Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Metaphysical Monist as a Sociological Pluralist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1920-12-02).pdf/3

Rh justified in declaring that “community has or is a mind.” Miss Follett also bases her doctrine of the “group-person” on the fact that people associated together may (and sometimes do) create genuinely new experience (conception, emotion or will)—a creation impossible not only to any one of these selves singly, but to the lot of them together so long as each acts as a separate unit either foisting his conviction on the rest, or yielding it, or mechanically compromising it. This fact of social “interpenetration” on which Miss Follett so brilliantly insists seems to me uncontrovertible. I take issue merely with her conclusion that “wherever you have a genuine common will you have a real person,” that. “the process of making decisions by the interpenetrating of thought, desire, etc., transfers the center of consciousness from the single I to the group I, … [to] the two-self, three-self, several-self, perhaps village-self.”

II. Up to this point I have merely tried to discredit, not as statements of fact but as arguments, the empirical considerations actually adduced in favor of the genuine group-person. The more difficult question remains unsettled: is it not incumbent on the absolutist, whatever the empirical arguments pro or con, to deduce from his conception of the universe as All-including Person the conception of the social group as lesser person? Otherwise put, does not rejection of the group-person carry with it metaphysical pluralism?

In favor of the view that the metaphysical monist is of necessity an upholder of the group-self, the community as person, the following argument may be urged. The Absolute, unless the word is to lose its specific meaning, certainly must be defined as a genuinely and ultimately single being-—a being (not indeed “” or “”) but to the many beings which are its parts or members. The many, in a word, are parts of the Absolute; the Absolute is not a composite of the many. Now, in a universe thus conceived there is—so the argument runs—no room for communities or social groups which are mere pluralities of interrelated selves, conscious indeed of mutually influencing each other yet constituting each a mere system or organization of distinct though related selves and not a single being.

This argument, it should be noted, is based on no mere analogy but on the monistic doctrine of relation. The absolutist, or monist, has rejected pluralism precisely because of its theory of relations as external. He holds, on the other hand, that relation is ultimately the characteristic of a whole, or including entity; that “two things can