tinguished by introspection, and certain elements of the nervous system discovered by a physical analysis of the brain; and that by different arrangements of these elements the various forms of mental activity are secured. If these assumptions are even in a measure correct, a new type of psychology arises which concerns itself solely with the mechanism of the mind.

Sociology furnishes a useful illustration. Suppose one who had no knowledge of the individuals that compose the society to be observing the operation of certain social institutions such as the church, the factory, the city, the nation. It would be impossible for him to explain any one of these phenomena in terms of the others. Churches do not, when aggregated, become factories; factories do not constitute cities; nor are cities the elements out of which nations are made. When, however, it is recognized that the unit from which all the institutions are formed are men, then it is easy to see the relations that exist between the institutions formed by aggregations of men on various principles. These institutions are merely the mechanism of society, and the problems of this mechanism are distinct from those which relate to the qualities of the individual members of society.33

Other passages in Patten's essay, however, give a better clue to the denotation which he intended to attach to the particular term "social forces," a term which he nowhere formally defines, although one would expect such a definition in view of the title of the study. In this respect his essay affords us one more illustration of the way in which certain concepts are finding their way into the technical equipment of sociologists from the vernacular, being used at first, apparently, simply because they appeal to some writer as suggestive of points they have desired to bring out. The following, then, are passages in which Patten uses the term "social forces" in such a way as to make fairly clear the connotations which he wishes to attach to it:

Economic motives become a determining force only after the evils of a pain economy are sufficiently removed to allow a conscious pursuit of pleasure. The aesthetic motives which normally should follow after the economic motives do not acquire sufficient importance to become requirements for survival. . . . .

....

The normal order of social forces must depend upon the order in which the mental powers of man develop. Institutions, beliefs, and ideals which depend on complex mental states and on the union of many areas of knowledge should follow the more simple forms of the subjective environment which demand a less complex development of the mental mechanism for their visualization.34

Race ideals are the highest type of social forces. . . . .35

All other social problems are civic. They include everything relating to the preservation and perfection of the best type of man for the one general environment that our planet affords. There are no elementary civic forces. All the forces are moral, aesthetic, and economic, combined and blended in many complex forms to meet the peculiar conditions demanded by human progress.

The civic forces are largely made up of three elements, civic customs, civic ideals, and civic instincts. . . . .36

Washington Gladden's little book, Social Facts and Forces, to which we have referred above, signalizes the development of the social workers' and social reformers' conception of social forces much more definitely than does Patten's rather abstruse and academic essay, which, indeed, as we have seen, was more in the Ward tradition, though Patten gives no credit to Ward for his ideas, and may not have been consciously influenced by him, if he had ever read Dynamic Sociology at all. Apparently, if one may judge from the content of Gladden's book, all that he did was to select the title "social forces" as an apt and appealing term from the vernacular with which to christen the somewhat rambling ideas concerning social conditions of the day which are collected together between its covers. One is inclined to think, however, that there must have been in his mind, in choosing this title, some more-or-less vague perception that these institutions, social movements, and conditions which he was attempting to describe, and, in a measure to analyze, constituted so many interacting factors in that total milieu which he would probably have called "society." A few items from the contents of the book will help to show the author's point of view, and make it possible for the reader of this study to judge for himself of the exact place of Gladden's contribution in the development of the contemporary social-forces concept. In the introduction which the author wrote for the published form of his lectures he said:

The pages which follow are devoted to an elementary study of a few of the more important of those social questions which are forcing themselves upon the attention of all intelligent and patriotic Americans. Every generation has social questions of its own, because in every generation of a progres

sive people "the old order changeth, giving place to new," and new adjustments of thought and life are constantly demanded. But the day in which we live is one in which the movements are more rapid and the changes more radical than the world has ever before witnessed, and the obligation laid upon us of watching those movements and guiding those changes is correspondingly stringent. For I suppose that we have some control over these social forces; that we may check them, and direct them to beneficent ends. There is a materialistic doctrine of political economy which represents them as unchangeable, inexorable, irreversible; which assumes that human will can do nothing to modify human conditions. The doctrine is false and mischievous. It will be seen that the author uses the term "social forces" here almost casually, in a matter-of-fact way, as if anyone might be expected to appreciate as a matter of course what he intended by it. This is characteristic, in fact, of the development of the vocabulary of theoretic sociology. Nothing is, after all, more natural than that in a science, better, in the attempt to establish a science, which should deal with the material and problems of ordinary human experience, terms should be used which were familiar from ordinary human intercourse. Small has pointed out, in a discussion of the development of the category "process" into a formal sociological concept, that the term was absorbed in this same manner. It can also be noticed in the foregoing passage that the author uses the term "social forces" in a sense not unlike that which we have noted as the historians' conception. It seems not unlikely that the term may have been suggested to him for this purpose by his reading in historical writings of the time.

What Gladden understood "social forces" to be is further brought out by the chapter headings of his book, which were as follows: i, "The Factory"; ii, "The Labor Union"; iii, "The Corporation"; iv, "The Railway"; v, "The City"; vi, "The Church." Probably he recognized that to place these topics side by side under the general heading "social forces" was not a practice which would commend itself to critical thought, but his lectures were addressed to popular audiences, and he was making no attempt to be scientific.

When we turn to the main text of the book, we find that Gladden has introduced still another idea into his concept "social forces": social forces are taken to be those which draw and hold people together in effective social organizations; forces which make

for disorganization are "unsocial forces." We have already noted that some tendency to use the term in this sense appears in the literature of sociological theory:

Thus we see that while the factory is a social force in one way, it may become, and in fact is becoming, an unsocial force in another; it draws together in close relations people of the same class, but it tends, at present, to separate classes-to dig chasms and build barriers between the capitalists and the laborers, the employers and the employed.37

It is not certain just how much influence Washington Gladden's little book and its title had, either upon sociologists or upon social workers; but that it helped to make the term "social forces" familiar to those interested in concrete social questions and problems one can scarcely doubt. Park and Burgess have recorded a later appearance of the term among social workers:

Beginning in October, 1906, there appeared for several years in the journal of social workers, Charities and Commons, now The Survey, editorial essays upon social, industrial, and civic questions under the heading "Social Forces." In the first article E. T. Devine made the following statement: "In this column the editor intends to have his say from month to month about the persons, books, and events which have significance as social forces. . . . . Not all the social forces are obviously forces of good, although they are all under the ultimate control of a power which makes for righteousness."

Ten years later a group of members in the National Conference of Social Work formed a division under the title "The Organization of the Social Forces of the Community." The term community, in connection with that of social forces, suggests that every community may be conceived as a definite constellation of social forces. In this form the notion has been fruitful in suggesting a more abstract, intelligible, and at the same time sounder, conception of the community life.

Most of the social surveys made in recent years are based upon this conception of the community as a complex of social forces embodied in institutions and organizations.38

It is, after all, not the "social workers" in the narrowest conventional sense, i.e., the case workers attached to the social agencies of the large cities, and their immediate supervisors, who have been Loc. cit., p. 25. See also pp. 52-53: "The instinct of self-preservation was the force that drew them together"; also pp. 194-95, distinction between "centrifugal force" and "centripedal force."

37

38

Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, pp. 491-92; see also the context, and chap. vii, passim-the quotation is taken from the concluding section of the chapter.

given to talk of "social forces in the community," or "community forces." The social case workers, in this narrow sense of the term, have their attention focused upon problems of "helping people (and families) out of trouble." But there are other types of workers in the general field of social practice: those employed in one capacity or another in the new profession of "community organization," settlement workers, and persons, often of great talent and vision, who have risen to positions where they are responsible for the fundamentals of administration and planning of the work of social agencies. These people, forced by the very nature of their work to seek for materials of social construction, have been naturally receptive to the conception of "social forces" which are more or less subject to control by social workers and reformers, and can be mobilized in constructive programs for community organization and community betterment.

Now the social case worker of today does not think of her cases as existing in a social vacuum or desert; on the contrary she knows very well that social case work consists in large part in readjustment of the person or family with reference to the social environment. But in diagnosing such a case the worker quite naturally and automatically enumerates and evaluates the factors of the social environment which are or may be significant in this case, in terms which serve to emphasize their meaning for this case, and these terms are quite likely to be different from those the community organization worker or the maker of a community survey would use in listing social forces in that community. Also the social case worker has a natural tendency to think of the forces having meaning for a particular case as "personal" forces, or as factors in a personal situation; hence the term "social forces" does not occur so frequently in their reports and literature.

With this explanation of the social case worker's point of view, it is not difficult to see in the following selections from a handbook for social case workers abundant content for the concept "social forces" in the concrete sense in which we are taking it in this section, although the expression "social forces" does not itself appear at all: