Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Mr. Muscio's Criticism of Miss Calkins's Reply to the Realist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1912-10-24).pdf/2

 And (2) in the second and admissible sense of mental, yellow is not mental, that is to say, it is not true that yellow “thinks, feels, wills, acts” as I do (p. 325).

Upon these criticisms I have the following comment to make: I entirely agree with Mr. Muscio that it is impossible to describe a sense-element. But the quotation from my paper makes it clear that I apply the term “describe” to the sense-object, or sense-complex, not to the sense-quality. I speak of making assertions about qualities and of “describing” objects, or things, by enumeration of their qualities. Mr. Muscio’s criticism is here based on a misreading of my statement. But this is a minor point and need not detain us.

Far more important is Mr. Muscio’s distinction between (1) “mental” in the sense in which yellow may be called mental and (2) “mental” meaning “like me”—a difference which, as he rightly notes, my paper, “The Idealist to the Realist,” ignores. My reason for leaving so important a distinction out of account was the fact that I was strictly limited to fifteen minutes in the delivery of the paper, and that it overran its predestined bounds in its published form. I offer this, however, as explanation, not as excuse, for Mr. Muscio’s criticism more than half inclines me to believe that I might better have withheld a partial statement of my view. The present brief discussion is mainly an attempt to make good the former omission.

I agree with Mr. Muscio in the belief that the basal meaning of “mental” is “like me.” To be mental is, ultimately, to be a self. The form of idealism which I uphold is, in other words, personal idealism,—the doctrine that the universe is constituted by interrelated selves, not phenomenalistic idealism, the Humian doctrine that things and selves alike are resolvable into series of mental “contents,” impressions, and ideas. In what sense then can I call “yellow” mental, since (as my critic rightly insists) yellow does not, like a self, “think” or “feel.” I answer: yellow is mental in the subordinate sense of being an “aspect” or “partial experience” of a self. The only unchallengeable assertion about yellow is that it is a way in which I, a self, am conscious. Mr. Muscio accordingly mutilates reality when he says that yellow is mental only in the sense of being incommunicable. For yellow is not merely incommunicable: it is the incommunicable experience of a self. The conception is in truth through and through personal: the “communicated” is experience shared with and by a self, and the “uncommunicated” is that experience which a self does not share.

To summarize this reply to Mr. Muscio: I agree with him that the term “mental” is used in two senses in my paper, and (2) that a