METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS IN SOCIOLOGY S3
expressions, quoted earlier in the paper, taken from the Elements of Sociology, p. 66, when he says :
The consciousness of kind is the cause of all the social activities which men enter upon intelligently.
In view of this, how can he admit that consciousness of kind is largely appreciative when we find such expressions as the follow- ing?
Social evolution is but a phase of cosmic evolution. All social energy is transmuted physical energy. The conversion of physical into social energy is inevitable, and it necessarily occasions those orderly changes in groupings and relationships that constitute development. Or, the statement may be made in slightly different terms, the original causes of social evolution are the processes of physical equilibration, which are seen in the integration of matter with the dissipation of motion, or in the integration of motion with the dis- integration of matter.*
Or, on the following page we read :
These generalizations of the persistence of force, the universal process of equilibration, and the physical necessity of evolution have not been suc- cessfully assailed These generalizations are as true of the social popu- lation as they are of inorganic matter. 6
Again, he says :
All the energy expended in the growth and activity of population is derived from the physical world. Here let me explain what I mean by social energy. Throughout this work society has been regarded as essentially a phenomenon of thought and feeling. Now thought and feeling, merely as states of consciousness, are not energy. Apart from energy, however, they can do nothing. [All along here we must remember that he says that con- sciousness of kind is the cause of all social activities which we enter upon intelligently.] They can manifest themselves in external action only through the physical energy of nerve and muscle. Therefore, all that is done in society, or by society, whether consciously or otherwise, is accomplished by physical energy. Neither in society nor elsewhere is there any other kind of energy. Accordingly if we speak of psychical energy, we use for convenience a term that can denote nothing more than a special form of physical energy; namely, the nervous energy that is directly associated with consciousness. Briefly then, although social phenomena are for the most part conscious phenomena, there is no social activity that is not physical activity.'
4 Principles of Sociology, pp. 363 f. * Ibid., p. 365.
- Ibid., pp. 365, 366.
