ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the preliminary task of analyzing the structure of society into certain constituent elements, and of tracing the process of social change to certain determining factors. It considers the complication of processes involved in all social life, or mental life lived in close contact with other minds. The chapter argues that if there is to be true progress, there must be an increasing effort to harmonize conflicting purposes, a growing movement towards greater unity of aim and effort, accompanied by more, and more willing, subordination to the common social good of all individual and sectional purposes. The individual member of society may be regarded as wholly a product of nature and the social process, and entirely dependent upon nature and society from first to last. The struggle for freedom may have begun by confusing the issue; confusing, that is, the necessary freedom of the true individual with the impossible freedom of the social person.
