Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/263

 THE .\fECHANICS OF SOCIETY 249

will power has worked the same class of transformations that the latter accomplished alone, only it has done this on a much larger scale. This is individual telesis. It constitutes almost the only social progress that has thus far taken place.

The intellect is not itself a force, it is only a guide. Just as the desires collectively considered constitute the dynamic agent, i. e., represent the forces to be dealt with in the mechanics of society, so the intellect constitutes the directive agent, and has for its function to guide the will into safe and effective channels of action. As the object is always to avoid the obstacles to the satisfaction of desire, the nature of this guidance must be to find paths, as it were, around these obstacles, and therefore its method is necessarily indirect. While the psychologic character of this indirection is always the same it appears under two quite differ- ent forms. Which of these forms it will assume depends upon the nature of the obstacles with which it has to deal. The two principal classes into which the objects of the impinging environ- ment naturally fall are the animate and the inanimate, or, from the present point of view they may better be called the sen- tient and the insentient. Intellectual indirection practiced on sentient creatures is always in the nature of deception. The advantage of the agent is the opposite of that of the sentient object, or at least, is so regarded by the latter. The purpose is to circumvent the will of the creature that constitutes the obsta- cle. Both the agent and the victim may be either animal or man. There are therefore four possible cases: (i) animal acting on animal ; (2) animal acting on man ; (3) man acting on animal ; and (4) man acting on man. But as the victim is usually inferior intellectually to the agent, the second case is rare or wanting, and in the first and fourth there is generally more or less inequal- ity between the exploiting and the exploited animal or man. From the sociological point of view only the third and fourth cases, i. e. t those in which man is the agent, are involved. I surely need not dwell upon the familiar phenomena of the oitation by man both of the animal world and of other men.

The psychological process involved has received a number