ABSTRACT
The use of the phrase "social will" gives us, in exchange for all the little tautologies which we found in the feelings and ideas, one huge tautology. By Ward the social will is described as the form or process through which the feeling forces work in certain high stages of social organization. An elaborate attempt to utilize the social will in interpreting society is made by Professor C. A. Eilwood in a series of articles in Vols. IV and V of the American Journal of Sociology. Professor Ellwood holds, to start with, that the real proof of the existence of "socio-psychical processes" is that social groups "act". He puts the social mind's subjective interpretation alongside of an objective interpretation which shows what part rivers, and mountains, and ore deposits, and microbes, and so forth, play in society. In this way Ellwood wants to found a social psychology "upon the fundamental principles and categories of a functional psychology of the individual".
