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 folklore. 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 customs crystallized into national or racial institutions.

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 would at most 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. 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 sa