Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/328

 314 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

is an exercise of psychological knowing. But it is a matter of extreme methodological necessity, and directly decisive for the principles of the psychical sciences in general, that the scientific treatment of psychical facts still by no means needs to be psychol- ogy. Even where we uninterruptedly employ psychological rules and perceptions, where the explanation of each separate fact is possible only in the psychological way, as is the case in sociology, the sense and intention of this procedure by no means needs to lead to psychology, i. e., not to the law of the psychic process, which process alone, to be sure, can carry a definite content; but the procedure leads only to this content and its configuration. There is here, however, only a difference of degree between the sciences of mind and the sciences of external nature. In the last analysis the latter, as facts of the mental life, are reflected only within the soul. The discovery of every astronomical or chemical truth, equally with reflection upon the same, is a consciousness-event which a complete psychology could deduce without reservations, purely from psychical conditions and developments. Yet in so far as they choose for their subject-matter, not the psychic pro- cesses, but their contents and their interdependences, those sci- ences of external nature come into being somewhat as we deduce a painting, according to its aesthetic meaning and its relation to art history, not from the physical oscillations, which produce the colors, and which we must admit create and maintain the whole real existence of the painting. There is always one reality which we cannot scientifically comprehend in its immediateness and totality ; but we must take it up from a series of detached stand- j)oints, and consequently shape it as a multiplicity of mutually independent scientific subject-matters. Now this is demanded also in the case of those psychic occurrences the contents of which do not form an independent spatial world, and do not visualize their psychic reality. The forms and laws of a language, for instance, which is certainly constructed out of energies of the soul, for purposes of the soul, are nevertheless treated by a linguistic science which disregards the only given realization of its object, and it presents, analyzes, or construes that object (i. e., the forms and laws themselves) purely according to its substan-