Mary Whiton Calkins

“ For though the self; or I, has indeed too often been confused with a ‘thing-like causal entity’ (the soul) , this misconception is quite unwarrantably foisted on the idealist. This statement must be stressed. For by self is meant simply the conscious being, whatever one’s conception of the nature of consciousness; and such a self, the idealist insists—the self as a complex, unique, persistent and yet changing conscious being—is either discovered or presupposed by every philosophic system not excepting realism. [12] This contention is, in truth, well borne out by Spaulding’s own procedure. ”

“ But the objective idealist claims that absolute truth is conceivable in terms of his theory and it is therefore imperative for Spaulding, not only as pluralist but as realist, to disprove this numerically monistic doctrine. As he conceives it, objective idealism is the doctrine that an Absolute Unity, spiritual or mental in nature, “underlies”? ”

“ The supposedly ‘underlying one,’ whose self-contradiction is so triumphantly shown up, has never really been conceived as either absolute or as underlying. For when anything is.thought as an extra-entity it is not thought as absolute or all-including; and when anything is conceived as mediating relations, then the relations are thought of as existing outside it. In a word, Spaulding makes his point against objective idealism only by stating the doctrine so that it presupposes the existence of many entities externally related. ”

“ There is no instance, the realist has asserted, of a unitary being; the idealist points to the self. Every complex being must reduce to elements, the realist has argued; the idealist confutes this argued conclusion by the observed instance of an irreducible complex, the self. But these are, after all, supplementary considerations which do not affect the fundamental argument of Spaulding in opposition to numerical monism: (3) The Absolute, he has argued, would of necessity underlie its members and mediate their relation. ”

“ He sets forth, to be sure, a theory of consciousness as ‘linear series’ or ‘dimension’ of conscious processes—a conception, it may be noted, which is in essence indistinguishable from the positivism which he has so effectively criticized. ”

“ One may be said, for example, to eliminate the color of a fabric when one is examining its texture, but the fabric keeps on being green or blue as well as smooth or rough. And similarly, though one may ideally eliminate the self when discussing the thing ”