246 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
phenomena become material for the natural sciences when the non-psychical factors of these phenomena are the questions at issue.'
Individual man as thinking and willing agent is the first datum of psy- chical science. Without knowledge of man, the individual, problems presented by combinations of men would be forever insoluble. Knowledge of the individual must, moreover, begin with concrete and individual experiences. For general application, however, only so much of these is pertinent as has its source in universal human qualities and impulses. The individual, not as individual, but as genus, is the first matter of interest in psychical science. The scientific discipline whose part it is to consider man in this universal form is psychology. In this view, psychology must have the importance of a fundamental science. More than this, individual psychology, as above described, is at the same time ^^w^ra/ psychology.'
This position is by no means universally accepted among the workers in psychical sciences. A chief reason lies in the fact that, up to date, official psychology has rendered but slight aid to the sciences of humanity. Mean- while scholars have not tried to get along without knowledge of man. Instead of waiting for the psychologists to furnish it, however, they have foraged for it themselves. As in politics, so in the psychical sciences, everybody has supposed himself to be familiar with the fundamental principles concerned. It has also come about that men who did not call themselves psychologists have been collecting psychological material, and have stored it in their museums and libraries under all sorts of labels, from anthropology to philos- ophy and religion.
It is further true that many of the professional psychologists have not yet freed themselves from the channels of a priori philosophy, and have conse- quently offered speculation in the place of science. These facts explain why psychology is not accorded the place in science which belongs to it. They do not justify further uncertainty about the order of dependence among the materials out of which a system of psychical sciences must be constructed. With philosophy of any a priori sort, psychology has no more and no less to do ^2lX\ physics or history. The composition of our conceptions, the develop-
' The foregoing distinctions come to have most radical importance whenever we take up questions which have both physical and psychical relations. For instance, in my seminar course upon social teleology, or the systematization of judgments about the ■value of conduct, we have to start with a review of so-called evolutionary ethics. We find that most of the men who have been dealing with what they call evolutionary ethics have not been in the ethical field at all. They have been studying problems of animal instinct or of reflex actions in animals and man; i. e., matters of physiological psychol- ogy, immensely important in themselves, but not having the ethical bearings that have been supposed. This supposition has been possible because there has been no such precise limitation and definition of ideas as the foregoing.
' Here we sharpen the perception that not only the physical base of De Greef's chart, but the psychical base, in the personal units, must be understood as introduction to social action.
