Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/425

Rh spending changes in the character of the products" (p. 174). "All forces are essentially alike, and the life force or growth force is like any other physical force. That is, it always obeys the first law of motion and causes motion in a straight line unless deflected by another force" (p. 178). "Science … teaches the spirituality of matter" (p. 379). "The deeper we penetrate the secrets of nature, the less do the mechanical, material, and physical processes seem to differ from psychic and spiritual processes, and all will ultimately prove to be the same" (p. 454).

Now, what intelligible notion can be gotten from these conflicting statements? The spiritual (psychical and social) forces are all primarily physical in their nature, like physical forces obeying the laws of motion, yet they are new forces called in to supplement the original forces of matter and life. The mere phrase "creative synthesis" does not clear up contradictions such as these. He says that these forces will all ultimately prove to be the same, but he offers no hypothesis which might make this statement intelligible. The difficulty of the apparent contradiction of the law of conservation of energy he passes over with the remark that "the conservation of energy and correlation of forces are as applicable to psychic and social forces as to physical forces" (p. 99).

Let us turn to another psychological conception. He says that feeling is prior to cognition. "The feelings had, moreover, a much earlier origin than the intellect, so that during a prolonged period they constituted the only psychic manifestations, and do so still throughout practically the entire animal world" (p. 101). A psychologist, reading this, naturally wonders whether this statement means what, upon the surface, it appears to mean. If feeling is a dynamic force, and intellect is not a force, but only a telic or directive agent, one might raise the question whether the question of priority could have any significance at all in the case of two such wholly different things. If both could be brought into the same category, either as forces or as telic agents, then the question of priority might be intelligible, and has, of course, often been raised and discussed by psychologists.

Feeling, he says, is "the subjective department of mind, the phenomena being wholly subjective or relating to the organism, and never objective or relating to the external world "(p. 102). It is "subjective subjectivity" (p. 128). How this can be reconciled with the statement that feeling is a physical force he does not explain. "One of its inherent qualities," he says, "is that of seeking an end" (p. 102). It