them by their general traits and to know them in particular. In every age each of them has done much that does not appear on the surface. The family, for instance, is not a "domestic" institution alone. It has always been, more or less, each of the other kinds of institution-ceremonial, political, ecclesiastical, professional, industrial. The same thing is true of each of the other groups of institutions. The paterfamilias, the priest, the king, the artist, the farmer, the blacksmith, do not have one and the same meaning in all times and places. In one society the farmer may be little more than a part of the clod he tills, while in another he may be maker of political constitutions and a prophet of new civilizations. The priest may be either a minister of religion or a pander to political and personal corruption. The king may be either a creator and developer of the state, or a parasite sapping the material and moral power of his people. Institutions are but the shell of social activities. Analyses of them simply as institutions are necessary; but that sort of analysis is merely a step toward more real analysis of the place which they actually occupy in working social arrangements, and of the social content which their operation actually secures.

While Spencer's account of social structure and functions is not to be recommended as the final form which those concepts should take in our minds, it is historically and pedagogically expedient to approach more literal renderings of actual social structure and function through Spencer's version. All the sociologists have obtained their present insight by means of preliminary analyses more or less like Spencer's. It is doubtful if anyone will reach the limits of our present perceptions of social relations without making some use of the Spencerian mode of approach. This does not mean that there is any logical relation of antecedent and consequent, of premise and conclusion, between the method of biological analogy and literal interpretation of social structures and functions. It simply means that, as a practical matter, there is no way of making the intimacy and complexity and interdependence of social structural and functional relations so vivid as by making biological structures and functions illustrate them. This latter device,

however, is not the social interpretation itself. It is merely a convenience tributary to the end of social interpretation. If it does not serve that end in any case, it is to be brushed aside accordingly.

It would occupy more space than is available to pursue the discussion of social structure and function into particulars. We might begin with Spencer's primary classification of social structure into the sustaining system, the distributing system, and the regulating system. We might show that the functions of production, transfer, and regulation go on, in some manner or other, in every group, from the parts of the animal body considered as a group, to the whole of the human race. We might show how the work performed by these great structural or functional systems1 varies indefinitely in content and proportions from time to time and from place to place, and that the same essential functions go on in social structures so different that only trained insight can discover the identity in the difference. We might show that much experience in analyzing social situations, so as to demonstrate the actual structure and functions concerned, is necessary to form mature and reliable sociological judgment. We might go through a critical analysis of the structure and functions of some selected society, as a sample of the work which every sociologist must be prepared to perform upon the situation with which he has especially to deal. In a conspectus of this sort, however, all this must be omitted.

One further consideration hinted at above may be added. One of the most frequent problems encountered in the practical affairs of social life is, in most general terms, a problem of the relations between social structure and function. It is a universal principle that function develops structure, and that structure limits function. For example, need of defense against men develops the military or police structures; need of defense against fire develops the fire department; per contra, the kind of a military, police, or fire department which a community possesses determines the sort of work which will be done in

They are the one or the other according as we think of them from the side of mechanism or from the side of the work that they perform.

their lines, and indirectly the sort of work which other parts of the society can perform in discharging other functions.

Now, it is a further general fact that social structures, although differentiated to perform functions, tend to assert themselves, even when the function is no longer necessary, or when the structure is no longer adequate to the function. The parts of social structures are persons. Selfish interests are closer than social interests. The persons who compose a social structure get their living or their repute by doing the work of that structure, or by perpetuating the assumption that they do the work. To the persons in this situation the structure is something desirable in itself, because from it their livelihood and their social prestige are derived. Every revolution in history has accordingly been, wholly or in part, a throwing away of some social structure which once performed a needed function; which had ceased to do the work; which useless people nevertheless wanted to perpetuate because it was a good thing for themselves; which the rest of society wanted to abolish because it stood in the way of their personal interests.

Accordingly, one of the most radical inquiries suggested by any strained social situation, whether it is merely the case of a local church which fails to prosper, or the case of a national government against which the people revolt, or anything intermediate between these extremes, is: What social structure is involved? What functions are its ostensible charge? Are the functions performed? What changes of structure would promote the performance of the functions? What interests insist upon the permanence of the structure at the expense of the functions? 9. Social forces.-No treatment of this subject is so full and clear as that of Ward. What we have said and suggested in the section on interests should, however, be recalled as the basis for analysis of the social forces.

We must guard at the outset against an illusion that has exerted a confusing influence at this point. There are no social forces which are not at the same time forces lodged in individuals, deriving their energy from individuals, and operating in 1 Dynamic Sociology, Vol. I, 468-82; and The Psychic Factors of Civilization.

and through individuals. There are no social forces that lurk in the containing ether and affect persons without the agency of other persons. There are, to be sure, all the physical conditions of which we have spoken above, that affect persons just as they affect all other forms of matter. So far, these are not social forces at all. They do not get to be social forces until they get into persons, and in these persons take the form of feelings which impel them to react upon other persons. Persons are thus transmuters of physical forces into social forces; but all properly designated social forces are essentially personal. They are within some persons and stimulate them to act upon other persons, or they are in other persons and exert themselves as external stimuli upon otherwise inert persons. In either case social forces are personal influences passing from person to person and producing activities that give content to the association.

The conception of social forces was never challenged so long as it was merely an everyday commonplace. When it passed into technical forms of expression, doubts began to be urged. If anyone in the United States had questioned the existence of Mrs. Grundy fifty years ago, he would have been pitied and ignored as a harmless "natural." Social forces in the form of gossip, and personified in Mrs. Grundy, were real to everybody. But the particular species of social forces which Mrs. Grundy represented were neither more nor less real than the other social forces which had no name in folk-lore. Persons incessantly influence persons. The modes of this influence are indescribably varied. They are conscious and unconscious, accidental and momentary, or deliberate and persistent. They are conventional and continuous, the result of individual habit, or of custom crystallized into national or racial institutions.

It is difficult to imagine how there could be any reality, or at least any significance, in the fact which we have named “the spiritual environment," if that environment did not have means of affecting persons. The ways in which the spiritual environment comes to be an environment at all in effect are simply the modes of action followed by the social forces. Yet our analysis of the social forces must not be treated as though it were in any

sense a deduction from the idea of a spiritual environment. The reverse is the case. We do not get the idea of a spiritual environment until we have found out that there are many distinct social forces, and then it becomes convenient for some purposes to mass them in one conception, to which we give the name "spiritual environment," or some equivalent. The simple fact which the concept "social forces" stands for is that every individual acts and is acted upon in countless ways by the other persons with whom he associates. These modes of action and reaction between persons may be classified, and the more obvious and recurrent among them may be enumerated. More than this, the action of these social forces may be observed, and the results of observation may be organized into social laws. Indeed, there would be only two alternatives, if we did not discover the presence and action of social forces. On the one hand, social science at most would be a subdivision of natural science. On the other hand, the remaining alternative would be the impossibility of social science altogether.

But social forces are just as distinctly discernible as chemical forces. The fact that we are not familiar with them no more makes against their existence and their importance than general ignorance of the pressure of the atmosphere takes that phenomenon out of the physical world. The social forces are the atmosphere of the moral world. They are not only the atmosphere, but they are a very large part of the moral world in general. If we could compose a complete account of the social forces we should at the same time have completed, from one point of attention at least, a science of everything involved in human society.

As suggested above, a preface to Ward's analysis of the social forces should be found in antecedent analysis of interests. As Ward correctly observes:

All beings which can be said to perform actions do so in obedience to those mental states which are denominated desires. . . We will, therefore, rest content to assume that desire is the essential basis of all action, and hence the true force in the sentient world (AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. I, p. 468).

But we have gone back a step beyond desires, and have found