Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Idealist to the Realist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1911-08-17).pdf/10

458 . “Energy is an ideal quantity,” says Newcomb. “To gain an idea,” Ostwald declares, “of the content of the concept of energy, we will start from the fact that we are able … through our will, to call forth occurrences in the external world.”

From considerations such as these the idealist refuses the lure of the realist’s pretension to the authority of science. For the hypothesized realities of the physical scientists are one and all reducible to the negligible unknown or else to a complex of sensible quality and relation. “Descend, then,” says the idealist to the realist, “from hypothesis to fact. Do not talk about vortex-ring, and electron, and ether, and energy, until you have first discussed the terms to which these reduce: the sensible qualities and complexes—extensity, resistance, motion—and the relations—cause, multiplicity, oneness, and the rest. You can give no unchallenged account of these qualities and relations, except as distinctive ways of experiencing, that is, of being conscious.”

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DISCUSSION PROFESSOR DEWEY’S ‘‘ACTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS’’

N a footnote on page 69 of ‘‘Essays Philosophical and Psycholog- ical in Honor of William James,’’ Professor Dewey says: ‘‘Of course on the theory I am interested in expounding, the so-called ac- tion of ‘consciousness’ means simply the organic releases in the way of behavior which are the conditions of awareness. and which also modify its content.’’ If this is all that Professor Dewey means by the action of consciousness upon the existences which are the direct subject-matter of knowledge, there are several questions that I should like to have answered; for they have been bothering me ever since I have read the very interesting paper on ‘‘Reality as Practical.’’

First. How does such a theory bring about the evaporation of “the metaphysical puzzles regarding ‘parallelism,’ ‘interaction,’ ‘automatism,’ the relation of ‘consciousness’ to ‘body’’’? (p. 65, footnote). The organic releases in the way of behavior, we are told, are the conditions of awareness. Although elsewhere in this paper Professor Dewey defines awareness as attention, I presume that in