Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/103

 THE SOCIAL FORCES 89

Positive

Negative Race Continuance

Direct

Indirect Spiritual

Esthetic

Moral

Intellectual

It is always a question, when treating of the bodily or phys- ical social forces, whether it is preferable to begin with the pre- servative or the reproductive group. There are many reasons why the latter seem to be the more fundamental. The race is more important than the individual, and in developed society the family is the most important social structure and the basis of the state. But going farther back and tracing the two prin- ciples entirely through the biological series, we at last arrive at the most fundamental of all the truths involved, viz., that in its ultimate analysis and most original form, reproduction is merely a mode of nutrition. Resting the case upon this primordial truth, I will adhere to the order of treatment which I adopted in Dynamic Sociology and make the nutritive group the first of the essential social forces.

Forces of Individual Presentation. When we come to deal with the social forces from the subjective side, i. e., from the standpoint of feeling, we have to consider their direct effects as true natural forces. The individuals in whom they reside must be represented as impelled by them to perform acts, and as obeying these impulses as rigidly as physical bodies obey the influences that cause them to move. These impulses in human beings are of course exceedingly complex and subtle, so that in many cases this does not seem to be true, but this is because we are unable to take them all into account. In the advanced stages of human developnu nt when intellectual and moral influences have entered the field the case is still more complicated, but even then, if there is a social science, what I have characterized as scientific faith, when it is fully c!<