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 dealing 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.2 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 Héfiding,* 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 
1 Pure Sociology, p. 99. 
2 [bid., pp.95,124f. For criticism of Ward’s theory of the dynamic agent and 
of social forces, see E. C. Hayes, Publications American Sociological Society, vol. v. 
3 Tbid., p. 99. 
4 Psychology, p.97. Cf. Small’s criticism, General Sociology, pp. 532 £. 
