Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/261

 METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 243

sect the actual unity of the given facts, in a more or less artificial way, in order to arrive at determination of the abstract conceptions involved in the facts. These abstract conceptions are then combined as nearly as possible into a report of reality.

By this sort of isolating abstraction, /«aM^wzaA« — ^. ^., as a system of conceptions and operations which have their basis in the formal qualities of real things — has separated itself from ih^ " real sciences" {reale Wissen- schaften) or " natural sciences," which deal less with the form and more with the content of observed reality.

Within the circuit of research about the actual, the so-called natural sciences have reserved a field for themselves, consisting of those facts which may be reported by the senses, in so far as they may be reported by the senses. This limitation of territory is tenable if we keep in mind that the restriction relates, not merely to the objects themselves with which natural science deals, but also to the aim of natural science.

This aim is reached when it has answered the questions : How do given data of sense perception arrange themselves in harmony with the entire collec- tion of our sense perceptions f Hence natural science, when legitimately acting, calls to its assistance only natural phenomena in explaining other natural phenomena. When natural science is compelled to use hypotheses of natural objects or occurrences which are not discoverable by the senses, the device is still with the intention of bringing objectively sensible phe- nomena into logical arrangement.

We may accordingly define natural science briefly as an arrangement of sense perceptions so that they do not contradict each other. We might then describe the psychical sciences in parallel fashion, as an attempt to arrange isychical manifestations so they do not contradict each other. But it is not difficult to see that this description and this antithesis are inadequate and inexact. They rest on a false analogy. The old psychology used to speak of " the objective and the subjective sense," "das dussere and das innere Sinn." There are no "objects of the subjective sense," as the concept was used in the old psychology, but only objects of the objective sense.

Accordingly, the events which are assigned to the "spiritual world " are events which are contained in the physical, sensible world. Even for psychol- ogy, therefore, the notion of a pure psychical science, devoted solely to so-called subjective experience, is not exact, for no psychology can entirely ignore the physical conditions and manifestations of psychical life. How much less completely may such abstraction be carried out with problems of history, philology, economics, jurisprudence, etc.! All of these get their peculiar reality by virtue of the existence of the physical world, and of tte conditions which it establishes for human life.

In other words, here is the evidence in support of the assertion that there are for our experience no psychical objects, as such, but only occurrences which we refer to psychical factors. With these psychical factors, so far as