Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/648

 632 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The metaphysician may add that we know them also by " appreciation." We do know them by appreciation of our own affective states, and so know by direct consciousness such examples of this class of phenomena as our own experience affords, and we can observe introspectively. These experiences are not less true phenomena because they are subjective. Rather than imply that the subjective is not phenomenal, it would be far truer to say that all phenomena are subjective. All phenomena, all manifestations or appearances, exist primarily in conscious- ness. Not only "red" and "long" are names for subjective experiences, but all the data for every science exist first in con- sciousness, and the question how science gets its grip on the external world is by so much harder than the question how it gets hold of the subjective activities and experiences of which it has both direct and indirect knowledge. That we can know such phenomena by both methods certainly does not make our knowledge of them less, but more, scientific. It is an erroneous assumption to treat psychic phenomena as metaphysical realities. All realities as realities are metaphysical, but all phenomena as phenomena are matter for science. This is the true distinc- tion. Of course, sociological facts, like all others, may run back into the metaphysical, and this is no evidence that more than others they are inaccessible to science, nor any escape from the scientific duty, here as elsewhere, to trudge the path of knowledge, by observation and inference, just as far as we can before taking to the wings of metaphysical speculation. In inferring that other members of our species, whose expressions and behavior we observe, feel as we felt when under like conditions we acted as we see them do, we are simply comparing and inferring that is, we are applying methods of science. And our knowledge of the emotions of others is, in fact, a result of this procedure without the addition of any metaphysical assumption. Appreciation of the experiences of associates is in no sense confined to metaphysicians, still less to the school of metaphysicians who teach " appreciation " as based upon the doctrine of the all-inclusive consciousness, and their doctrine cannot compel the admission of metaphysical ele- ments into sociology. The sociologist, as a sociologist, must study