Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Ancient Landmarks - A Comment on Spiritualistic Materialism (The Journal of Philosophy, 1922-08-31).pdf/1

Rh it may be fairly decisive of the character of a literature and of the domestic habits. A spasm along a yard or two of tho intestinal tract may or may not be a great deal more than just that. This simple view, that more than mechanism can be seen in a world seen to be mechanically ordered, will yield an answer, I think, to all of Mr. Lovejoy’s five conundrums.

 

“Remove not the ancient landmark.” Proverbs, XXII: 28. “Philonous. Tell me, Hylas, hath every one a liberty to change the current proper signification annexed to a common name in any language? For example, suppose a traveller should tell you, that in a certain country men might pass unhurt through the fire; and … you found he meant by the word fire that which others call water … Would you call this reasonable? —Berkeley, Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II.

In my recent philosophical wanderings I have met a surprising number of travellers who seem to mean “by the word fire that which others call water.” I have, for example, encountered, in the successive spring numbers of the Philosophical Review, two who appear to me to play very fast and loose with the terms “spiritual” and “material.” (i) One of these, Professor Sheldon, writes in defense of what he calls “positive” or “enlightened” materialism, though he fills the greater number of his pages with “the indictment of materialism” of the popular type, the description of mind and consciousness “in terms of physical process.” In these pages Dr. Sheldon sets forth what he calls “the definite ineompatibilities between admitted facts of consciousness and … material process.” Of the specifie properties of consciousness which are incompatible with the conditions of material reality he especially stresses the following: first, the ‘presence of the past in memory”; second, the 