AMERICAN SOCIAL THINKERS, beginning with Ward and James,
pointed out that while it was incontestable that genetic forces determined
social interaction, it was equally true that teleological forces affected con-
duct. In his Dynamic Sociology of 1883, Ward argued that all social action
involves efforts to attain desired ends, and such ends are present in the
mind before action is attempted. ¹ He argued, too, that we must think of
interaction in society in terms of action, not process, force, or motion. And
the kind of action most characteristic of man in society is invention and art.

The intellectual element, though commonly called a force, is not in reality such. It
is not comparable with the other true psychic forces. . . . The intellect only guides
[psychic forces] in such a manner as to secure maximum results. It also brings other
natural forces to their aid and thus increases the effects. The general process by which
all this is done is that of invention, the product is art, and, therefore the faculty may
be called the inventive faculty, and the phenomena produced, artificial phenomena. ²

Ward, like James and Dewey, argued that a fully developed science of
sociology and psychology could develop only if ends, values, and purpose
could be studied empirically. It was easy enough to expose the fallacies of
theories of human conduct which explained all that man did in the present
by what he had done in the past. But from an empirical point of view, the
question of how we could know a past was no different from how we
could know a future. It was really a question (for the student of society,
at least) of how knowledge of the past or of the future could be ordered
and demonstrated within some kind of social context. For, if, as Ward
taught in his theory of telesis, social ends are present in the mind before
action is attempted, what are the social data of such ends? How can we
establish hypotheses about ends, values, and purpose, which are "in" the
mind?

History, biology, religion, Freudian psychology, and even nineteenth-

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