Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/654

 638 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

unity of the human species. This inference is reinforced experi- mentally ; that is, the validity of the interpretations based upon it are continually tested in practice, as when we let our associates know how we have understood their conduct, and they testify that we have correctly apprehended their emotional states; and when we know by the responses that we elicit that our signaling of our own feelings has been understood ; and when, in order to produce changes in human conduct, we form judgments as to the motives from which such conduct issues, and the motives that will prompt conduct desired, and, by providing the conditions which we infer will affect human motives, find it possible to interrupt conduct which we desire to terminate, and to evoke conduct the motives for which we have supplied. In all this there is nothing involved but phenomena, including the phenomena of our own conscious- ness and the apparent relations of phenomena, and therefore nothing metaphysical, and no question of the absolute reality which underlies these appearances.

Near the opening of this section we dismissed for the time two of the three questions that are raised by examining sociology from the metaphysician's point of view. We have now discussed the question : Must social phenomena be studied by any non-scientific metaphysical method of approach, or can they be studied satis- factorily by the scientific methods of observation, comparison, and inference? The second question, Are social phenomena caused? has received only incidental attention, and will meet us again here- after. The third question demands the remainder of this section, namely: Does the teleological nature of sociology, its dealing with valuations and ideals, require us to resort to a non-scientific " philosophic method " ? We are told that what is is matter for science, but what ought to be is matter for philosophy ; that phe- nomena we can see and describe, but " meanings " and " values " we can only appreciate ; therefore they are not matters of science, but of philosophy or metaphysics.

Upon this third question the position here offered for con- sideration is as follows : Our views of the " meanings " and " values " of things are not to be deduced from our metaphysical