Mary Whiton Calkins

“ Now all the arguments known to me for the self-conception of society fall far short of establishing the truth that a social group is in this sense a person. Such arguments seem to fall into two groups:
1. There is first the consideration, eloquently urged by Royce, that a man may love his country—church or country—and be loyal to it and sacrifice himself for it as if it were a self. In other words, Royce argues (and in my opinion very effectively) that a society is regarded by its members as a self. But this certainly does not prove that a society is a self. ”

“ From the puzzling nature of time, finally, Leibniz reasons, just as Kant does, to its ideality. “Everything of time,” he says, “which exists, is successive, and so perishes continually; and how can a thing exist eternally which, to speak exactly, never exists? ... Only instants of time exist, and the instant is not even a part of time. Therefore time could not be anything except ideal (le temps ne saurait être qu‘une chose idéelle) ; and the analogical relation of time and space will make us consider one as ideal as the other.” ”

“ The Christian doctrine of the fatherhood of God directly implies that other Christian doctrine of the uniqueness and value of the human soul. For it belongs to every parent to individualize his children. The most ordinary child in a long school procession of little replicas of himself is instantly descried and selected by the individualizing eye of watching father and mother. And Christianity, which teaches that God is a father, of necessity teaches that the human soul is a ‘pearl of great price,’ a ‘treasure hid in a field’—a coin, a sheep which, if lost, must be sought for till it is found. ”

“ The one thing which unites the world to-day is the desire for the end of the Great War. The larger desire which animates many men is the passionate longing for an end of all war. But checking this desire, strangling this hope, are two widespread dogmas: the psychological dogma that man is inevitably a fighter and the ethical dogma that through war, and through war alone, he can rise to the supreme height of self-sacrifice. ”

“ I believe, in a word, that solipsism is a sharp horn of the pluralistic idealist’s dilemma. To the monistic idealist, on the other hand, it presents no unavoidable difficulty. For the monistic idealist’s position is, in brief, the following: In being conscious of myself I know myself as limited, thwarted, circumscribed. But one can not know oneself as bounded without knowing the existence of a boundary; and to be aware of a boundary as boundary one must be aware of a something beyond. That is to say, in the experience of my narrow, single self, I experience also a somewhat-beyond-myself. ”

“ One may admit without a quaver Ames’s account of taboo, of magic, even of prayer, and still hold that the religious consciousness arises out of purely human, social intercourse only when this collective “group consciousness” gains as its object a self conceived as superhuman. Against such a construction Ames would, of course, interpose the considerations by which he seeks to discredit intellectualistic conceptions of religion. The rationalistic view of religion is, he holds, untrue to history and to psychology alike. ”

“ But Christian philosophy from its very beginning has found difficulty in justifying God and has found itself obliged to sacrifice now the belief in God’s goodness, now the conviction of his power, to the flinty facts of pain, stupidity, and sin. Royce’s philosophy is, as all readers of him know, an optimistic conception of a good God. It is an invincible optimism for it cherishes no illusions, and affirms instead of ignoring the ‘capriciousness of life,’ ‘the degradation of the sinner’s passive victim,’ the ‘brute chance’ and the mechanical accidents to which the nature-world is prey. ”

“ The cardinal error not only of Bergson’s critics, but of Bergson himself, in the valuation and the estimate of his system, is the exclusive emphasis laid on this ultimateness of change and freedom, to the neglect of his equally positive doctrine that back of change is that which changes, that fundamental to time and freedom and evolution is the enduring, willing, developing self. ”

“ The student of philosophy will recognize this as little other than Henry More’s conception of the extendedness of spirit. But Sheldon, so far from concluding that extension is spiritual, teaches explicitly that “mind is material, because it displays all the positive attributes of matter,” that while “dualism is right in declaring that mind as compared with the matter of our sense-world is unique; dualism and spiritualism are quite wrong ... when they deny materiality and substantiality to mind.” ”

“ In this crisis of conflicting needs—on the one hand the crying need of all nations for men of courage and self-sacrifice who will fight for the ends of justice and humanity, on the other hand, the dire need of nations desolated, blighted and impoverished, to be rid of war—the militant pacificist, in season and out of season, preaches his fighting gospel of a war against obdurate nature-evils, against floods and fires, famine and disease ”

“ But I insist that a sense quality is mental, or ideal, in a genuinely idealistic sense, that is, as aspect or “content” of a self. Thus “yellow” is a certain experience which a self has (or which selves have) ; just as any relation (whether knowledge, or dependence, or influence) ultimately is a self-in-its-relating,—a self as knowing, depending, or acting. And again I ask Mr. Muscio and the other critics of idealism to make any other unchallengeable assertions about sense-qualities. ”

“ As an idealist, I agree to check myself in every exuberant denial of the possibility that unknown extra-mental objects exist. But I do not hereby recant my idealism. For the truth is that the hypothetical unknown, extra-mental reality is utterly negligible. Such an x, an utterly unknown extra-mental object, is not the object of physical science, of logic, or of mathematics ”