they invariably have the effect of isolating the ideas with which they are associated and of inhibiting the contrary emotions. This is the explanation of war. When the fighting instincts are stirred, men lose the fear of death and the horror of killing.

When an idea, particularly one that is associated with some original tendency of human nature, is thus isolated in consciousness, the tendency is to respond to it automatically, just as one would respond to a simple reflex. This explains the phenomena of suggestion. A state of suggestibility is always a pre-condition of suggestion, and suggestibility means just such an isolation and dissociation of the suggested idea as has been described. Hypnotic trance may be defined as a condition of abnormal suggestibility, in which the subject tends to carry out automatically the commands of the experimenter, “as if,” as the familiar phrase puts it, “he had no will of his own,” or rather, as if the will of the experimenter had been substituted for that of the subject. In fact the phenomena of auto-suggestion, in which one obeys his own suggestion, seems to differ from other forms of the same phenomena only in the fact that the subject obeys his own commands instead of those of the experimenter. Not only suggestion and auto-suggestion, but imitation, which is nothing more than another form of suggestion, are made possible by the existence of mental mechanisms created by dissociation.

Hypnotism represents an extreme but temporary form of dissociation of the memories, artificially produced. Fascination and abstraction (absent-mindedness) are milder forms of the same phenomena with this difference, that they occur “in nature” and without artificial stimulation.

A more permanent dissociation is represented in moods. The memories which connect themselves with moods are invariably such as will support the dominant emotion. At the same time memories which tend in any way to modify the prevailing tone of the mood are spontaneously suppressed.

It is a familiar fact that persons whose occupations or whose mode of life brings them habitually into different worlds, so that the experiences in one have little or nothing in common with those of the other, inevitably develop something akin to a dual personality. The business man, for example, is one person in the city and another at his home in the suburbs.

The most striking and instructive instances of dissociation, however, are the cases of dual or multiple personality in which the same individual lives successively or simultaneously two separate lives, each of which is wholly oblivious of the other. The classic instance of this kind is the case of the Rev. Ansel Bourne reported by William James in his Principles of Psychology. Ansel Bourne was an itinerant preacher living at Greene, Rhode Island. On January 19, 1887, he drew $551.00 from a bank in Providence and entered a Pawtucket horse car and disappeared. He was advertised as missing, foul play being suspected.

On the morning of March 24, at Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown awoke in a fright and called on the people of the house to tell him who he was. Later he said he was Ansel Bourne. Nothing was known of him in Norristown except that six weeks before he had rented a small shop, stocked it with stationery, confectionery, and other small articles, and was carrying on a quiet trade “without seeming to anyone unnatural or eccentric.” At first it was thought he was insane, but his story was confirmed and he was returned to his home. It was then deemed that he had lost all memory of the period which had elapsed since he boarded the Pawtucket car. What he had done or where he had been between the time he left Providence and arrived in Norristown, no one had the slightest information.

In 1890 he was induced by William James to submit to hypnotism in order to see whether in his trance state his “Brown” memories would come back. The experiment was so successful that, as James remarks, “it proved quite impossible to make him, while in hypnosis, remember any of the facts of his normal life.” The report continues:

An interesting circumstance with respect to this case and others is that the different personalities, although they inhabit the same body and divide between them the experiences of a single individual, not only regard themselves as distinct and independent persons but they exhibit marked differences in character, temperament, and tastes, and frequently profess for one another a decided antipathy. The contrasts in temperament and character displayed by these split-off personalities are illustrated in the case of Miss Beauchamp, to whose strange and fantastic history Morton Prince has devoted a volume of nearly six hundred pages.

In this case, the source of whose morbidity was investigated by means of hypnotism, not less than three distinct personalities in addition to that of the original and real Miss Beauchamp were evolved. Each one of these was distinctly different and decidedly antipathetic to the others.

Pierre Janet’s patient, Madam B, however, is the classic illustration of this dissociated personality. From the time she was sixteen years of age, Léonie, as she was called, had been so frequently hypnotized and subjected to so much clinical experimentation that a well-organized secondary personality was elaborated, which was designated as Léontine. Léonie was a poor peasant woman, serious, timid, and melancholy. Léontine was gay, noisy, restless, and ironical. Léontine did not recognize that she had any relationship with Léonie, whom she referred to as “that good woman,” “the other,” who “is not I, she is too stupid.” Eventually a third personality, known as Léonore, appeared who did not wish to be mistaken for either that “good but stupid woman” Léonie, nor for the “foolish babbler” Léontine.

Of these personalities Léonie possessed only her own memories, Léontine possessed the memories of Léonie and her own, while the memories of Léonore, who was superior to them both, included Madam B’s whole life.

What is particularly interesting in connection with this phenomenon of multiple personality is the fact that it reveals in a striking way the relation of the subconscious to the conscious. The term subconscious, as it occurs in the literature of psychology, is a word of various meanings. In general, however, we mean by subconscious a region of consciousness in which the dissociated memories, the “suppressed complexes,” as they are called, maintain some sort of conscious existence and exercise an indirect though very positive influence upon the ideas in the focus of consciousness, and so upon the behavior of the individual. The subconscious, in short, is the region of the suppressed memories. They are suppressed because they have come into conflict with the dominant complex in consciousness which represents the personality of the individual.

“Emotional conflicts” have long been the theme of literary analysis and discussion. In recent years they have become the subject of scientific investigation. In fact a new school of medical psychology with a vast literature has grown up around and out of the investigations of the effects of the suppression of a single instinct—the sexual impulse. A whole class of nervous disorders, what are known as psychoneuroses, are directly attributed by Dr. Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic school, as it is called, to these suppressions, many of which consist of memories that go back to the period of early childhood before the sexual instinct had attained the form that it has in adults.

The theory of Freud, stated briefly, amounts to this: As a result of emotional conflicts considerable portions of the memories of certain individuals, with the motor impulses connected with them, are thrust into the background of the mind, that is to say, the subconscious. Such suppressed memories, with the connected motor dispositions, he first named “suppressed complexes.” Now it is found that these suppressed complexes, which no longer respond to stimulations as they would under normal conditions, may still exercise an indirect influence upon the ideas which are in the focus of consciousness. Under certain conditions they may not get into consciousness at all but manifest themselves, for example, in the form of hysterical tics, twitchings, and muscular convulsions.

Under other circumstances the ideas associated with the suppressed complexes tend to have a dominating and controlling place in the life of the individual. All our ideas that have a sentimental setting are of this character. We are all of us a little wild and insane upon certain subjects or in regard to certain persons or objects. In such cases a very trivial remark or even a gesture will fire one of these loaded ideas. The result is an emotional explosion, a sudden burst of weeping, a gust of violent, angry, and irrelevant emotion, or, in case the feelings are more under control, merely a bitter remark or a chilling and ironical laugh. It is an interesting fact that a jest may serve as well to give expression to the “feelings” as an expletive or any other emotional expression. All forms of fanaticism, fixed ideas, phobias, ideals, and cherished illusions may be explained as the effects of mental mechanisms created by the suppressed complexes.

From what has been said we are not to assume that there is any necessary and inevitable conflict among ideas. In our dreams and day-dreams, as in fairyland, our memories come and go in the most disorderly and fantastic way, so that we may seem to be in two places at the same time, or we may even be two persons, ourselves and someone else. Everything trips lightly along, in a fantastic pageant without rhyme or reason. We discover something of the same freedom when we sit down to speculate about any subject. All sorts of ideas present themselves; we entertain them for a moment, then dismiss them and turn our attention to some other mental picture which suits our purpose better. At such times we do not observe any particular conflict between one set of ideas and another. The lion and the lamb lie down peacefully together, and even if the lamb happens to be inside we are not particularly disturbed.

Conflict arises between memories when our personal interests are affected, when our sentiments are touched, when some favorite opinion is challenged. Conflict arises between our memories when they are connected with some of our motor dispositions, that is to say, when we begin to act. Memories which are suppressed as a result of emotional conflicts, memories associated with established motor dispositions, inevitably tend to find some sort of direct or symbolic expression. In this way they give rise to the symptoms which we meet in hysteria and psychasthenia—fears, phobias, obsessions, and tics, like stammering.

The suppressed complexes do not manifest themselves in the pathological forms only, but neither do the activities of the normal complexes give any clear and unequivocal evidence of themselves in ordinary consciousness. We are invariably moved to act by motives of which we are only partially conscious or wholly unaware. Not only is this true, but the accounts we give to ourselves and others of the motives upon which we acted are often wholly fictitious, although they may be given in perfect good faith.

A simple illustration will serve, however, to indicate how this can be effected. In what is called post-hypnotic suggestion we have an illustration of the manner in which the waking mind may be influenced by impulses of whose origin and significance the subject is wholly unaware. In a state of hypnotic slumber the suggestion is given that after awaking the subject will, upon a certain signal, rise and open the window or turn out the light. He is accordingly awakened and, at the signal agreed upon while he was in the hypnotic slumber but of which he is now wholly unconscious, he will immediately carry out the command as previously given. If the subject is then asked why he opened the window or turned out the light, he will, in evident good faith, make some ordinary explanation, as that “it seemed too hot in the room,” or that he “thought the light in the room was disagreeable.” In some cases, when the command given seems too absurd, the subject may not carry it out, but he will then show signs of restlessness and discomfort, just for instance as one feels when he is conscious that he has left something undone which he intended to do, although he can no longer recall what it was. Sometimes when the subject is not disposed to carry out the command actually given, he will perform some other related act as a substitute, just as persons who have an uneasy conscience, while still unwilling to make restitution or right the wrong which they have committed, will perform some other act by way of expiation.

Our moral sentiments and social attitudes are very largely fixed and determined by our past experiences of which we are only vaguely conscious.

“This same principle,” as Morton Prince suggests, “underlies what is called the ‘social conscience,’ the ‘civic’ and ‘national conscience,’ ‘patriotism,’ ‘public opinion,’ what the Germans call ‘Sittlichkeit,’ the war attitude of mind, etc. All these mental attitudes may be reduced to common habits of thought and conduct derived from mental experiences common to a given community and conserved as complexes in the unconscious of the several individuals of the community.”

Sentiments were first defined and distinguished from the emotions by Shand, who conceived of them as organizations of the emotions about some particular object or type of object. Maternal love, for example, includes the emotions of fear, anger, joy, or sorrow, all organized about the child. This maternal love is made up of innate tendencies but is not itself a part of original nature. It is the mother’s fostering care of the child which develops her sentiments toward it, and the sentiment attaches to any object that is bound up with the life of the child. The cradle is dear to the mother because it is connected with her occupation in caring for the child. The material fears for its welfare, her joy in its achievements, her anger with those who injure or even disparage it, are all part of the maternal sentiment.

The mother’s sentiment determines her attitude toward her child, toward other children, and toward children in general. Just as back of every sensation, perception, or idea there is some sort of motor disposition, so our attitudes are supported by our sentiments. Back of every political opinion there is a political sentiment and it is the sentiment which gives force and meaning to the opinion.

Thus we may think of opinions merely as representative of a psycho-physical mechanism, which we may call the sentiment-attitude. These sentiment-attitudes are to be regarded in turn as organizations of the original tendencies, the instinct-emotions, about some memory, idea, or object which is, or once was, the focus and the end for which the original tendencies thus organized exist. In this way opinions turn out, in the long run, to rest on original nature, albeit original nature modified by experience and tradition.

C. THE FOUR WISHES: A CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIAL FORCES

1. The Wish, the Social Atom[166]

The Freudian psychology is based on the doctrine of the “wish,” just as physical science is based, today, on the concept of function. Both of these are what may be called dynamic concepts, rather than static; they envisage natural phenomena not as things but as processes and largely to this fact is due their pre-eminent explanatory value. Through the “wish” the “thing” aspect of mental phenomena, the more substantive “content of consciousness,” becomes somewhat modified and reinterpreted. This “wish,” which as a concept Freud does not analyze, includes all that would commonly be so classed, and also whatever would be called impulse, tendency, desire, purpose, attitude, and the like, not including, however, any emotional components thereof. Freud also acknowledges the existence of what he calls “negative wishes,” and these are not fears but negative purposes. An exact definition of the “wish” is that it is a course of action which some mechanism of the body is set to carry out, whether it actually does so or does not. All emotions, as well as the feelings of pleasure and displeasure, are separable from the “wishes,” and this precludes any thought of a merely hedonistic psychology. The wish is any purpose of project for a course of action, whether it is being merely entertained by the mind or is being actually executed—a distinction which is really of little importance. We shall do well if we consider this to be, as in fact it is, dependent on a motor attitude of the physical body, which goes over into overt action and conduct when the wish is carried into execution.

It is this “wish” which transforms the principal doctrines of psychology and recasts the science, much as the “atomic theory” and later the “ionic theory” have reshaped earlier conceptions of chemistry. This so-called “wish” becomes the unit of psychology, replacing the older unit commonly called “sensation,” which latter, it is to be noted, was a content of consciousness unit, whereas the “wish” is a more dynamic affair.

Unquestionably the mind is somehow “embodied” in the body. But how? Well, if the unit of mind and character is a “wish,” it is easy enough to perceive how it is incorporated. It is, this “wish,” something which the body as a piece of mechanism can do—a course of action with regard to the environment which the machinery of the body is capable of carrying out. This capacity resides clearly in the parts of which the body consists and in the way in which these are put together, not so much in the matter of which the body is composed, as in the forms which this matter assumes when organized.

In order to look at this more closely we must go a bit down the evolutionary series to the fields of biology and physiology. Here we find much talk of nerves and muscles, sense-organs, reflex arcs, stimulation, and muscular response, and we feel that somehow these things do not reach the core of the matter, and that they never can; that spirit is not nerve or muscle; and that intelligent conduct, to say nothing of conscious thought, can never be reduced to reflex arcs and the like—just as a printing press is not merely wheels and rollers, and still less is it chunks of iron. The biologist has only himself to thank if he has overlooked a thing which lay directly under his nose. He has overlooked the form of organization of these his reflex arcs, has left out of account that step which assembles wheels and rollers into a printing press, and that which organizes reflex arcs, as we shall presently see, into an intelligent, conscious creature. Evolution took this important little step of organization ages ago, and thereby produced the rudimentary “wish.”

Now in the reflex arc a sense-organ is stimulated and the energy of stimulation is transformed into nervous energy, which then passes along an afferent nerve to the central nervous system, passes through this and out by an efferent or motor nerve to a muscle, where the energy is again transformed and the muscle contracts. Stimulation at one point of the animal organism produces contraction at another. The principles of irritability and of motility are involved, but all further study of this process will lead us only to the physics and chemistry of the energy transformations—will lead us, that is, in the direction of analysis. If, however, we inquire in what way such reflexes are combined or “integrated” into more complicated processes, we shall be led in exactly the opposite direction, that of synthesis, and here we soon come, as is not surprising, to a synthetic novelty. This is specific response or behavior.

In this single reflex something is done to a sense-organ and the process within the organ is comparable to the process in any unstable substance when the foreign energy strikes it; it is strictly a chemical process, and so for the conducting nerve, likewise for the contracting muscle. It happens, as a physiological fact, that in this process stored energy is released so that a reflex contraction is literally comparable to the firing of a pistol. But the reflex arc is not “aware” of anything, and indeed there is nothing more to say about the process unless we should begin to analyze it. But even two such processes going on together in one organism are a very different matter. Two such processes require two sense-organs, two conduction paths, and two muscles; and since we are considering the result of the two in combination, the relative anatomical location of these six members is of importance. For simplicity I will take a hypothetical but strictly possible case. A small water animal has an eyespot located on each side of its anterior end; each spot is connected by a nerve with a vibratory silium or fin on the side of the posterior end; the thrust exerted by each fin is toward the rear. If, now, light strikes one eye, say the right, the left fin is set in motion and the animal’s body is set rotating toward the right like a rowboat with one oar. This is all that one such reflex arc could do for the animal. Since, however, there are now two, when the animal comes to be turned far enough toward the right so that some of the light strikes the second eyespot (as will happen when the animal comes around facing the light), the second fin, on the right side, is set in motion, and the two together propel the animal forward in a straight line. The direction of this line will be that in which the animal lies when its two eyes receive equal amounts of light. In other words, by the combined operation of two reflexes the animal swims toward the light, while either reflex alone would only have set it spinning like a top. It now responds specifically in the direction of the light, whereas before it merely spun when lashed.

Suppose, now, that it possess a third reflex arc—a “heat spot” so connected with the same or other fins that when stimulated by a certain intensity of heat it initiates a nervous impulse which stops the forward propulsion. The animal is still “lashed,” but nevertheless no light can force it to swim “blindly to its death” by scalding. It has the rudiments of “intelligence.” But so it had before. For as soon as two reflex arcs capacitate it mechanically to swim toward light, it was no longer exactly like a pinwheel; it could respond specifically toward at least one thing in its environment.

It is this objective reference of a process of release that is significant. The mere reflex does not refer to anything beyond itself; if it drives an organism in a certain direction, it is only as a rocket ignited at random shoots off in some direction, depending on how it happened to lie. But specific response is not merely in some random direction, it is toward an object, and if this object is moved, the responding organism changes its direction and still moves after it. And the objective reference is that the organism is moving with reference to some object or fact of the environment. For the organism, while a very interesting mechanism in itself, is one whose movements turn on objects outside of itself, much as the orbit of the earth turns upon the sun; and these external, and sometimes very distant, objects are as much constituents of the behavior process as is the organism which does the turning. It is this pivotal outer object, the object of specific response, which seems to me to have been overneglected.

It is not surprising, then, that in animals as highly organized reflexly as are many of the invertebrates, even though they should possess no other principle of action than that of specific response, the various life-activities should present an appearance of considerable intelligence. And I believe that in fact this intelligence is solely the product of accumulated specific responses. Our present point is that the specific response and the “wish” as Freud uses the term, are one and the same thing.

2. The Freudian Wish[167]

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride” is a nursery saw which, in the light of recent developments in psychology, has come to have a much more universal application than it was formerly supposed to have. If the followers of the Freudian school of psychologists can be believed—and there are many reasons for believing them—all of us, no matter how apparently contented we are and how well we are supplied with the good things of the earth, are “beggars,” because at one time or another and in one way or another we are daily betraying the presence of unfulfilled wishes. Many of these wishes are of such a character that we ourselves cannot put them into words. Indeed, if they were put into words for us, we should straightway deny that such a wish is or was ever harbored by us in our waking moments. But the stretch of time indicated by “waking moments” is only a minor part of the twenty-four hours. Even during the time we are not asleep we are often abstracted, day-dreaming, letting moments go by in reverie. Only during a limited part of our waking moments are we keenly and alertly “all there” in the possession of our faculties. There are thus, even apart from sleep, many unguarded moments when these so-called “repressed wishes” may show themselves.

In waking moments we wish only for the conventional things which will not run counter to our social traditions or code of living. But these open and above-board wishes are not very interesting to the psychologist. Since they are harmless and call for the kinds of things that everybody in our circle wishes for, we do not mind admitting them and talking about them. Open and uncensored wishes are best seen in children (though children at an early age begin to show repressions). Only tonight I heard a little girl of nine say: “I wish I were a boy and were sixteen years old—I’d marry Ann” (her nine-year old companion). And recently I heard a boy of eight say to his father: “I wish you would go away forever; then I could marry mother.” The spontaneous and uncensored wishes of children gradually disappear as the children take on the speech conventions of the adult. But even though the crassness of the form of expression of the wish disappears with age, there is no reason to suppose that the human organism ever gets to the point where wishes just as unconventional as the above do not rise to trouble it. Such wishes, though, are immediately repressed; we never harbor them nor do we express them clearly to ourselves in our waking moments.

The steps by which repression takes place in the simpler cases are not especially difficult to understand. When the child wants something it ought not to have, its mother hands it something else and moves the object about until the child reaches out for it. When the adult strives for something which society denies him, his environment offers him, if he is normal, something which is “almost as good,” although it may not wholly take the place of the thing he originally strove for. This in general is the process of substitution or sublimation. It is never complete from the first moment of childhood. Consequently it is natural to suppose that many of the things which have been denied us should at times beckon to us. But since they are banned they must beckon in devious ways. These sometime grim specters both of the present and of the past cannot break through the barriers of our staid and sober waking moments, so they exhibit themselves, at least to the initiated, in shadowy form in reverie, and in more substantial form in the slips we make in conversation and in writing, and in the things we laugh at; but clearest of all in dreams. I say the meaning is clear to the initiated because it does require special training and experience to analyze these seemingly nonsensical slips of tongue and pen, these highly elaborated and apparently meaningless dreams, into the wishes (instinct and habit impulses) which gave them birth. It is fortunate for us that we are protected in this way from having to face openly many of our own wishes and the wishes of our friends.

We get our clue to the dream as being a wish fulfilment by taking the dreams of children. Their dreams are as uncensored as is their conversation. Before Christmas my own children dreamed nightly that they had received the things they wanted for Christmas. The dreams were clear, logical, and open wishes. Why should the dreams of adults be less logical and less open unless they are to act as concealers of the wish? If the dream processes in the child run in an orderly and logical way, would it indeed not be curious to find the dream processes of the adult less logical and full of meaning?

This argument gives us good a priori grounds for supposing that the dreams of adults too are full of meaning and are logical; that there is a wish in every dream and that the wish is fulfilled in the dream. The reason dreams appear illogical is due to the fact that if the wish were to be expressed in its logical form it would not square with our everyday habits of thought and action. We should be disinclined to admit even to ourselves that we have such dreams. Immediately upon waking only so much of the dream is remembered, that is, put into ordinary speech, as will square with our life at the time. The dream is “censored,” in other words.

The question immediately arises, who is the censor or what part of us does the censoring? The Freudians have made more or less of a “metaphysical entity” out of the censor. They suppose that when wishes are repressed, they are repressed into the “unconscious,” and that this mysterious censor stands at the trapdoor lying between the conscious and the unconscious. Many of us do not believe in a world of the unconscious (a few of us even have grave doubts about the usefulness of the term consciousness), hence we try to explain censorship along ordinary biological lines. We believe that one group of habits can “down” another group of habits—or instincts. In this case our ordinary system of habits—those which we call expressive of our “real selves”—inhibit or quench (keep inactive or partially inactive) those habits and instinctive tendencies which belong largely in the past.

This conception of the dream as having both censored and uncensored features has led us to divide the dream into its specious or manifest content (face value, which is usually nonsensical) and its latent or logical content. We should say that while the manifest content of the dream is nonsensical, its true or latent content is usually logical and expressive of some wish that has been suppressed in the waking state.

On examination the manifest content of dreams is found to be full of symbols. As long as the dream does not have to be put into customary language, it is allowed to stand as it is dreamed—the symbolic features are uncensored. Symbolism is much more common than is ordinarily supposed. All early language was symbolic. The language of children and of savages abounds in symbolism. Symbolic modes of expression both in art and in literature are among the earliest forms of treating difficult situations in delicate and inoffensive ways. In other words, symbols in art are a necessity and serve the same purpose as does the censor in the dreams. Even those of us who have not an artistic education, however, have become familiar with the commoner forms of symbolism through our acquaintance with literature. In the dream, when the more finely controlled physiological processes are in abeyance, there is a tendency to revert to the symbolic modes of expression. This has its use, because on awaking the dream does not shock us, since we make no attempt to analyze or trace back in the dream the symbol’s original meaning. Hence we find that the manifest content is often filled with symbols which occasionally give us the clue to the dream analysis.

The dream then brings surcease from our maladjustments: If we are denied power, influence, or love by society or by individuals, we can obtain these desiderata in our dreams. We can possess in dreams the things which we cannot have by day. In sleep the poor man becomes a Midas, the ugly woman handsome, the childless woman surrounded by children, and those who in daily life live upon a crust in their dreams dine like princes (after living upon canned goods for two months in the Dry Tortugas, the burden of my every dream was food). Where the wished-for things are compatible with our daily code, they are remembered on awaking as they were dreamed. Society, however, will not allow the unmarried woman to have children, however keen her desire for them. Hence her dreams in which the wish is gratified are remembered in meaningless words and symbols.

Long before the time Freud’s doctrine saw the light of day, William James gave the key to what I believed to be the true explanation of the wish. Thirty years ago he wrote:

What James is particularly emphasizing here is that the human organism is instinctively capable of developing along many different lines, but that due to the stress of civilization some of these instinctive capacities must be thwarted. In addition to these impulses which are instinctive, and therefore hereditary, there are many habit impulses which are equally strong and which for similar reasons must be given up. The systems of habits we form (i.e., the acts we learn to perform) at four years of age will not serve us when we are twelve, and those formed at the age of twelve will not serve us when we become adults. As we pass from childhood to man’s estate, we are constantly having to give up thousands of activities which our nervous and muscular systems have a tendency to perform. Some of these instinctive tendencies born with use are poor heritages; some of the habits we early develop are equally poor possessions. But, whether they are “good” or “bad,” they must give way as we put on the habits required of adults. Some of them yield with difficulty and we often get badly twisted in attempting to put them away, as every psychiatric clinic can testify. It is among these frustrated impulses that I would find the biological basis of the unfulfilled wish. Such “wishes” need never have been “conscious” and need never have been suppressed into Freud’s realm of the unconscious. It may be inferred from this that there is no particular reason for applying the term “wish” to such tendencies. What we discover then in dreams and in conversational slips and other lapses are really at heart “reaction tendencies”—tendencies which we need never have faced nor put into words at any time. On Freud’s theory these “wishes” have at one time been faced and put into words by the individual, and when faced they were recognized as not squaring with his ethical code. They were then immediately “repressed into the unconscious.”

A few illustrations may help in understanding how thwarted tendencies may lay the basis for the so-called unfulfilled wish which later appears in the dream. One individual becomes a psychologist in spite of his strong interest in becoming a medical man, because at the time it was easier for him to get the training along psychological lines. Another pursues a business career, when, if he had had his choice, he would have become a writer of plays. Sometimes on account of the care of a mother or of younger brothers and sisters, a young man cannot marry, even though the mating instinct is normal; such a course of action necessarily leaves unfulfilled wishes and frustrated impulses in its train. Again a young man will marry and settle down when mature consideration would show that his career would advance much more rapidly if he were not burdened with a family. Again, an individual marries and without even admitting to himself that his marriage is a failure he gradually shuts himself off from any emotional expression—protects himself from the married state by sublimating his natural domestic ties, usually in some kind of engrossing work, but often in questionable ways—by hobbies, speed manias, and excesses of various kinds. In connection with this it is interesting to note that the automobile, quite apart from its utilitarian value, is coming to be a widely used means of repression or wish sublimation. I have been struck by the enormously increasing number of women drivers. Women in the present state of society have not the same access to absorbing kinds of works that men have (which will shortly come to be realized as a crime far worse than that of the Inquisition). Hence their chances of normal sublimation are limited. For this reason women seek an outlet by rushing to the war as nurses, in becoming social workers, pursuing aviation, etc. Now if I am right in this analysis these unexercised tendencies to do things other than we are doing are never quite got rid of. We cannot get rid of them unless we could build ourselves over again so that our organic machinery would work only along certain lines and only for certain occupations. Since we cannot completely live these tendencies down, we are all more or less “unadjusted” and ill adapted. These maladjustments are exhibited whenever the brakes are off, that is, whenever our higher and well-developed habits of speech and action are dormant, as in sleep, in emotional disturbances, etc.

Many but not all of these “wishes” can be traced to early childhood or to adolescence, which is a time of stress and strain and a period of great excitement. In childhood the boy often puts himself in his father’s place; he wishes that he were grown like his father and could take his father’s place, for then his mother would notice him more and he would not have to feel the weight of authority. The girl likewise often becomes closely attached to her father and wishes her mother would die (which in childhood means to disappear or go away) so that she could be all in all to her father. These wishes, from the standpoint of popular morality, are perfectly innocent; but as the children grow older they are told that such wishes are wrong and that they should not speak in such a “dreadful” way. Such wishes are, then, gradually suppressed—replaced by some other mode of expression. But the replacement is often imperfect. The apostle’s saying, “When we become men we put away childish things” was written before the days of psychoanalysis.

3. The Person and His Wishes[168]

The human being has a great variety of “wishes,” ranging from the desire to have food to the wish to serve humanity.

Anything capable of being appreciated (wished for) is a “value.” Food, money, a poem, a political doctrine, a religious creed, a member of the other sex, etc., are values.

There are also negative values—things which exist but which the individual does not want, which he may even despise. Liquor or the Yiddish language may be a positive value for one person and a negative value for another.

The state of mind of the individual toward a value is an “attitude.” Love of money, desire for fame, appreciation of a given poem, reverence for God, hatred of the Jew, are attitudes.

We divide wishes into four classes: (1) the desire for new experience; (2) the desire for security; (3) the desire for recognition; (4) the desire for response.

1. The desire for new experience is seen in simple forms in the prowling and meddling activities of the child, and the love of adventure and travel in the boy and the man. It ranges in moral quality from the pursuit of game and the pursuit of pleasure to the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of ideals. It is found equally in the vagabond and the scientific explorer. Novels, theaters, motion pictures, etc., are means of satisfying this desire vicariously, and their popularity is a sign of the elemental force of this desire.

In its pure form the desire for new experience implies motion, change, danger, instability, social irresponsibility. The individual dominated by it shows a tendency to disregard prevailing standards and group interests. He may be a complete failure, on account of his instability; or a conspicuous success, if he converts his experiences into social values—puts them in the form of a poem, makes of them a contribution to science, etc.

2. The desire for security is opposed to the desire for new experience. It implies avoidance of danger and death, caution, conservatism. Incorporation in an organization (family, community, state) provides the greatest security. In certain animal societies (e.g., the ants) the organization and co-operation are very rigid. Similarly among the peasants of Europe, represented by our immigrant groups, all lines of behavior are predetermined for the individual by tradition. In such a group the individual is secure as long as the group organization is secure, but evidently he shows little originality or creativeness.

3. The desire for recognition expresses itself in devices for securing distinction in the eyes of the public. A list of the different modes of seeking recognition would be very long. It would include courageous behavior, showing off through ornament and dress, the pomp of kings, the display of opinions and knowledge, the possession of special attainments—in the arts, for example. It is expressed alike in arrogance and in humility, even in martyrdom. Certain modes of seeking recognition we define as “vanity,” others as “ambition.” The “will to power” belongs here. Perhaps there has been no spur to human activity so keen and no motive so naïvely avowed as the desire for “undying fame,” and it would be difficult to estimate the rôle the desire for recognition has played in the creation of social values.

4. The desire for response is a craving, not for the recognition of the public at large, but for the more intimate appreciation of individuals. It is exemplified in mother-love (touch plays an important rôle in this connection), in romantic love, family affection, and other personal attachments. Homesickness and loneliness are expressions of it. Many of the devices for securing recognition are used also in securing response.

Apparently these four classes comprehend all the positive wishes. Such attitudes as anger, fear, hate, and prejudice are attitudes toward those objects which may frustrate a wish.

Our hopes, fears, inspirations, joys, sorrows are bound up with these wishes and issue from them. There is, of course, a kaleidoscopic mingling of wishes throughout life, and a single given act may contain a plurality of them. Thus when a peasant emigrates to America he may expect to have a good time and learn many things (new experience), to make a fortune (greater security), to have a higher social standing on his return (recognition), and to induce a certain person to marry him (response).

The “character” of the individual is determined by the nature of the organization of his wishes. The dominance of any one of the four types of wishes is the basis of our ordinary judgment of his character. Our appreciation (positive or negative) of the character of the individual is based on his display of certain wishes as against others, and on his modes of seeking their realization.

The individual’s attitude toward the totality of his attitudes constitutes his conscious “personality.” The conscious personality represents the conception of self, the individual’s appreciation of his own character.

III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS

Literature on the concept of social forces falls under four heads: (1) popular notions of social forces; (2) social forces and history; (3) interests, sentiments, and attitudes as social forces; and (4) wishes as social forces.

1. Popular Notions of Social Forces

The term “social forces” first gained currency in America with the rise of the “reformers,” so called, and with the growth of popular interest in the problems of city life; that is, labor and capital, municipal reform and social welfare, problems of social politics.

In the rural community the individual had counted; in the city he is likely to be lost. It was this declining weight of the individual in the life of great cities, as compared with that of impersonal social organizations, the parties, the unions, and the clubs, that first suggested, perhaps, the propriety of the term social forces. In 1897 Washington Gladden published a volume entitled Social Facts and Forces: the Factory, the Labor Union, the Corporation, the Railway, the City, the Church. The term soon gained wide currency and general acceptance.

At the twenty-eighth annual National Conference of Charities and Correction, at Washington, D.C., Mary E. Richmond read a paper upon “Charitable Co-operation” in which she presented a diagram and a classification of the social forces of the community from the point of view of the social worker[169] given on page 492.

Beginning in October, 1906, there appeared for several years in the journal of social workers, Charities and Commons, now The Survey, editorial essays upon social, industrial, and civic questions under the heading “Social Forces.” In the first article E. T. Devine made the following statement: “In this column the editor intends to have his say from month to month about the persons, books, and events which have significance as social forces…. Not all the social forces are obviously forces of good, although they are all under the ultimate control of a power which makes for righteousness.”

Diagram of Forces With Which the Charity Worker May Co-operate

Ten years later a group of members in the National Conference of Social Work formed a division under the title “The Organization of the Social Forces of the Community.” The term community, in connection with that of social forces, suggests that every community may be conceived as a definite constellation of social forces. In this form the notion has been fruitful in suggesting a more abstract, intelligible, and, at the same time, sounder conception of the community life.

Most of the social surveys made in recent years are based upon this conception of the community as a complex of social forces embodied in institutions and organizations. It is the specific task of every community survey to reveal the community in its separated and often isolated organs. The references to the literature on the community surveys at the conclusion of chapter iii, “Society and the Group,”[170] will be of service in a further study of the application of the concept of social forces to the study of the community.

2. Social Forces and History

Historians, particularly in recent years, have frequently used the expression “social forces” although they have nowhere defined it. Kuno Francke, in the Preface of his book entitled A History of German Literature as Determined by Social Forces, states that it “is an honest attempt to analyze the social, religious, and moral forces which determined the growth of German literature as a whole.” Taine in the Preface to The Ancient Régime says: “Without taking any side, curiosity becomes scientific and centres on the secret forces which direct the wonderful process. These forces consist of the situations, the passions, the ideas, and the wills of each group of actors, and which can be defined and almost measured.”[171]

It is in the writings of historians, like Taine in France, Buckle in England, and Karl Lamprecht in Germany, who started out with the deliberate intention of writing history as if it were natural history, that we find the first serious attempts to use the concept of social forces in historical analysis. Writers of this school are quite as much interested in the historical process as they are in historical fact, and there is a constant striving to treat the individual as representative of the class, and to define historical tendencies in general and abstract terms.

But history conceived in those terms tends to become sociology. “History,” says Lamprecht, “is a socio-psychological science. In the conflict between the old and the new tendencies in historical investigation, the main question has to do with social-psychic, as compared and contrasted with individual-psychic factors; or to speak somewhat generally, the understanding on the one hand of conditions, on the other of heroes, as the motive powers in the course of history.”[172] It was Carlyle—whose conception of history is farthest removed from that of Lamprecht—who said, “Universal history is at bottom the history of great men.”

The criticism of history by historians and the attempts, never quite successful, to make history positive furnish further interesting comment on this topic.[173]

3. Interest, Sentiments, and Attitudes as Social Forces

More had been written, first and last, about human motives than any other aspect of human life. Only in very recent years, however, have psychologists and social psychologists had either a point of view or methods of investigation which enabled them to analyze and explain the facts. The tendency of the older introspective psychology was to refer in general terms to the motor tendencies and the will, but in the analysis of sensation and the intellectual processes, will disappeared.

The literature on this subject covers all that has been written by the students of animal behavior and instinct, Lloyd Morgan, Thorndike, Watson, and Loeb. It includes the interesting studies of human behavior by Bechterew, Pavlow, and the so-called objective school of psychology in Russia. It should include likewise writers like Graham Wallas in England, Carleton Parker and Ordway Tead in America, who are seeking to apply the new science of human nature to the problems of society.[174]

Every social science has been based upon some theory, implicit or explicit, of human motives. Economics, political science, and ethics, before any systematic attempt had been made to study the matter empirically, had formulated theories of human nature to justify their presuppositions and procedures.

In classical political economy the single motive of human action was embodied in the abstraction “the economic man.” The utilitarian school of ethics reduced all human motives to self-interest. Disinterested conduct was explained as enlightened self-interest. This theory was criticized as reducing the person to “an intellectual calculating machine.” The theory of evolution suggested to Herbert Spencer a new interpretation of human motives which reasserted their individualistic origin, but explained altruistic sentiments as the slowly accumulated products of evolution. Altruism to Spencer was the enlightened self-interest of the race.

It was the English economists of the eighteenth century who gave us the first systematic account of modern society in deterministic terms. The conception of society implicit in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations reflects at once the temper of the English people and of the age in which he lived.[175] The eighteenth century was the age of individualism, laissez faire and freedom. Everything was in process of emancipation except woman.

The attention of economists at this time was directed to that region of social life in which the behavior of the individual is most individualistic and least controlled, namely, the market place. The economic man, as the classical economists conceived him, is more completely embodied in the trader in the auction pit, than in any other figure in any other situation in society. And the trader in that position performs a very important social function.[176]

There are, however, other social situations which have created other social types, and the sociologists have, from the very first, directed their attention to a very different aspect of social life, namely, its unity and solidarity. Comte conceived humanity in terms of the family, and most sociologists have been disposed to take the family as representative of the type of relations they are willing to call social. Not the auction pit but the family has been the basis of the sociological conception of society. Not competition but control has been the central fact and problem of sociology.

Socialization, when that word is used as a term of appreciation rather than of description, sets up as the goal of social effort a world in which conflict, competition, and the externality of individuals, if they do not disappear altogether, will be so diminished that all men may live together as members of one family. This, also, is the goal of progress according to our present major prophet, H. G. Wells.[177]

It is intelligible, therefore, that sociologists should conceive of social forces in other terms than self-interest. If there had been no other human motives than those attributed to the economic man there would have been economics but no sociology, at least in the sense in which we conceive it today.

In the writings of Ratzenhofer and Small human interests are postulated as both the unconscious motives and the conscious ends of behavior. Small’s classification of interests—health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, rightness—has secured general acceptance.

“Sentiment” was used by French writers, Ribot, Binet, and others, as a general term for the entire field of affective life. A. F. Shand in two articles in Mind, “Character and the Emotions” and “Ribot’s Theory of the Passions,” has made a distinct contribution by distinguishing the sentiments from the emotions. Shand pointed out that the sentiment, as a product of social experience, is an organization of emotions around the idea of an object. McDougall in his Social Psychology adopted Shand’s definition and described the organization of typical sentiments, as love and hate.

Thomas was the first to make fruitful use of the term attitude, which he defined as a “tendency to act.” Incidentally he points out that attitudes are social, that is, the product of interaction.

4. Wishes and Social Forces

Ward had stated that “The social forces are wants seeking satisfaction through efforts, and are thus social motives or motors inspiring activities which either create social structures through social synergy or modify the structures already created through innovation and conation.”[178] Elsewhere Ward says that “desire is the only motive to action.”[179]

The psychoanalytic school of psychiatrists have attempted to reduce all motives to one—the wish, or libido. Freud conceived that sex appetite and memories connected with it were the unconscious sources of some if not all of the significant forms of human behavior. Freud’s interpretation of sex, however, seemed to include the whole field of desires that have their origin in touch stimulations. To Jung the libido is vital energy motivating the life-adjustments of the person. Adler from his study of organic inferiority interpreted the libido as the wish for completeness or perfection. Curiously enough, these critics of Freud, while not accepting his interpretation of the unconscious wish, still seek to reduce all motives to a single unit. To explain all behavior by one formula, however, is to explain nothing.

On the other hand, interpretation by a multitude of unrelated conscious desires in the fashion of the older sociological literature is no great advance beyond the findings of common sense. The distinctive value of the definition, and classification, of Thomas lies in the fact that it reduces the multitude of desires to four. These four wishes, however, determine the simplest as well as the most complex behavior of persons. The use made of this method in his study of the Polish peasant indicated its possibilities for the analysis of the organization of the life of persons and of social groups.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. POPULAR NOTION OF SOCIAL FORCES

(1) Patten, Simon N. The Theory of Social Forces. Philadelphia, 1896.

(2) Gladden, Washington. Social Facts and Forces. The factory, the labor union, the corporation, the railway, the city, the church. New York, 1897.

(3) Richmond, Mary. “Charitable Co-operation,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, 1901, pp. 298-313. (Contains “Diagram of Forces with which Charity Worker may Co-operate.”)

(4) Devine, Edward T. Social Forces. From the editor’s page of The Survey. New York, 1910.

(5) Edie, Lionel D., Editor. Current Social and Industrial Forces. Introduction by James Harvey Robinson. New York, 1920.

(6) Burns, Allen T. “Organization of Community Forces for the Promotion of Social Programs,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, 1916, pp. 62-78.

(7) Social Forces. A topical outline with bibliography. Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association, Educational Committee. Madison, Wis., 1915.

(8) Wells, H. G. Social Forces in England and America. London and New York, 1914.

II. HISTORICAL TENDENCIES AS SOCIAL FORCES

(1) Lamprecht, Karl. What Is History? Five lectures on the modern science of history. Translated from the German by E. A. Andrews. London and New York, 1905.

(2) Loria, A. The Economic Foundations of Society. Translated from the 2d French ed. by L. M. Keasbey. London and New York, 1899.

(3) Beard, Charles A. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York, 1913.

(4) Brandes, Georg. Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature. 6 vols. London, 1906.

(5) Taine, H. A. The Ancient Régime. Translated from the French by John Durand. New York, 1891.

(6) Buckle, Henry Thomas. History of Civilization in England. 2 vols. New York, 1892.

(7) Lacombe, Paul. De l’histoire considérée comme science. Paris, 1894.

(8) Francke, Kuno. Social Forces in German Literature. A study in the history of civilization. New York, 1896.

(9) Hart, A. B. Social and Economic Forces in American History. From The American Nation, A History. London and New York, 1904.

(10) Turner, Frederick J. Social Forces in American History, The American Historical Review, XVI (1910-11), 217-33.

(11) Woods, F. A. The Influence of Monarchs. Steps in a new science of history. New York, 1913.

III. INTERESTS AND WANTS

A. Interests, Desires, and Wants as Defined by the Sociologist

(1) Ward, Lester F. Dynamic Sociology, or Applied Social Science. As based upon statical sociology and the less complex sciences. “The Social Forces,” I, 468-699. New York, 1883.

(2) ——. Pure Sociology. A treatise on the origin and spontaneous development of society. Chap. xii, “Classification of the Social Forces,” pp. 256-65. New York, 1903.

(3) ——. The Psychic Factors of Civilization. Chap. ix, “The Philosophy of Desire,” pp. 50-58, chap. xviii, “The Social Forces,” pp. 116-24. Boston, 1901.

(4) Small, Albion W. General Sociology. Chaps. xxvii and xxxi, pp. 372-94; 425-42. Chicago, 1905.

(5) Ross, Edward A. The Principles of Sociology. Part II, “Social Forces,” pp. 41-73. New York, 1920.

(6) Blackmar, F. W., and Gillin, J. L. Outlines of Sociology. Part III, chap ii, “Social Forces,” pp. 283-315. New York, 1915.

(7) Hayes, Edward C. “The ‘Social Forces’ Error,” American Journal of Sociology, XVI (1910-11), 613-25; 636-44.

(8) Fouillée, Alfred. Education from a National Standpoint. Translated from the French by W. J. Greenstreet. Chap. i, pp. 10-27. New York, 1892.

(9) ——. Morale des idées-forces. 2d ed. Paris, 1908. [Book II, Part II, chap. iii, pp. 290-311, describes opinion, custom, law, education from the point of view of “Idea-Forces.”]

B. Interests and Wants as Defined by the Economist

(1) Hermann, F. B. W. v. Staatswirthschaftliche Untersuchungen. Chap. ii. München, 1870. [First of the modern attempts to classify wants.]

(2) Walker, F. A. Political Economy. 3d ed. New York, 1888. [See discussion of competition, pp. 91-111.]

(3) Marshall, Alfred. Principles of Economics. An introductory volume. Chap. ii, “Wants in Relation to Activities,” pp. 86-91. 6th ed. London, 1910.

(4) ——. “Some Aspects of Competition,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Sec. VII, “Modern Analysis of the Motives of Business Competition,” LIII (1890), 634-37. [See also Sec. VIII, “Growing Importance of Public Opinion as an Economic Force,” pp. 637-41.]

(5) Menger, Karl. Grundsatze der Volkswirthschaftslehre. Chap. ii, Wien, 1871.

(6) ——. Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der politischen Ökonomie insbesondere. Chap. vii, “Über das Dogma,” etc. Leipzig, 1883.

(7) Jevons, W. S. The Theory of Political Economy. Chap. ii, “Theory of Pleasure and Pain,” pp. 28-36; “The Laws of Human Wants,” pp. 39-43. 4th ed. London, 1911.

(8) Bentham, Jeremy. “A Table of the Springs of Action.” Showing the several species of pleasures and pains of which man’s nature is susceptible; together with the several species of interests, desires and motives respectively corresponding to them; and the several sets of appellatives, neutral, eulogistic, and dyslogistic, by which each species of motive is wont to be designated. [First published in 1817.] The Works of Jeremy Bentham, I, 195-219. London, 1843.

C. Wants and Values

(1) Kreibig, Josef K. Psychologische Grundlegung eines Systems der Wert-Theorie. Wien, 1902.

(2) Simmel, Georg. Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der ethischen Grundbegriffe. Vol. I, chap. iv, “Die Glückseligkeit.” 2 vols. Berlin, 1904-05.

(3) Meinong, Alexius. Psychologische-ethische Untersuchungen zur Wert-Theorie. Graz, 1894.

(4) Ehrenfels, Chrn. v. System der Wert-Theorie. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1897-98.

(5) Brentano, Franz. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Chap. vi-ix, pp. 256-350. Leipzig, 1874.

(6) Urban, Wilbur Marshall. Valuation, Its Nature and Laws. Being an introduction to the general theory of value. London, 1909.

(7) Cooley, Charles H. Social Process. Part VI, “Valuation,” pp. 283-348. New York, 1918.

IV. SENTIMENTS, ATTITUDES, AND WISHES

(1) White, W. A. Mechanisms of Character Formation. An introduction to psychoanalysis. New York, 1916.

(2) Pfister, Oskar. The Psychoanalytic Method. Translated from the German by Dr. C.R. Payne. New York, 1917.

(3) Jung, Carl G. Analytical Psychology. Translated from the German by Dr. Constance E. Long. New York, 1916.

(4) Adler, Alfred. The Neurotic Constitution. Outlines of a comparative individualistic psychology and psychotherapy. Translated from the German by Bernard Glueck. New York, 1917.

(5) Freud, Sigmund. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York, 1920.

(6) Tridon, André. Psychoanalysis and Behavior. New York, 1920.

(7) Holt, Edwin B. The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics. New York, 1915.

(8) Mercier, C.A. Conduct and Its Disorders Biologically Considered. London, 1911.

(9) Bechterew, W. v. La psychologie objective. Translated from the Russian. Paris, 1913.

(10) Kostyleff, N. Le mécanisme cérébral de la pensée. Paris, 1914.

(11) Bentley, A. F. The Process of Government. A study of social pressures. Chicago, 1908.

(12) Veblen, T. The Theory of the Leisure Class. An economic study in the evolution of institutions. New York, 1899. [Discusses the wish for recognition.]

(13) ——. The Instinct of Workmanship. And the state of the industrial arts. New York, 1914. [Discusses the wish for recognition.]

(14) McDougall, William. An Introduction to Social Psychology. Chaps. v-vi, pp. 121-73. 13th ed. Boston, 1918.

(15) Shand, A. F. “Character and the Emotions,” Mind., n. s., V (1896), 203-26.

(16) ——. “M. Ribot’s Theory of the Passions,” Mind., n. s., XVI (1907), 477-505.

(17) ——. The Foundations of Character. Being a study of the tendencies of the emotions and sentiments. Chaps. iv-v, “The Systems of the Sentiments,” pp. 35-63. London, 1914.

(18) Thomas, W. I., and Znaniecki, F. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. III, 5-81. Boston, 1919.

TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES

1. The Concept of Forces in the Natural Sciences.

2. Historical Interpretation and Social Forces.

3. The Concept of Social Forces in Recent Studies of the Local Community.

4. Institutions as Social Forces: The Church, the Press, the School, etc.

5. Institutions as Organizations of Social Forces: Analysis of a Typical Institution, Its Organization, Dominant Personalities, etc.

6. Persons as Social Forces: Analysis of the Motives determining the Behavior of a Dominant Personality in a Typical Social Group.

7. Group Opinion as a Social Force.

8. Tendencies, Trends, and the Spirit of the Age.

9. History of the Concepts of Attitudes, Sentiments, and Wishes as Defined in Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology.

10. Attitudes as the Organizations of Wishes.

11. The Freudian Wish.

12. Personal and Social Disorganization from the Standpoint of the Four Wishes.

13. The Law of the Four Wishes: All the Wishes Must Be Realized. A Wish of One Type, Recognition, Is Not a Substitute for a Wish of Another Type, Response.

14. The Dominant Wish: Its Rôle in the Organization of the Person and of the Group.

15. Typical Attitudes: Familism, Individualism, “Oppressed Nationality Psychosis,” Race Prejudice.

16. The Mutability of the Sentiment-Attitude: Love and Hate, Self-esteem and Humility, etc.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Make a list of the outstanding social forces affecting social life in a community which you know. What is the value of such an analysis?

2. How does Simons use the term “social forces” in analyzing the course of events in American history?

3. In what sense do you understand Ely to use the term “social forces”?

4. Would there be, in your opinion, a social tendency without conflict with other tendencies?

5. How far is it correct to predict from present tendencies what the future will be?

6. What do you understand by Zeitgeist, “trend of the times,” “spirit of the age”?

7. What do you understand by public opinion? How does it originate?

8. Is legislation in the United States always a result of public opinion?

9. Does the trend of public opinion determine corporate action?

10. Is public opinion the same as the sum of the opinion of the members of the group?

11. What is the relation of social forces to interaction?

12. Is it possible to study trends, tendencies, and public opinion as integrations of interests, sentiments, and attitudes?

13. Are desires the fundamental “social elements”?

14. What do you understand Small to mean when he says, “The last elements to which we can reduce the actions of human beings are units which we may conveniently name ‘interests’”?

15. What is Small’s classification of interests? Do you regard it as satisfactory?

16. What do you think is the difference between an impulse and an interest?

17. Do people behave according to their interests or their impulses?

18. Make a chart showing the difference in interests of six persons with whom you are acquainted.

19. Make a chart indicating the variations in interests of six selected groups.

20. What difference is there, in your opinion, between interests and social pressures?

21. Do you consider the following statement of Bentley’s correct: “No slaves, not the worst abused of all, but help to form the government”?

22. Does the group exert social pressure upon its members? Give illustrations.

23. What do you understand to be the differences between an idea and an idea-force?

24. Give illustrations of idea-forces.

25. Are there any ideas that are not idea-forces?

26. What do you understand by a sentiment?

27. What is the difference between an interest and a sentiment? Give an illustration of each.

28. Are sentiments or interests more powerful in influencing the behavior of a person or of a group?

29. What do you understand by a social attitude?

30. What is a mental conflict?

31. To what extent does unconsciousness rather than consciousness determine the behavior of a person? Give an illustration where the behavior of a person was inconsistent with his rational determination.

32. What do you understand by mental complexes?

33. What is the relation of memory to mental complexes?

34. What do you understand by personality? What is its relation to mental complexes?

35. What is meant by common sense?

36. How does Holt define the Freudian wish?

37. What distinction does he make between the wish and the motor attitude?

38. How would you illustrate the difference between an attitude and a wish as defined in the introduction?

39. How far would you say that the attitude may be described as an organization of the wishes?

40. How far is the analogy between the wish as the social atom and the attitude as the social element justified?

41 What is the “psychic censor”?

42. What is the Freudian theory of repression? Is repression conscious or unconscious?

43. What is the relation of wishes to occupational selection?

44. Give illustrations of the “four wishes.”

45. Describe a person in terms of the type of expression of these four wishes.

46. What social problems arise because of the repression of certain wishes?

47. “Wishes in one class cannot be substituted for wishes in another.” Do you agree? Elaborate your position.

48. Analyze the organization of a group from the standpoint of the four wishes.