Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Idealist to the Realist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1911-08-17).pdf/6

454 of the object as immediately known are mental) yet the characters known through inference are, or may be, extra-mental—the answer will be plain: Qualities and relations are the only discovered factors of objects as known. The inferred object itself must, therefore, consist in relations, in sense qualities, or in a combination of the two; or else it is an object of unknown nature. The immediately following paragraphs will consider the possibility of the existence of unknown objects, but the present discussion concerns objects as known. And these objects, analyzed into their constituents, have been found—not assumed—to be forms of experience.

A final charge remains. The second of the alleged assumptions of idealism is to be refuted. All that precedes has concerned objects-as-known. The realist now insists that the idealist has in any case no right to assert the non-existence of unknown objects. To quote Professor Montague: The intuitional argument of the idealists “consists of a confused identification of a truism and an absurdity. The truism:. The absurdity:. … It is to the failure to perceive [this fallacy] … that idealism owes its supposedly axiomatic character.” In other words, the fact that the objects of our knowledge are, as such, known is no reason for asserting that objects can not exist unknown. I propose to deal with this argument very simply by admitting its contention, but, at the same time, pointing out that, kept within its proper limits, it is utterly insignificant. As an idealist, I agree to check myself in every exuberant denial of the possibility that unknown extra-mental objects exist. But I do not hereby recant my idealism. For the truth is that the hypothetical unknown, extra-mental reality is utterly negligible. Such an x, an utterly unknown extra-mental object, is not the object of physical science, of logic, or of mathematics; it does not consist in sense qualities—that is, it is not extended or in motion, colored or sounding; it is not a relation—that is, it is not a substance, or a thing, or a cause, or a reality, or an entity, or a term, or a function. In a word, it is more than negligible, it is necessarily left out of account by men with only ordinary human endowment. Such an extra-mental reality is indeed unknowable, since it is by nature unknown. Therefore the thinker can have no concern with it and, of all people, the realist of to-day, whose fetish is logic, should eschew illicit commerce with the inconceivable and the indefinable.