SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 637
one's own transient experience, and in a sense incapable of being remembered, is nevertheless remembered in this sense, that one recalls the time of his emotion, his own place at the time, the fact that he had an emotion of a kind which he conceives, names, and identifies whenever the like occurs, and also recalls the conditions that appear to him to have occasioned his emotion (and at the remembrance of them a like emotion may return, sometimes even more intense), and one recalls the conduct which appeared, and still appears, to him to have resulted from the emotion ; and, third, since one can so far describe his own or another's emotions as to convey by language all this which one keeps in remembrance, can indeed convey all this just as well as what we call the description of a percept can be conveyed, therefore descriptions do, in this sense, make emotional phenomena "public" by similarity of testimony, as well as that result is accomplished by the kind of remembrance and description which applies to material things, especially since the apparent conditions and effects of emotion are open to the concurrent observation of the members of a society. It is true that an observer with no subjective experience like that of man could conceive or describe man's subjectivity only in terms of its time, place, occasions, and effects, and the affective quality of it would escape him. He would not know how men feel. But we infer that other individuals of our species feel as we should have to, in order to act as they do under their conditions ; that they experience the varieties of feeling that we have experi- enced and can conceive. Consequently, description conveys to us the same kind of knowledge of their emotions that we have of our own past emotions. And this knowledge is often reinforced by the fact that our imagination of their situation arouses actual present emotion in us, like that which we believe was theirs. The description of emotions is dependent upon the inference of sub- jective similarity in man; but no whit more so than is that other description which conveys knowledge from one mind to another mind because both minds are capable of similar cognitive states, and assign to words similar meanings. Moreover, our knowledge of this similarity is not due to any mystic, metaphysical insight, but is a true inference from the premises, including the biological
