Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/386

 374 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

gotten will as our ultimate principle ; and when we find the prin- ciple most adequately manifested in conscious individuals and their activities, we find out that we are in the field of sociology, and have gotten there by undertaking a metaphysical investigation and not stopping at mere analysis, but by making it a complete and exhaustive investigation. In other words, we have followed out the principle of specification as well as that of homogeneity.

Now, taking the problem the other way, we can start with sociological facts and analyze them, and we find that the stages in the process will be : institutions, individuals ; and that resolved further will give us the interaction of conscious wills; and so we have gotten to the principle which was found to be primary in the other method of considering the problem.

Does not the very nature of sociological investigation demand the point of view of appreciation rather than observation ? Obser- vation takes in mere cause-and-effect relations. But in socio- logical investigation these causes are, we have seen, of a different sort ; for we cannot really understand social phenomena if we do not read our own individual experience into that of others. 82 So that the contention is : by reason of its material, the point of view of observation unsupplemented as a method for sociology will not be adequate.

If you make your investigation entirely from the spectator's point of view, you will miss some of the richest elements in the content of sociological study. To get an adequate and explana- tory notion of societary phenomena, a certain amount of appre- ciative penetration will be necessary. Now, if you go on the view of the indifference of subject and object, or the scientific method, then this cannot be included. The metaphysical method, however, demands community and fellowship ; and so here the metaphysical method is more applicable than the purely scientific; and so the knowledge of sociology is metaphysical rather than physical.

The outer manifestations of society which the sociologist classifies of course belong to the world of description. But when we get to the real study of social phenomena, and want to get the inner springs of sociality or, to speak in a physical analogy,

"GiDDiNcs, Elements of Sociology, pp. 341 ff.