Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/678

 658 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

we do not mean to imply that it can furnish a complete inter- pretation of society. There are many physical phenomena of land and climate, and many physiological phenomena of race and population, which are not less than psychical facts to be taken into account in a complete interpretation of society, but which social psychology as such cannot consider. Hence an objective as well as a subjective interpretation is essential for the proper understanding of the social life : neither alone will yield complete knowledge of society; both are necessary for the understanding, not only of society as a whole, but of any particular side of societary life. Nor is the subjective or psy- chological interpretation to be set over against the objective or biological interpretation ; both arc parts of a philosophic whole, and each is supplementary to the other.

The objective interpretation of society has been, perhaps, sufficiently developed and emphasized during the present cen- tury by such men as Comte, Spencer, Buckle, and their follow- ers. They regarded the physical and objective as fundamental, and brought in the subjective and mental only as modifications of the physical. Hence they treated the science of society logically as a physical science. In this proceeding they were justified, since they all explicitly or implicitly denied that the actions of men are independent phenomena having laws of their own. It is because we question, however, on methodological grounds the rightfulness of such an assumption that we would now shift the emphasis from the objective to the subjective interpretation. We do not question the value of an objective interpretation ; it is absolutely necessary to any complete understanding of the social process ; but experience has shown that it is inadequate to explain the principal and characteristic features of that pro- cess ; that it explains the incidental rather than the essential facts of societary life. We must, therefore, reverse the methodological order of the older sociologists and proceed from man to nature in our interpretation of society, not from nature to man.' That is to say, asocial psychology is needed to interpret the processes

■ Cf. Patten's Theory of Dynamic iE'coHOOTzVi, Introduction. The methodological justification for the above position will appear in a later article.