Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Idealist to the Realist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1911-08-17).pdf/3

Rh of readiness to sacrifice empirical fact—admittedly universal—to methodological theory. The method of agreement and difference is a way of studying the relations of such phenomena as are difficult of observation because they are not always present. And yet we are called upon to eliminate from our philosophy an ever-present fact, the ego, because just this, its ubiquity, prevents our studying it by a logical method invented as an aid in the investigation of inconstant phenomena. Thus, to sum up our reply to this criticism: idealism can not be contradictory to the fundamental laws of logic, for these are laws of mental self-consistency. And subsidiary logical “laws” and “methods” are neither sacrosanct nor axiomatic.

2. We turn now to consider the alleged inconsistency of the idealistic position. It is urged by contemporary realists, as by those of Berkeley’s day, that the distinction actually made by idealists between subject and object, percept and image, is possible only on the supposition that non-mental reality exists. The idealist admits that he makes this distinction. He, like other men, recognizes a difference between present and external, and merely imagined, objects, But he distinguishes the two kinds of things, not as extramental and mental, but as objects respectively of his shared and of his unshared consciousness, or as objects of one self and of many selves. His desk is an external thing because it is actual or possible object of many selves’ consciousness; the scene which he is now imaging and not describing is not external because it is the object of his private, unshared consciousness.

This idealistic theory of perception, presupposing as it does the existence of many selves, has, however, to take account of a second and more important charge of inconsistency. Idealism, it is urged, is necessarily solipsistic. The basal tenet of idealism, the critics insist, is the peculiar or unique certainty of the existence of myself, a single conscious self. But the idealist (so the realists point out) who refuses to argue from this certainty of his own existence to the existence of extra-mental objects is equally debarred from arguing to the existence of selves external to him. This objection has been urged by Mooore, by H. W. Carr, by Perry, and by others.

I shall not pause to criticize any details in the different