Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/258

 244 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

character of the funtion performed by the compound structure will depend upon the nature of its component structures. Any change in the nature of the functions is liable to be due to essential modifications in the substructures which may leave the compound structure to all appearances unchanged. We may therefore really be dealing with a dynamic phenomenon without knowing it. If this error be carefully guarded against, the general proposition that the perfection of identical types of structure is a statical phenomenon remains altogether valid, and we have as the broadest truth at which we have thus far arrived the law that all considerations of structure and func- tion are statical. The investigation of structures is anatomy, that of functions is physiology, and in all sciences, including sociology, the study of both anatomy and physiology belongs to the department of statics.

We turn next to the dynamic aspect. We have seen that the dynamic agent resides in the feelings or affective depart- ment of mind, and it exerts its power through the myriad forms of appetitive desire constituting impulses, or impelling forces, and motives, or moving forces all of which may be embodied under the general term will, and regarded as making up the true soul of nature, of man, and of society. I have endeavored to show how the original and unrestrained operation of these social forces causes them to collide and antagonize one another, to check and control the movements set up, and ultimately to result in definite structures consisting of mechan- isms for the equilibration of the forces and for the storage of the social energy. I have further shown that through such social structures society is enabled to systematize the work of the social forces and accomplish infinitely more than could have been accomplished without them, and that the work thus performed constitutes the function of these social structures. All this belongs to the department of social statics.

But there is always a limit to the efficiency of any fixed mechanism, and the same agencies that caused the origination and development of these structures, from a condition in which