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SOCIOLOGY AS DISTINCT FROM SOCIAL SCIENCES 49
which the humanistic studies rest that the scientific treat-
ment of psychical facts is not necessarily psychology. Psy-
chological processes have a definite content, but this con-
tent may be the subject-matter of a great many different
sciences. The sciences of language, art, morals, and re-
ligion treat such content of psychological processes in ab-
straction from those processes.
There is only a difference in degree between the hu-
manistic studies and the sciences of external nature. Even
the latter deal in the last analysis with facts of the mental
life, with occurrences within the mind. The discovery of
an astronomical or chemical truth, or the mental repro-
duction of this truth, is an event of consciousness which a
complete psychology might deduce from purely psycholog-
ical conditions and developments. These sciences of exter-
nal nature come into existence by choosing as their sub-
ject-matter, not the psychic processes, but the relations
between their contents.
No actuality can be scientifically comprehended in its
immediate totality. It must be viewed from a series of dif-
ferent standpoints and regarded as a multiplicity of mu-
tually independent scientific contents. The fact that in
the psychical occurrence process and content are a unitary
totality does not abolish the methodological and episte-
mological requirement of differentiating between the form
of the process on the one hand and the content of the pro-
cess on the other hand. And this differentiation is not
only required for those psychical occurrences whose con-
tents synthesize in an independent, objective spatial world,
but also for those occurrences whose contents do not build
an independent spatial world. In the first case the differ-
entiation would yield psychology and the sciences of ex-
ternal nature. In the second instance the differentiation
yields psychology and the humanistic sciences.
