Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Ancient Landmarks - A Comment on Spiritualistic Materialism (The Journal of Philosophy, 1922-08-31).pdf/4

496 ” and he explicitly uses ”spirituality” as synonym for ”congruity with ideals.” Once this meaning is attached to the term, Loewenberg brilliantly demonstrates that mind may be ”essentially unspiritual” and that “matter is capable of sublimation as much as is mind.” For on the one hand, mind may be, as Schopenhauer describes it, ”blind, foolish, capricious, sordid and miserable”; on the other hand, materialism is ”accepted by its votaries” as satisfying both the spiritual ”sentiment of rationality” and ”the quest for unity … behind and beyond the superficial medley and flow of things.”

I have no quarrel with these conclusions. Like all technically trained contemporary ”idealists,” I do not &ream of denying either the ”speculative possibility” of a world that is ”through and through mental, but … at variance with our ideals” or the fact that materialism may well satisfy genuine ”human needs” of those who hold it. Nor am I concerned with the virtual implications of Dr. Loewenberg’s closing paragraphs: that philosophy reduces to a form of differential psychology or to biography, that ”the assertions of philosophy” are essentially ”expressions of conflicting motives and needs” and that *the strife of rival theories in philosophy is a tragic struggle not of competing … hypotheses but of incompatible passions and values.” My main purpose is, once more, to protest against the wresting of a word from its time-honored meaning. The term ”spiritual,” whatever the divagations in the use of it, has always carried a meaning directly opposed to that of ”material.” Many idealists, doubtless, before and after and including Leibniz and Berkeley, have combined with a spiritualistic doctrine an uncritical optimism; but, however unfounded their inference from the mental nature of the world to its value, they have not (to my knowledge) confounded the meaning of the term ”spiritual” with that of “valued,” or ”significant.” ”Spiritual” means simply ”pertaining to spirit.” The ambiguity in the use of the term is due mainly to the diverse tendencies now to identify ”spirit” (after Berkeley’s fashion) with “mind,” “soul,” and ”self,”