Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/267

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 253 on an investigation and discovery of the laws controlling social phenomena. This, as in the physical sciences, will constitute the foundation, for a genuine process of social invention. The laws made by governments are totally different from the laws of nature. They are simply applications of them. Properly viewed they are, when effective, nothing more nor less than so many inventions in the domain of the social forces. Legislation, in so far as it is scientific, is invention.

It is of course easy to see how widely this ideal legislation differs from most of the actual legislation. In the latter the intellectual method of indirection is rarely employed. Most laws are mandatory or prohibitory, i. e., only brute force is employed, the same as that by which irrational creatures strive to attain their ends. The inventive method consists in devising mechanical adjustments such as shall direct the forces to be controlled into paths foreseen to be advantageous. As the forces are indestructible and ever pressing, and as they will necessarily follow the lines of least resistance, they must flow along these useful paths foreordained by human ingenuity. Man would never have established art by attempting to compel physical forces to act this way or that. He not only abandons brute force but he ceases to use his own force at all and applies himself to leading, or, as it were, attracting the natural forces into their prescribed courses. And when the mechanics of society shall have been made in like manner the prolonged and successful study of the intelligent legislator, this method will completely supersede the present crude, unscientific and largely ineffective method, and the results for society will compare with those now attained as the highest industrial art compares with the crudest empiricism. I have called this method Attractive Legislation, the further consideration of which must be deferred to the final paper of this series.

We thus perceive that the mechanics of society naturally falls under the two general groups of social statics and social dynamics. The first of these groups need not for present purposes be subdivided, but the second primarily dichotomizes into