There is no question that a more rational and adequate control in the field of human behavior is very desirable. And there are no powers of the human mind necessary to the formation of a science in this field which have not already been employed in the development of a science and a corresponding practice in the material world. The chief obstacle to the growth of a science of behavior has been our confidence that we had an adequate system for the control of behavior in the customary and common sense regulation of the wishes of the individual by family, community, and church influences as outlined in Chapter II, if only we applied the system successfully. And the old forms of control based on the assumption of an essential stability of the whole social framework were real so long as this stability was real. But this stability is no longer a fact. Precisely the marvelous development of the physical and biological sciences, as expressed in communication in space and in the industrial system has made the world a different place. The disharmony of the social world is in fact due to the disproportionate rate of advance in the mechanical world. The evolution of the material world, based on science, has been so rapid as to disorganize the social world, based on common sense. If there had been no development of mechanical inventions community life would have remained stable. But even so, the life of the past was nothing we wish to perpetuate. Another cause of the backwardness of the science of society is our emotional attachment to the old community standards or “norms.” I described in Chapter II how much emotion enters into the formation of everyday habits. It is well known that men have always objected to change of any kind. There was strong condemnation, for example, of the iron plow, invented late in the eighteenth century, on the ground that it was an insult to God and therefore poisoned the ground and caused weeds to grow. The man who first built a water-driven sawmill in England was mobbed; the man who first used an umbrella in Philadelphia was arrested. There was opposition to the telegraph, the telephone, the illumination of city streets by gas, the introduction of stoves and organs in churches, and until recent years it would be difficult to find a single innovation that has not encountered opposition and ridicule.