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 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 631

trust and admire, a person whose qualities we have not named. This may be because the same sign can indicate a whole class of hateful or admirable traits, and we recognize the presence of the class, amiable or hateful, but have not yet learned what species of the class confronts us; or it may be because we have genuine instincts, like those that tell the animals what to shun and what to seek, but do not tell them why. Instinct might well survive long- est to guide the actions that deal with the element in our environ- ment which is both most important to our welfare and most diffi- cult to analyze and understand, namely, our associates.

We know, then, the affective experiences of our associates by their observable and describable manifestations, interpreted by our knowledge of what similar expressions and conduct of our own have meant emotionally. These manifestations are both the intended and the unintentional ; both the larger expressions which we call conduct and the minuter ones to which reference has been made. Of course, the speculator, if he likes, is at liberty to hold that phenomena in general are nothing real, in the sense in which emotions have true reality, and that the two orders of appearance and reality are not woven into one network of the conditioning and the conditioned. But the scientist must proceed as if the observable were the real, and the cure for error were more and better observation; and so proceeding, he will say that some things make men angry and that others make them glad, and that anger and gladness make men behave in different ways ; in other words, that we can observe the vividly contrasting effects of men's emotions, of avarice, generosity, pride, humility, courage, fear, and that a trustworthy sociological maxim is : " By their fruits ye shall know them." And if we know emotions by their effects, they are as public, describable, and open to the scientific method as is electricity, which we know by its effects and by these alone. Pro- ceeding as a scientist must proceed, we know the emotions of others by the same process of observation and inference by which we get other scientific knowledge. If this process did not include the inference of the similarity of individuals of the same species and the same society, then we should know them, not as emotions, but only as we know ether and electricity that is, as the condi- tions of certain effects.