Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/651

 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 635

Is it not preferable to deny that it is fundamentally important for sociologists even to think of society as having the highly com- plex unity which it does not objectively possess, and to discover a form of social unity which is an objective reality? Without mis- apprehending the idealistic argument, it is possible to insist that it is important that the scientist should think of the object of his science as it is.

It is true, not to say a truism, that " we are not concerned with anything outside the world of experience," 13 in the sense that we can think only our own thoughts and be conscious of only our own states of consciousness. Nevertheless, the objective idealist, with- out disloyalty to his metaphysics, may hold that it is of the greatest concern to us whether our thoughts correspond to things as they exist " independent of our experience ; " and Professor Adams appears to be an objective idealist and not a subjective idealist; that is, he seems to recognize that there are "things in themselves independent of our experience." And I suppose that the apparatus of intelligence exists by reason of agelong contact with things as they are, and that its biological teleology is to set up subjective conscious states that correspond so well with "things themselves" that they will stimulate actions that fit the external realities; for example, so that we shall not run against ledges, leap over precipices, or try to walk up trees; or so that all the engineers on a railroad, in presence of a given semaphore signal, which exists out there independent of their subjectivity, shall think "open switch." And this correspondence between subjective experience and objective reality is quite as important for science, as science, as it is for practice; indeed, it may be said to be the only important consideration for science. Even abstraction, which thinks things apart which do not exist apart, is scientifically useful only when it thinks the objective truth about its fragment, and is scientifically dangerous in proportion as it forgets the objective relations of its fragment, or ceases thinking before it has thought the fragments together again as they really exist.

It is perfectly true, as Professor Adams says, that we may

"Ibid., p. an.