INVENTION AND PRODUCTION 225 



the lower animals, and it is important to note . . . that feeling constitutes 

 the dynamic agent, and is therefore the highest attribute that we have to 

 consider so long as we are deahng with the dynamic agent. . . . Now feel- 

 ing is a true cosmic force . . . and constitutes the propelling agent in 

 animals and in man.^ 



Feeling is used by Ward in two different senses: as the property 

 of self-awareness which is the chief differential attribute of the 

 animal,^ and as a force or the dynamic agent in animal and human 

 evolution.^ It would seem as though Ward were guilty of the 

 fallacy of the universal and like Spencer confuses logical classifi- 

 cation with ontological reality. Because man has a multitude 

 of specific feelings and because animals behave as though 

 they had inner experiences similar to man does not prove that 

 feeling is one force, something like gravitation, always acting, 

 and a common antecedent to all activity. There is a general 

 sense of awareness which Ward considers as feeling; there is a 

 certain vital feeling or awareness of the general operation of vital 

 processes, especially the vegetative, according to Hoffding,* and 

 there is the consciousness of certain specific agreeable or dis- 

 agreeable states or experiences, but there is no warrant for 

 assuming a general feeling, as a force. Thought, feeling and 

 will are class terms. The phenomenal realities are specific 

 thoughts, specific feelings, and specific attitudes which eventuate 

 in action. These are all functions of personality. To assume 

 feeling as a force presupposes a cosmic personality that feels, but 

 this is contrary to Ward's philosophy. 



3. Ward's third contribution is his doctrine of synergy which 

 he explains as follows: — 



Just as in biology the world was never satisfied with the law of organic 

 evolution worked out by Goethe and Lamarck until the principle of natural 

 selection was discovered which explained the workings of that law, so in 

 sociology it was not enough to formulate the law of social evolution, however 

 clear it may have been, and the next step has been taken in bringing to light 

 the sociological homologue of natural selection which explains the progress of 



^ Pure Sociology, p. 99. 



2 Ibid., pp. 95, 1 24 f . For criticism of Ward's theory of the dynamic agent and 

 of social forces, see E. C. Hayes, Publications American Sociological Society, vol. v. 



• Ibid., p. 99. 



* Psychology, p. 97. Cf. Small's criticism, General Sociology, pp. 532 f. 



