Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Idealist to the Realist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1911-08-17).pdf/4

452 of this argument because I am, for myself, prepared to accept its main conclusion. I believe, in a word, that solipsism is a sharp horn of the pluralistic idealist’s dilemma. To the monistic idealist, on the other hand, it presents no unavoidable difficulty. For the monistic idealist’s position is, in brief, the following: In being conscious of myself I know myself as limited, thwarted, circumscribed. But one can not know oneself as bounded without knowing the existence of a boundary; and to be aware of a boundary as boundary one must be aware of a something beyond. That is to say, in the experience of my narrow, single self, I experience also a somewhat-beyond-myself. And when I reflect on the nature of this somewhat-beyond, I must conclude that the distinction between it and me is partial, or relative, since between ultimately separate realities there can be no relation and consequently not the relation of knowing. This something-beyond-myself, therefore, which I directly experience in being conscious of my self-limitation, must be like me, must—in other words—be other-self.

But it is high time to come to closer issue with our antagonists. Their most fundamental criticisms have yet to be stated. They argue that idealism is based on unjustified assumptions, of which the first is the assumption that an object, because known, is therefore mental in nature. “The realistic position is curtly stated by Holt: “The entities (objects, facts, et caet.) under study in logic, mathematics, and the physical sciences are not mental in any usual or proper meaning of the word ‘mental.’ The being and nature of these entities are in no sense conditioned by their being known.”

This is an accurate and an uncompromising statement of the difference between the two parties. For the idealist does hold as fundamental just this doctrine which the realist attributes to him, that is to say, he believes that objects, as known, are mental. But he does not regard this belief as an assumption. He holds, on the contrary, that a close examination of the objects of logic, of mathematics, and of the physical sciences discloses their ideal character. The following, in brief, is the result of the idealist’s empirical study of the known object: An object of physical science contains one or all of the following characters: (1) sensible qualities, as extension, motion, weight, color, sound, fragrance, etc.; and (2) relations, as spatial and temporal positions, permanence or impermanence, likeness and difference, degree, singleness or multiplicity or totality. Objects of logic and of mathematics differ from every-day “physical