Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/270

 252 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Errors in the application of the principle of subjective judgment are easy and obvious. To guard the use of the principle, these errors must be made conspicuous — a sort of logical rogues' gallery. They are in principle chiefly two:

First, assigning the activity of mind concerned in judging to the objects judged. Thus is produced a tendency to one-sided intellectual explanation of psychical facts.

Second, attributing the individual traits of the person judging to the object judged. Hence follows the tendency to refer objective psychical facts entirely to given individuals, and further the tendency to a one-sided individualistic conception, and, furthermore, negligence of the variability of men along with changing circumstances — i. e., the unhistorical judgment of times and persons.

Of these errors, the first — one-sided intellectualism — is perhaps most common. It appears in the attempt to account for everything — the most important developments of psychical life — morality, law, religion — as exclusively the products of conscious calculation of utility. In explanation of historical events the attempt is frequent to make them appear as products of deliberate intention. In reality, logical reflection had little to do with them, but they came from the most confused mass of feelings. Or, how often, when there was evident intention, an entirely different end was reached, on account of the intervention of secondary motives; and from the outcome we reason back to the existence of primary motives which were in reality not present. This is illustrated by a passage in Tolstoi's War and Peace. He argues that history has imported intentions into the minds of both French and Russians that never existed. He shows how all the events of the year 1812, up to the burning of Moscow, might have occurred of necessity, without any of the systematic planning on the part of any of the actors which has been attributed to them. He declares that the Russians had no sort of desire, as has been supposed, to lure the French into the depths of Russia. They rather did all they could to stop them on the borders. The Russians charge the French, and the French the Russians, with the burning of Moscow. The city was burned, says Tolstoi, because, abandoned by its inhabitants, occupied by soldiers who were heedless in handling fire, it was in a situation in which any wooden city must burn.

Frequent as these errors are, it is usually not observed in connection with them that they often spring from the very condition in the interpreter which is essential to calm and judicial judgment. The calmer and cooler the interpreter is in his estimate of events, the more inclined he is, unless fortified by previous training in overcoming the tendency, to imagine that the actors whom he is judging were in the same deliberate mood. He consequently attributes to definite and clear-cut aims and intentions what was due to a multitude of previous incongruous impulses.

The second — the individualistic — conception is so clearly connected with the subjective criterion that it inevitably colors first judgments of objective

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