METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 253
psychical events. To unsophisticated reflection the circumstances and des- tinies of peoples always seem to be the immediate outcome of the acts of a few eminent men, and this impression is confirmed by all success in putting such acts of individuals in a connected historical series. This impulse holds its sway even in advanced stages of reflection. It is much easier to grasp certain relations of an individual to events than to bind together the innu- merable influences that make a historical incident. Hence the reduction of the individual element in any historical reaction to its actual proportions is one of the most tremendous tasks presented to the investigator, and it demands the most mature self-restraint against inveterate psychical habit.
But the principle of subjective judgment impels not merely to the subjec- tivizing and individualizing of objective events, but further to the projection of the obser-uer's own subjective state into these interpretations. That is, the tendency is to constant anachronism in judgment, against the fact that the person judging is a later product than the people observed, and to a consid- erable extent, therefore, a variation from their type. Men of past times are, in general qualities, like ourselves, but not in those minor modes of thinking and feeling which make the final arbiters of acts. It is, therefore, a matter of long training and experience to learn how to judge the content of minds distant from us by the lapse of time.
The one-sidedness and the errors thus pointed out constitute a large part of what we mean by the unhistorical view of things. Every judgment is unhistorical which uses the standard of one age as the interpreter of another.' Yet not history alone, but ethnology, economics, jurisprudence, and aesthetics, suffer from the same fault of trying to make our own time a sufficient measure of all times. The fault of ««historical judgment is, consequently, only a special case under the more general error of defective objectivity. Hence the principle of subjective judgment implies as correlates and correctives other principles of discovery. In fact, the principle of demand for objectivity, par- ticularly that historical facts shall be seen in the light of their own time and culture, involves the following principle, viz. :
B. THE PRINCIPLE OF DEPENDENCE UPON THE PSYCHICAL ENVIRONMENT.
This principle seems to be the direct antithesis of the preceding. The former principle called for translation of the observer and interpreter into the consciousness of actors to be judged, in order to trace events from those actors' states of consciousness. This principle calls for attention to the psy- chical medium in which these actors moved, in order, so far as possible, to trace influences upon events from this medium. This apparent antithesis, however, is only in appearance (/'. e., between principles A and B).
The psychical medium itself is made by the combined minds of many indi- viduals. To understand it and them, we have to use the process of subjective judgment. Hence, this principle, after all, means only a change of focus for
' A capital instance is pointed out by Jheking, Der Zweck im Recht, I, 246.
