Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Metaphysical Monist as a Sociological Pluralist (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1920-12-02).pdf/4

684 be related only as both are included in a third as their common ground;” and (if he is personalistic as well as absolutist) that relation is, and “relating is a specific characteristic of those complex entities known as selves.” Obviously, therefore, the critic urges, the absolutist must abjure the conception of community or group as constituted by distinct yet related selves, in favor of the doctrine of the community as a genuine self relating its members.

The reply of the metaphysical monist, or absolutist, who is also a sociological pluralist is briefly the following: It is indeed true, he asserts, that “two things” can be related “only as both are included in a third as their common ground,” and that consequently the interpenetrating selves of a social group are members of an including greater self. But no a priori consideration forbids the conclusion that between the human and near-human selves (each a relating self) and the all-including Absolute Self, the ultimate relater, there are no intervening self-conscious persons. Community, association, and state, so far as they are personified, are therefore sociological and neither psychological nor metaphysical units, constructs of the socially minded selves who compose them. Hach of these members of society is distinctively conscious of himself as in close mutual relation with his fellows and each may personify the social group and conceive it, feel toward it, or behave toward it as if it were a person. But the social group, even when personified, remains a plurality, larger or smaller, of the selves who are ultimately related as members of the Absolute Self. After this fashion, sociological pluralism is harmonized with a genuine metaphysical monism.

It should be noted, in conclusion, that it would be possible to maintain the literally personal existence of social groups while denying that of, or voluntary, societies, because of their apparent dependence on the impulses or purposes of human. selves. One might then conceive the race, or even the community in the wide sense, as a person, without so regarding the trade-union or the bar association. A sociological monism could thus be maintained without thereby entailing the consequences of political absolutism, the doctrine of state or church or any other organization as possessing