Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/99

 THE SOCIAL FORCES 85

In psychology, as we saw, forces have as yet scarcely been recog- nized. Philosophers were content, until within quite recent times, to study the phenomena of the most derivative of the human faculties, and scarcely a suggestion can be found that these faculties could have been naturally produced. Intel- lect, memory, reflection, imagination, and other admittedly remarkable phenomena have been long studied, and a vast amount of speculation has been done in these fields. But the affective side of the mind in which the forces reside has been ignored so far as any attempt to understand its relations to the rest of mind is concerned. The appetites, passions, and even emotions, though recognized as having a necessary relation to ethics, have not been thought of as an integral part of mind. They are in fact the genetic source of all the other faculties, the seat of all psychic power, and the basis of any true science of mind.

In a somewhat similar manner the dynamic basis of society has been overlooked. The cause, not only of the primary fact of association itself, but of all other human activities, is appetite. Whether looked at from the standpoint of function or from that of feeling, i. e., whether we consider the end of nature or that of the creature, it comes to the same thing. Every act proceeds from motive, and that motive can be none other than the satis- faction of some want. The capacity to want is planted in the organic structures. It is the necessary concomitant of the capacity to feel. The primary form of feeling is intensive, I. e., it is either agreeable or disagreeable, pleasure or pain in some degree, however slight. This is the incipient distinction between good and evil. The pleasurable is the good, the painful is the bad. Every organism is thus constituted as a condition to its once, and equally essential is it th.it the impulse should exist to perform the appropriate acts. This impulse causes the creature to seek the good and shun the evil. All this is readily accounted for on the leading principle of modern biology, natural selection, or, as I prefer to call it, the principle of advantage. In short, desire, taken in its widest sense, both positive and