me time have completed, from one point of
attention at least, a science of everything involved in human society.

"All beings which can be said to perform actions do so in obedience to
those mental states which are denominated desires." But we have gone
back a step beyond the desires and have found it necessary to assume the
existence of underlying interests. These have to desires very nearly the
relation of substance to attribute, or, in a different figure, of genus
to species. Our interests may be beyond or beneath our ken; our desires
are strong and clear. I may not be conscious of my health interests in
any deep sense, but the desires that my appetites assert are specific
and concrete and real. The implicit interests, of which we may be very
imperfectly aware, move us to desires which may correspond well or ill
with the real content of the interests. At all events, it is these
desires which make up the active social forces, whether they are more or
less harmonious with the interests from which they spring. The desires
that the persons associating actually feel are practically the elemental
forces with which we have to reckon. They are just as real as the
properties of matter. They have their ratios of energy, just as
certainly as though they were physical forces. They have their peculiar
modes of action, which may be formulated as distinctly as the various
modes of chemical action.

Every desire that any man harbors is a force making or marring,
strengthening or weakening, the structure and functions of the society
of which he is a part. What the human desires are, what their relations
are to each other, what their peculiar modifications are under different
circumstances--these are questions of detail which must be answered in
general by social psychology, and in particular by specific analysis of
each social situation. The one consideration to be urged at this point
is that the concept "social forces" has a real content. It represents
reality. There are social forces. They are the desires of persons. They
range in energy from the vagrant whim that makes the individual a
temporary discomfort to his group, to the inbred feelings that whole
races share. It is with these subtle forces that social arrangements and
the theories of social arrangements have to deal.

2. Interests[161]

During the past generation, the conception of the "atom" has been of
enormous use in physical discovery. Although no one has ever seen