Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/98

 84 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

life, mind, and human action, simply lack faith in the order of the universe.

In a certain very wide sense all force is one, but from its different modes of manifestation it is convenient to recognize a number of forces. The law of the conservation of energy, or of the correlation or transmutation of forces, shows that all these different iorms of the universal force are interconvertible. Astronomy and baronomy deal with the gravitant forces, while etheronomy and perhaps alconomy, deal with the radiant forces, which seem to be opposed to the former. The workings of the universal force in bionomy we call vital or biotic, while in psychonomy we call them psychic. For socionomy I long ago proposed the name "social forces"* not as an absolutely new expression, but as the first attempt to give it a definite technical meaning. For I went into a somewhat elaborate explanation of what constitutes the social forces, and especially of what they have accomplished and how they have accomplished it. In the second volume (chap, viii) I essayed to prove that they are true natural forces and obey the Newtonian laws of motion. But I did not in that work attempt to show that sociology derives its primary laws directly from psychology. This was done in my Psychic Factors of Civilization, published in 1893. In the Fifth paper of this series a portion of this argument was briefly reca- pitulated. The present paper can at best be only a similar brief recapitulation of the general treatment of the social forces as set forth in those works.

All sciences, in order to be such, must be domains of forces. Until a group of facts and phenomena reaches the stage at which these can be generalized into laws, which, in turn, are merely the expressions of the uniform working of its underlying forces, it cannot be appropriately denominated a science. Biology, since Darwin, has fairly entered upon this part of its history. Psy- chology and sociology have scarcely reached it. Most of the work in both is still confined to the observation of isolated facts without much attempt at their coordination or reduction to law.

' Dynamic Sociology. New York, 1883, Vol. I, chap, vii, p. 468 ff.