or
political creed as of another. Any Frenchman who clung to Protestantism
during the reign of Louis the Fourteenth; any north-country squire who
in the England of the eighteenth century adhered to the Roman
Catholicism of his fathers; Samuel Johnson, standing forth as a Tory and
a High Churchman amongst Whigs and Free Thinkers; the Abbe Gregoire,
retaining in 1830 the attitude and the beliefs of a bishop of that
constitutional church of France whereof the claims have been repudiated
at once by the Church and by the State; James Mill, who, though the
leader in 1832 of philosophic Radicals, the pioneers as they deemed
themselves of democratic progress, was in truth the last "of the
eighteenth century"--these are each and all of them examples of that
intellectual and moral conservatism which everywhere, and especially in
England, has always been a strong force. The past controls the present.

Counter-currents, again, may be supplied by new ideals which are
beginning to influence the young. The hopes or dreams of the generation
just coming into the field of public life undermine the energy of a
dominant creed.

Counter-currents of opinion, whatever their source, have one certain and
one possible effect. The certain effect is that a check is imposed upon
the action of the dominant faith.

_Fifth_, laws foster or create law-making opinion. This assertion may
sound, to one who has learned that laws are the outcome of public
opinion, like a paradox; when properly understood, it is nothing but an
undeniable, though sometimes neglected, truth.

B. INTERESTS, SENTIMENTS, AND ATTITUDES

1. Social Forces and Interaction[160]

We must guard at the outset against an illusion that has exerted a
confusing influence. There are no social forces which are not at the
same time forces lodged in individuals, deriving their energy from
individuals and operating in 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 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 they 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