kind of activity, that gives unity to the class of facts and meaning to the term by which the class of facts is designated. One slight modification of this statement may be pointed out. Imitation, social suggestion, and sympathetic radiation each refer to a particular class of activities in a particular type of relation. Thus, imitation refers to overt muscular movements that stand in the relation of consequent to the similar antecedent activity of an associate. But muscular movements are anything "from saying mamma to building a battleship," and the class of facts referred to by the term imitation has no unity except by virtue of and reference to that particular type of relationship in which a resultant activity stands to similar antecedent activity of an associate. Likewise the term social suggestion may be used to refer to the sort of activity which we call having ideas as standing in a similar relation to the antecedent activity of an associate, and sympathetic radiation to refer to activities in which feelings predominate which stand in the relation of effect to antecedent feeling of an associate which is its cause. But, although in these three cases the type of activity referred to is limited, it is still wide and full of diversity, and as in the rest of the thirteen cases the group of facts named has its unity and the name its meaning by virtue of a type of relationship between activities. NATURE OF SOCIAL PROCESS If we restrict the term "process" to activity and change in activity, as distinguished from relations between activities then the social process is the total tide of causally interdependent activities that are impossible to individuals in isolation. It is the life process of society. It can be analyzed into many included activities, each made possible by the relations in which it stands, or has stood, to other activities by other actors. It is called a process first because it is made up of activities and second because it is characteristically a changing reality, a becoming. It is psychic in its inner essence. Its material products and overt manifestations are the expressions of activity that is primarily and essentially psychic. Institutions and customs are essentially modes of psychic activity, mental and emotional processes that reveal themselves in overt activity. A custom is a prevalent idea of a particular mode of overt activity which is translated into conduct upon presentation of the occasion, neither the idea nor its overt manifestation requiring any rational ground, being accompanied and motivated by emotional preference due to familiarity and by consciousness of group expectation that the customary activity will appear when the occasion for it arises. An institution differs from a mere custom in certain specific ways, especially by including an element of rationality, as the rationally approved method of achieving a rationally approved end. Social activities, customary or institutionalized, are of many sorts from language to religion and from technic arts to governmental institutions. They include (1) language, which is the most fundamental type of social custom, (2) moral sentiments or codes of ethics, (3) religions and "supernatural" beliefs, (4) the technic arts, (5) practices of economic exchange, (6) government, (7) fine arts, (8) games, (9) education and methods for the dissemination of ideas, (10) domestic customs and institutions (most but not all of what falls here could be divided between morality government and ceremony), (11) science and philosophy. And the sum total of social activities correlated and interwoven as they are, make up the social process the tide of social life or, as it is often called, "culture." This process may be analyzed into many included processes or particular social activities, and these all are molded by the conditions with which they stand in relation. The relations of such activities to each other, that is the relations between the activity of one associate and that of another or of others, or between the activity of one group and the activity of another group, these distinctly social relations, next to the social process and included minor processes (activities) themselves, are the central concepts of sociology which we need to formulate clearly if sociology is to progress. NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION All explanation that can be called scientific is in terms of conditioning relations. All scientific explanation, as Karl Pearson and others have clearly pointed out, is simply description of a fact ex tended so as to include the other facts by relation to which it is conditioned." Social activities are the activities of persons which stand in the relation of cause and effect to activities of other persons-activities that are conditioned by the past, or present, activities of other persons, and may in turn condition the activities of other persons. In explaining these activities, which constitute the social process, the chief concern of sociology is with the causal relations between them. However, they are affected also by other conditioning facts and no explanation of them can be complete that omits any of the essential and immediate conditions. These include geographic, technic, and biological facts. The work of sociology is in no sense confused by including reference to facts of all these kinds so long as it is remembered that sociology seeks to explain only one class of facts, namely, socially conditioned activities. On the contrary, no concrete social situation can be explained and no practical social problem can be adequately dealt with if any essential factor in its causation is omitted. Even the problem of a delinquent child calls for an examination of his home and material surroundings, and a psychophysical examination to determine whether he is diseased, 'This is the gist of my protest against "The Social Forces Error." Compare American Journal of Sociology, XVI, 613, 642; publications of the American Sociological Society, and ibid. The term "social forces" is currently employed (1) as a vague rhetorical recognition of the fact that social results are caused, without analysis of the causal or conditioning facts into their contrasting types or question as to the universal applicability to them of the term "force”; (2) to mean aversion or desire or determination or "attitude," and consequent readiness to act, with reference to a specific object, such as determination to make Germany pay an indemnity or the aversion of the Jews to eating pork. Such attitudes are social activity in all but overt manifestation, that is, they are social activity in its psychic aspect, the very thing that is to be explained, so that to adopt "the Jews do not eat pork because they have an aversion to eating pork" as the type of sociological explanation is to reduce sociological explanation to a meaningless absurdity, or rather to abandon the hope of sociological explanation, (3) to mean the organic predispositions biologically native to man as man, which of course are among the factors in sociological explanation but never the only ones, otherwise social activities would be always and everywhere the same. It is better to call them predispositions, biological conditions, or psychophysical conditions, and not social forces. 8 * The biologic conditions affecting social activity include the innate human predispositions, as indicated in the foregoing note. feeble-minded, or psychopathic, as well as knowledge of his social relations with parents, school, work, and gang. Especially any sociology becomes a "vicious particularism" if it does not retain a sense of proportion between the significance of heredity and of environment. Someone must painstakingly maintain this correlation. No one needs it so much, yet no one is so well prepared to maintain it with balance as he who studies the all-pervading social relations. To omit heredity is to omit factors so important as to have been generally called "the social forces," that human nature of which Professor Allport asserts that its study is the beginning of all sociological comprehension, and to omit the whole field of "population problems." All the items in the explanation are conditioning facts—and relations are facts as truly as the things that stand related. But relations are not processes. There are no social processes except socially conditioned activities, including the changes in those activities. As has so often been pointed out by scientists, we know nothing of force in any ultimate sense. We know only facts grouped in causal relations. There description, including the description that is explanation, stops. The sociologist knows socially conditioned activities, and the relations to them of conditioning factors of which other social activities are the chief but not the whole. With description of these activities-or the social process -and of the conditioning facts (including relations), out of which they issue as results, sociology stops. If someone asks where then does society, or "the group," come in? the answer is: the group is the assemblage of people who carry on the social activities, whose activities condition one another, and they are a society by virtue of the fact that their activities so condition one another that, as a result of this conditioning, influenced by the other conditions present, they issue in a system of activities impossible to individuals in isolation. A society is a plurality of persons whose activities so condition one another as to produce or maintain a system of activities otherwise impossible. As plants vary from the bacterium to the oak, and as animals vary from unicellular organisms to man, so societies vary from temporary associations of twos and threes to international culture groups. THE CONCEPT "SOCIAL FORCES" IN AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY SECTION III. GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS AS SOCIAL FORCES FLOYD N. HOUSE ABSTRACT Two methods of handling geographic and physical factors.—From the time of Spencer and Ward there have been two fundamentally different attitudes displayed toward the problem of geographic and material factors in social causation, each typical of one of these two men. Spencer treated psychic and physical factors as if they were of co-ordinate importance, the one balanced against the other. W. I. Thomas, in his earliest writings, and Blackmar and Gillin more recently, have followed Spencer's lead. Ward, being a monist, believed the psychic factors were evolved out of the physical, but once evolved, were of primary importance. Small, Thomas, in his later writings, Ellwood, Hayes, Ross, and Giddings have followed approximately the lead of Ward, treating the geographic and material factors as conditioning forces, rather than as forces co-ordinate with the desires. In the literature of American sociology from Ward to the present time there is visible an interesting divergence of treatment of geographic and material factors considered in relation to social causation. As we have noted, it is desirable to trace the development of sociology in the United States, not only in general, but with reference to most special phases, from Ward and from Spencer, since it is evident that their work was widely read by the men who made the earliest contributions following the time of publication of Ward's Dynamic Sociology and Spencer's several sociological works. Using this approach, then, what we find is that, after Spencer and Ward, there were injected into the stream of American sociological thought two quite different attitudes toward the problem of geographic and material influences in social processes. We have examined Spencer's outline of the "factors of social phenomena" in an earlier section and have seen that he takes the attitude that there are two basic sets of such factors: internal factors and external factors; or, there are human beings on the one hand, and the factors of environment on the other hand. This |