Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/269

 METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 25 I

can associate with remembered psychical experiences of our own, that sub- jective experience of ours is the most obvious measure of the observed phe- nomena. The primary discrimination of the psychical is always instinctive rather than deliberate {pianmdssig). It is judgment from a total impression, not from clearly conceived special marks. It may, therefore, err in many ways by making the boundaries either too broad or too narrow. For the first rough impression, however, our ovm subjective experience is a measure. In case the objective circumstances only partially coincide with the subjective experience, we are at once ready to coordinate them with subjective expe- riences none the less, since these are most familiar to us, and the easiest to posit. (So early men interpreted natural phenomena as acts of will.) Hence the most natural of the two errors just mentioned is that of too generously extending the realm of the psychical. This error made mythology, etc. (Giddings' "consciousness of kind" is an example of excessive assumption of similarity to our own processes in primitive processes.)

Hence, progressive scientific reflection is the more inclined to err in the other direction by requiring as credentials of the psychical an amount of intellectual performance which is possible only at a high stage of psychical development. To find the mean between these extremes is a task requiring patient and judicial research, or long social development.

After such progress, naive and instinctive assumption of the psychical in objects passes into conscious and systematic interpretation of the subject into the object. This first in psychology itself, by taking past states of the sub- ject's consciousness as objects of contemplation, and later by extending the same observation to other persons. The other psychical sciences use this process in three forms : First, they judge persons acting with reference to the historical and social influences which they set in motion. Second, they judge by the subjective standard collective occurrences, which must be referred to the co5peration of several persons. Here the search is for the psychical influences which acted on the individuals, and for the causal relations of the same to the total occurrence in question. Third, psychical products of every sort — literary, artistic, historical monuments, etc. — are subject to judgment by the same measure. Whether the authors are otherwise known or not, the man- ner of men that they must have been is conjectured by reflecting what states of consciousness in ourselves would have been potent to produce such results.

Problems of this sort, in which the psychical character of a creator must be construed from his works, are evidently the most difficult. This appears in notable controversies over the question, which of certain otherwise known persons were the authors of certain works — the Junius letters, the Shakes- pearean plays, the Psalms, and many paintings and sculptures. Also in the questions about the individual or plural authorship of many works — the bib- lical writings, the Homeric poems, the Indian epics, and manj' modern inven- tions, e. g., the sewing machine. This form of judgment is of the most frequent application in criminal prosecutions.