1. Phenomenology is the philosophical method whereby the investigator focuses on the immediate data as they are dircctly presented to consciousness (‘the phenomena’), suspending—for methodological reasons—all the assumptions which he customarily makes as a scientist or as a plain man. Too often we allow our stock conceptions or our theoretical constructions to come between us and reality as it is actually divulged to us in our raw, unprocessed experience. One of the chief features of phenomenology is its insistence on a faithful return to the data as we experience them, before we begin to build our psychological, sociological, or other scientific theories on the basis of the data thus disclosed.