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/3

Rh sense quality is not mental in the sense of being a self. 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.

I realize that the “unchallengeableness” of these statements will not give pause to those neo-realists who regard the indisputableness of an assertion as a possibly insignificant character of it. This indifference to a self-evident truth is perhaps to be explained by the fact that the neo-realists, adhering as they do to the philosophy of “primordial common sense” (excepting only in their highly uncommon explanations of illusion), enter on the business of philosophy with a very respectable stock in trade of unchallenged ( of unchallengeable!) assumptions. But thinkers who have divested themselves of this hereditary capital and who have to make their way in the world of speculation without such helpful presuppositions as the “knower” and the “known world,” with its “evident composition,” can not afford to throw away even insignificant certainties. They hold that however unimportant the unchallengeable in itself, the character of being unchallengeable is of utmost significance in the philosophical search for truth.

Of course, my argument in its present form has led only to a solipsistic type of personal idealism. The first stage of the argument against non-idealism does, in truth, lead to a temporarily solipsistic conclusion. The way out of solipsism, through a recognition of the implication of the passivity and receptiveness of my experience, I have indicated briefly in the article under discussion and more at length elsewhere.

Mr. Muscio concludes his very temperately written article with the rather extravagant observation that “the hypothesis that the objects of knowledge are mental will have to find some definite, relevant, and logical support if it is to be more than a mere forgotten fantasy.” The remark is the more surprising in that Mr. Muscio has just admitted that it “is doubtless true that ‘realistic’ writers have little positive doctrine.’? He defends the realist, however, as a “clearer away of much rubbish.” Waiving the question whether or not the realist has yet, as a fact, cleared away the “rubbish” of