Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/24

 10 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

animal either drives others away, or seizes directly upon its prey by its own physical equipment and devours it at once for imme- diate gratification or self-preservation. Man, on the contrary, besides this animal exercise of force, also preserves, and even multiplies, the objects of his coercion for future gratification or service, and holds physical force in reserve as a means of com- pelling obedience to his commands. In the one case force is temporary, repellent, or destructive for present appetite, and essentially physical. In the other case force is enduring, appro- priative, preservative, providing for future wants, and only con- ditionally physical. In the animal we have force per se, generic force, the competitive struggle for life by beings pressed on by desire. In man we have the same kind of force with the same motives, but it is postponed, reserved, economized, and made a means to lasting advantage. The difference suggests a psychic difference.

Those sociologists who have made distinct quest for the psychic basis of society have either contented themselves with an empiric classification of motives and desires, each of which is asserted to underlie some particular social phenomenon or insti- tution, or they have attempted to designate that peculiar psychic bond which underlies the single fact of association. The former group would seem to lack the true scientific sense, which always seeks unity in a single underlying principle, and the latter group have falsely narrowed the field of their science. If sociology is a science underlying and unifying all the social sciences, then it must furnish the psychic as well as biologic basis for all the social sciences. Political science, jurisprudence, and religion must have a psychic basis as well as economics and the science of the family. Spencer, in so far as he touches the problem, finds the enduring psychic basis in altruism ; " Christian" sociolo- gists find it in love; Giddings practically agrees with them when he finds it in consciousness of kind ; Ward finds a double basis, desire and intellect ; Tarde, desire and belief. Other writers, like Durkheim, Novicow, De Greef, do not seek the psychic basis proper, but the social modes of its operation (imitation, social pressure, conflict, force yielding to contract).