ABSTRACT
This chapter considers—in what way society and social life are affected by various sets of forces—have a fuller content than appears at first sight. It examines the social groups, their members, their relationships, their institutions, and their activities, as influenced by physical, vital, and psychical forces and begins with the modifications impressed upon society by its subordination to the external forces and the laws of the physical world. Society has been brought directly under the laws of matter and force by virtue of the fact that its development appears to follow always the order of cosmic evolution. The differences, again, between the moving pastoral peoples and the fixed village communities of agricultural folk, are no less marked, and might be traced throughout all the departments of their social life. The chapter explains the danger of what is known as the economic or physical interpretation of history and social life.
