234 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
and through individuals. There are no social forces that lurk in the containing ether and affect persons without the agency of other persons. There are, to be sure, all the physical conditions of which we have spoken above, that affect persons just as they affect all other forms of matter. So far, these are not social forces at all. They do not get to be social forces until they get into persons, and in these persons take the form of feelings which impel them to react upon other persons. Persons are thus transmuters of physical forces into social forces ; but all properly designated social forces 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 per- son 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 folk-lore. Persons incessantly influence persons. The modes of this influence are indescriba- bly 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 custom crystallized into national or racial institutions.
It is difficult to imagine how there could be any reality, or at least any significance, in the fact which we have named " the spiritual environment," if that environment did not have means of affecting persons. The ways in which the spiritual environ- ment comes to be an environment at all in effect are simply the modes of action followed by the social forces. Yet our analysis of the social forces must not be treated as though it were in any
