Chapter XVIII:
The Social Forces.

All beings which can be said to perform actions do so in obedience to those mental states which are denominated desires. Desire is the essential basis of all action, and hence the true force in the sentient world; and consistency as well as truth requires us to predicate this equally of man and of all things lower in the scale of animal life. . . . The classification of the forces operating in the department of animated nature will then be equivalent to, and, in fact, the same thing as, the classification of animal desires; and, as what is true of all must be true of a part, this will likewise constitute a classification of the social forces. — Dynamic Sociology, I, 468.

The following table will exhibit at a glance the classification of the social forces as already sketched:

Only when it is seen that the process is in all cases similarly determined by forces, and is not scientifically interpreted until it is expressed in terms of those forces;— only then is there reached the conception of Sociology as a science, in the complete meaning of the word. — HERBERT SPENCER : Study of Sociology, p. 329.

No psychologist has yet devoted himself to make, or has succeeded in making, a complete analysis of the emotions, by resolving the complex feelings into their simple elements and tracing them back from their complex evolutions to the primitive passions in which they are rooted; this is a promising and much-needed work which remains to be done; but when it is done, it will be shown probably that they have proceeded originally from two fundamental instincts, or — if we add consciousness of nature and aim — passions, namely, that of self-preservation, with the ways and means of self-defense which it inspires and stimulates, and that of propagation, with the love of offspring and other primitive feelings connected with it. — MAUDSLEY: Fortnightly Review, April 1, 1874, Vol. XXI (New Series, Vol. XV), p. 470.

Dempemäss fullt die Sorge für die Erhaltung jenes Daseyns, unter so schweren, sich jeden Tag von Neuem meldenden Forderungen, in der Regel, das ganze Menschenleben aus. An sie knüpft sich sodann unmittelbar die zweite Anforderung, die der Fortpflanzung des Geschlechts. Zugleich bedrohen ihn von allen Seiten die verschiedenenartigsten Gefahren, denen zu entgehen es beständiger Wachsamkeit bedarf. — SCHOPENHAUER. Welt als Wille, I, 368.

While all wealth is not originated by labor, all labor originates wealth. Man toils, not because labor necessarily precedes wealth, but because wealth necessarily follows labor. The possession of want-satisfying products is what the laborer seeks, and desire is the moving force in the whole process. Labor is not to be conceived of as the vis a tergo that pushes wealth forward; but wealth is to be conceived of as the siren that lures labor onward. Wealth is always the cause of labor; labor is not always the cause of wealth. Nature subjected and appropriated is wealth; man's subjection of nature is labor. — J B. CLARK. Philosophy of Wealth, p. 25.

In view of the thoroughness with which the subject of the social forces was elaborated in Dynamic Sociology, it is of course no part of the purpose of the present chapter to enter into it exhaustively. As stated at the beginning of the present work the social forces constitute one of the two primary doctrines of dynamic sociology, scarcely perceived by any other writer and as yet almost completely neglected even by those who are favorably disposed toward the general system of philosophy outlined in that work. I am far from anxious about the recognition of this or any other principle merely because it was practically original with me, and should be glad to learn that some one before me had developed it even more fully than I have done, especially if that would lead to its general recognition, because I regard it as an exceedingly fertile principle, and one which, though, like most great truths, it may seem to some, after fully comprehending it, to be little more than a truism, lies at the foundation of social science and without which there can be no such science. To the objection of its simplicity it may be answered that nearly all important truths are simple and easy to understand, but this has not prevented most of them from remaining long unperceived, nor has it rendered them any the less effective agencies in revolutionizing thought when once recognized and applied. On the contrary it is usually this quality of simplicity and reasonableness that has made such a use of them possible.

I am not therefore disposed to believe that the failure to recognize and apply this principle to the great problems of society and economics has been due in any great degree to the humble source from which it was put forth, or to the fact that its announcement was not made ex cathedra, and I prefer to attribute it to causes more worthy of the able and earnest class of workers in these fields. Much of it is doubtless due to the fact that the large work in which it was incorporated was necessarily addressed to a small class of readers, is a heavy tax upon the busy brain of active investigators, contains much else to divert the attention, and has not made its way into the curriculum of colleges or lists of indispensable reading matter of most writers and teachers.¹

It has also grown more and more apparent to me as the years have passed that notwithstanding the direct manner in which this principle appeals to the understanding and to the reason, still, so cautious has the rigid scientific method of the time made the investigators of every subject that many may have felt that, in the treatise referred to, it was not sufficiently substantiated to be accepted in the form presented. So forcibly was I struck with it at that time, so impressed by its simplicity and obviousness, that from a desire to avoid the possible charge of seeking to demonstrate an axiom, I refrained from presenting the philosophic grounds on which the principle itself rests, and contented myself with its simple announcement as a truth apparent to all. The treatment that followed was confined exclusively to the elaboration of the details that naturally flow from it. But since the appearance of that work in 1883 I have had many intimations that this part of the subject had been slighted. It is true that the general philosophy of desire was there treated from a psychological point of view in several places, particularly in chapters V, VII, IX, and XI, but the more I reflected upon it the more difficult it appeared, and the greater seemed the need of subjecting it to a thorough analysis as a basis for the doctrine of the social forces to rest upon. Plain and simple as the statement seems that the desires constitute the social forces, as soon as the attempt is made to go deeper and explain the nature of the desires great difficulties arise. The whole philosophy of feeling is opened up and the knotty problems of pleasure and pain, of the soul and the will, and the train of complicated antecedents to individual and social action must be probed to the bottom. Nor can one escape from the consideration of social friction which involves the vast lumberstrewn field of ethics. Those therefore who hesitate to accept the doctrine of the social forces, as originally presented, on the ground that it was not adequately supported by scientific proofs, seem to me to be much nearer right than those who discard it because it is too elementary. For the former class I have great respect, and this I have endeavored to show by the present attempt to elaborate the groundwork of that principle. To do this I have found it necessary to dwell almost exclusively in the domain of psychology, and to show that one great neglected department of that science underlies this principle, and forms the only secure basis for the whole science of sociology. Here at last the mind that seeks for causal relations can rest with a sense of satisfaction.

But in this search for the foundations of sociology we seem, as it were, to have stumbled upon a true science of mind. Both sciences have their roots far down in the beginnings of sentient life and we find ourselves, whether we will or no, feeling our way in the morning twilight of the soul of nature. We assist at the birth of a great transforming agency, and we follow this new-born power to its maturity in the social forces. In Chap. XV it was seen that desire is a true natural force and the basis of dynamic psychology, which accounts for the transformations that have taken place through the activities of the higher animals and of man. It is obvious that it is no other which is the motor of social change, and the truth comes forth that the social forces are essentially psychic. It is this that has made it imperative that the foundations of sociology be sought in psychology. I wish to lay special stress on this because it certainly has not been sufficiently insisted upon, and writers on sociology have seemed rather to be trying to base the science upon biology and to find its dynamics in the vital forces.

Although I have used the expression dynamic sociology in a somewhat special sense, fully explained in the work by that title, and to be, if possible, still more clearly brought out in the second part of this work, still, I have never lost sight of the primary sense, in which society is looked upon as a theater of active forces, its phenomena explained as due to those forces, and its condition at any time or place interpreted as the result of the former action of those forces. It is only in geology that the word dynamic, in precisely this sense, has been regularly adopted and is constantly used to mark off a distinct department of that science. But there is no reason why it should not be introduced into all the sciences,² since all must have, in order to be sciences at all, their dynamic department. The other departments of most or all, sciences are chiefly the his­torical and the descriptive, or some may be restricted to the latter alone. The dynamic department of the other sciences, except geology, either have not been specially named or they have been called by other names. In astronomy that depart­ment is usually called the mathematical, and if we exclude sidereal astronomy, which as yet scarcely possesses a dynamic department, i.e., is as yet scarcely a science, this is the most exact of all the sciences. In physics no special name has been given to this department because it embraces so nearly the whole of the science. In chemistry it includes everything that relates to elective affinity and reagency, and leaves little else except the description of chemical substances and the history of their discovery. In biology there was no recognized dyna­ mic department until the time of Darwin. Lamarck and a few others had founded this department and thus erected it into a science, but their views were rejected. It now has a definite dynamic department, and its phenomenal progress since Darwin simply shows what a vivifying power this principle possesses whenever it is applied ; shows, in a word, the power of the scientific treatment of any subject.

The old psychology was wholly devoid of a dynamic depart­ ment. It was not a science but mere metaphysics, i.e., beyond nature, as the word implies, and transcendental, as the meta­ physicians admitted. Objective psychology in and of itself is essentially so. Psychology does not become a science until its subjective phenomena are considered, because it is in these that its forces lie.

With regard to sociology, although Comte, who founded and named it, dimly perceived that it possessed a dynamic depart­ ment and treated both social statics and social dynamics at some length, and although Spencer wrote an early work en­ titled Social Statics, implying the existence of social forces, it remained, I am bound to affirm, without a clearly recognized dynamic department until the appearance of Dynamic Sociology

in 1883. This is not because there was not an attempt on the part of both Comte and Spencer to establish such a department, but because these authors both made the mistake of supposing that the social forces were vital instead of psychic forces. They both perceived the analogy between society and an organism, and the latter has worked out this analogy to its minutest details. Although much too competent a biologist not to perceive that it was only an analogy, and that society is not a literal organism, he still treats the development of society essentially and persistently from the biological standpoint, and calls in as its conditioning instrumentalities the biologic laws and principles that he had so ably expounded in his Principles of Biology.

I hasten to disclaim, however, that in the above is meant to be implied a complete failure on the part of all writers to recognize the existence of the true social forces as I define them, or of the fact that desires are true forces. There is no important truth established by scientific investigation which poets and seers such as Goethe, Shakspeare, and Emerson, have not foreshadowed in their vague but comprehensive forms of diction. Of the older philosophers Spinoza, Hobbes, and Bacon have given adumbrations of the true position of hunger, and love as mainsprings to human action. Among moderns Maudsley clearly perceived the social power of love distinct from its physiological function. But it must also be admitted that both Comte and Spencer have perceived and repeatedly referred to these underlying causes of social phenomena and recognized their fundamental nature. Indeed, what philosopher, nay, what thoughtful person could fail to see that hunger, love, and want in general drive men on in a great struggle with nature and absorb the energies of the greater part of mankind? It is true that the popular notion is that "money" is what all the world is seeking, or, as some keen-sighted, coarse natures more fully and accurately state it, "money or women"; and the vulgar newspaper heading that there was "a woman in the case" shows that love is also recognized as a universal power in society. But all this is not philosophy. It is the mere glimpse which the masses catch of principles that no one could formulate. These principles are not established by the fact that popular writers crystalize these glimpses in neat epigrams or weave them into romances. All know with what immense labor every great truth has had to be brought forth and really born. A few university lectures, laboratory experiments, or even carefully prepared memoirs in the Philosophical Transactions would not have established the law of gravitation. It required the labor of a lifetime culminating in the Principia for the world really to possess this truth. To establish the law of organic development Darwin must write at least five volumes packed with facts and weighted with arguments. Cosmic and organic evolution could make no headway until a Synthetic Philosophy was put behind it. And so it is with all great conceptions. Littré embodied the idea in its application to Comte's Positive Philosophy when in his introduction to the edition of 1869, he said: " Il n'est point de grande doctrine sans grand livre." And so I presume that the conception of a dynamic sociology will require much more than two thick volumes fairly to launch it into the world. And the 132 pages devoted to this one of the two cardinal principles of that doctrine needs to be supplemented by half another volume setting it squarely upon its psychologic base, so that there shall not remain the least chance for it to fall or a single brick wanting to threaten its permanent connection with the whole fabric of nature below it. Upon biology it can only rest unconform­ ably and precariously, since it is felt that there is a causal hiatus between them, but upon psychology it rests naturally and safely, since, as has been shown, the dynamic department of psychology becomes also that of sociology the moment we rise from the individual to society. The social forces are the psychic forces as they operate in the collective state of man.

The present work, therefore, is only intended to be complementary of the previous one. In that the social forces were defined, their laws established, and their action and effects set forth, but their origin, nature and cause were not treated. The foregoing pages are intended to supply this deficiency and to place the doctrine itself of true natural forces in society upon a scientific footing.

Notes

1. The work is now in use in the post graduate courses of the University of Chicago, the University of Indiana, Cornell University, and Colby University.↩
2. This chapter was written early in March, 1892, since which date Prof. Simon N. Patten of the University of Pennsylvania has published a work entitled . The Theory of Dynamic Economics. Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, Political Economy and Public Law Series, Vol. Ill, No. 2, Philadelphia, 1892. ↩