Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/64

50 between courts, and all the results of campaigns. The various materialistic and mechanical philosophies of history, that have attempted to find the secret of human development in the inevitable operations of nature, have not overestimated the absolute value of this fundamental and constant factor. They have simply miscalculated its ratio and some of its other relations to all the other factors. There is neither free will nor free thought nor free feeling in the world of people. Feeling, thought, and volition are tethered to fixed physical conditions. This is as true of the rhapsody of the devotee, the exhortation of the zealot, the vision of the poet, the speculation of the metaphysician, as it is of the geographer's search for the north pole or the miner's delving for gold or coal. All that men do or desire is either a drifting on the tide of physical conditions or primarily some sort of reaction upon those conditions. The extent to which men can act, and the mode of their action, is not to be deduced from the formulas of an absolutely defined freedom, for that condition exists only in the speculative imagination. On the other hand, the formulas of volition are not to be derived from physical law alone. The scope of sentient action is, however, merely that restricted area to which the individual or the generation is limited by the conditions of physical nature.

All this is nearly as trite among sociologists as it is among natural scientists, but it will doubtless require many generations for many people to adjust themselves properly to this axiom of social science. Nobody knows all that it involves. The psychologists are trying to find out for us how far we are obeying physical impulse when we suppose ourselves to be acting from strictly psychical initiative. Lester F. Ward has committed himself to the theses that "the desires of sentient beings constitute true natural forces," and furthermore that "the desires of men obey the Newtonian laws of motion." Whether these theorems hold or not, they are symptoms of intelligence about the common basis of all human facts. We are portions of matter. We are fragments of the physical world. Not a force that shapes the earth's crust, or puts forth vegetable life, or generates animal