Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/101

 THE SOCIAL FORCES 87

This new force represents a step forward in the evolution of the world. There had been many such steps before this one was taken, and, as we shall see in a future paper, there has been at least one since. Each such step represents progress, and this progress is always in the nature of evolving new modes of mani- festation of the universal force. Not only so, but each successive step secures a better, i. e., a higher, more efficient mode of man- ifesting it. "The course of evolution . . . has been in the direction from the unorganized and inefficacious toward the organized and efficacious through the process of storing energy in appropriate forms. This has taken place by a series of successive steps, each resulting in a more efficient product, that is, one possessing, in addition to the properties of antecedent products, some new property with a special power of its own capable of better work." x

Such is the esssential or cosmical nature of the social forces, and it remains to consider in a general way the mode of their operation. It is clear that we must proceed exclusively from the standpoint of feeling. Each individual or social unit must be regarded as a magazine of feelings, for the most part in the nature of unsatisfied desires, and therefore representing as much force as it requires to satisfy those desires. This energy is always to a large extent potential rather than kinetic, but the leading problem of sociology is how to convert the potential energies of society into kinetic energy. The amount of energy thus set free is the true measure of the strength of the social forces at any given time.

The classification of the social forces from the standpoint of feeling is substantially the same as from that of function. This results from the fact already explained that both lead to the same result and are the necessary correlates of each other. In giving names to them in Dynamic Sociology I employed terms th.it connote function instead of feeling, because the latter would have been difficult to find. This is due to the functional

'The Natural Storage of Energy. Tke Monist, Vol. V, Chicago, January 1895, p. 257.