METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS IN SOCIOLOGY 37 I
experiences, and to be able to get any causal explanation at all, is to examine my own consciousness when it has led to similar actions, and conclude that his inner experience leading to those actions was similar to my own.
There is another way of getting at that experience which was the cause of the given phenomena. The subject of these actions tells me why he acted thus; what it was that influenced his will into just that volitional discharge. But just as soon as he tells me, he has put his experience into words which are merely media of exchange or coin of the realm of inner, subjective experience, and so those words are translated back into inner subjective experience by me (into appreciatively descriptive, and not scien- tific, terms), 27 so that, whichever way it is looked at, that notion of appreciative interpretation, or understanding others by reading my own experience into them, is indispensable. Consequently, to get at societary fact it is a necessary preliminary that the subject connect himself vitally with the world of his investigation, so that he feels himself as part of that world, as having fellowship with it. And here we are beyond doubt in the world of appreciation, and so in the preserves of metaphysics. Furthermore, Professor Small seems to put an unfair interpretation on Professor Gid- dings's statement when he calls this reading in of subjective experience the reading in of the personal equation, since the term "personal equation" has acquired a bad meaning, owing to its standing for a lack of scientific exactness. Now, this meaning of the term is entirely inapplicable to Professor Giddings's term " subjective interpretation."
The discussion which has gone before may be utilized in advancing another point, which has no doubt become clear by this time, viz., that the interaction between individuals which furnishes the phenomena for sociology is in reality an internal interaction, and not simply external contact, such as is treated by physical science, and such as is required by physical causation. It was pointed out above that the causation involved in sociology is of a different sort from that involved in natural causation ; that there is an internal element present. The formula for social evolution
" For a characterization of appreciatively descriptive terms see p. 356.
