SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES. IV
PROFESSOR EDWARD C HAYES, PH.D. Miami University
SECTION VII. IS SOCIOLOGY METAPHYSICAL? 1
If social phenomena are psychic, is sociology therefore meta- physical ? Are these phenomena too inaccessible to observation to be successfully studied by the methods of science without aid from those of metaphysics? This question, having been raised and emphasized, 2 stands at this point across our path.
Dr. Fogel asserts that for adequate study of social phenomena there is required some other method of approach than those known to natural science ; and he says :
The other and more direct mode of approach is through appreciation. By appreciation I mean a sympathetic identification of the subject or individual with the world in which the individual sees himself as an agent realizing his world in an experience which is individual for himself. He thinks himself as- part of the stream of the world-process, and so looks at the rest of this stream as like himself in that it can be realized by him just as he realizes his own experience ; or, in other words, he is at fellowship with the world, so that the distinction between subject and object is no longer an absolute one.*
This use of the word " appreciation " is based upon the meta- physical doctrine of Professor Royce the doctrine, namely, that there is in ultimate truth but one consciousness, and what we call conscious individuals are, in reality, waves of one vast sea. Or r to employ a figure of Professor Royce's, souls are like monads,, which may indeed have no windows, but which also have no roofs, and but one sky into which all look up and see each other reflected there. Consciousness, then, is not a strictly individual phenome- non, but each finite self is so much of the absolute self as comes to
1 This topic absorbs the present section. Discussion of the other questions raised at the close of sec. vi will follow immediately.
- Philip H. Fogel, " Metaphysical Elements in Sociology," American Journal
of Sociology, November, 1904, and January, 1905.
- American Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, p. 356.
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