Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Bertrand Russell on Neo-Realism (The Philosophical Review, 1915-09-01).pdf/2

Rh lies within my experience it is not necessary to know anything about my nervous system.” In fact, as Russell is at pains to urge, in a later article (p. 591), “a knowledge of physics and physiology must not be assumed in theory of knowledge.”

Neutral monism, in the third place, is entirely unable to account for the individuality of experience. A’s experiencing of an object is one fact, and B’s experiencing of the object is another fact, and neutral monism has no terms in which to describe the distinction (p. 438).

A final objection to neutral monism is its inability to account for error. If there were no distinction between mental and physical reality we should have to find in the physical world an “entity corresponding to false belief.”

In the face of these trenchant criticisms one may well wonder by what right Russell retains his position among the neo-realists. The main reason for his opposition to idealism is, of course, his belief that ‘extra-mental’ objects exist. It will be well to scrutinize more closely the grounds of this belief. Mr. Russell argues effectively against solipsism in the extreme sense in which “our present experience” is asserted to be “all-embracing.” For, he points out, “we may know propositions of the form: ‘there are things having such a property’ even when we do not know any instance.” For example, I may remember that I yesterday knew, what I have to-day forgotten, the name of X, to whom I am being presented. But this disproof of solipsism is as compatible with a personalistic as with a ‘realistic’ philosophy. In truth, Mr. Russell never argues the existence of non-mental realities. In The Problems of Philosophy there occurs, to be sure (p. 74), the implication that the physical object must exist as cause of such and such sense-data. But, for the most part, both universals, “which may be experienced by two minds,” and physical objects or ‘things of sense,’ are assumed to exist, somewhat as Mr. Russell assumes minds other than my own—though he calls this last a mere ‘working hypothesis.’

To confess the truth, Russell’s philosophy, as so far outlined, resembles nothing so much as old-fashioned Cartesian dualism. Of course he is not a dualist in the ‘epistemological’ sense of the term which the neo-realists have made fashionable, that is, he wisely rejects the ‘representative’ or copy-theory of knowledge. But he retains the ultimate distinctness of subject and object of knowledge. From the charge of holding so comprehensible a position Russell, however, is unhappily freed by his cavalier treatment of the self. In Russell’s view, consciousness is a sui generis relation called experience,