Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Idealist to the Realist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1911-08-17).pdf/8

456 hand.” Still other scientific conceptions, whether realistically or idealistically interpreted, turn out to be mere tautologies. Such are Clerk Maxwell's definitions of matter as that which may have energy communicated to it, and of energy as that which passes from matter to matter. This is to the full as illuminating as Oliver Herford‘s “Alphabet of Celebrities”:

Q is the Queen, so noble and free; For further particulars look under V.

V is Victoria noble and true; For further particulars, look under Q.

It is not fair, of course, to dwell on so palpable a slip in the provisional definitions of a hook no longer new. But Whetham, writing only a few years ago, finds in recent theories the same tendency to circular definitions and to explanations which are not ultimate. “The success of such theories,” he says, “does but shift the mystery of the unknown. Matter is a persistent strain-form flitting through a universal sea of ether: we have explained matter in terms of ether. Ether in its turn is described as a fairly closely packed conglomerate of minute grains in continual oscillation. We have explained the properties of the ether. … But what of the grains of which the ether is composed? … Has a new ether more subtle than the first to be invoked to explain our properties, and a third ether to explain the second? … An ultimate explanation of the simplest fact remains, apparently forever, unattainable.”

This reminder that no realist may find refuge from the tempest of conflicting metaphysical views in a sanctuary of fixed and satisfying physical doctrine, is, however, preliminary only to the opposition of idealist to realist. The idealist, in fact, maintains that so-called physical reality, however conceived, reduces to sensible quality, to relation, or to a combination of the two; or else reduces to utterly unknown reality. Quality and relation, he has already argued, are ideal; and neither the every-day man, the scientist, nor the philosopher is concerned with that whose nature it is to be unknown. This idealistic teaching should be restated in its application to specific realistic conceptions.

1. The physical universe may be regarded as made up of molecules and atoms. Now the molecule and atom are often conceived as extended things. “The atom,” to quote Fullerton, “is not directly perceivable by sense, but it is conceived as though it and its motions