Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The New Rationalism and Objective Idealism (The Philosophical Review, 1919-11-01).pdf/2

Rh critical pages are devoted. The purpose of this paper is to summarize and to comment on this attempted refutation. Non-Humian idealism holds that the world is through and through mental, but teaches (in opposition to positivism) that mental entities are ultimately personal—that the universe is made up of egos, knowers, or selves and their ‘mental processes’ or experiences. Spaulding objects to both parts of the doctrine. Against the idealistic position that objects are mental he urges that known objects are independent of being known. To establish this position he recognizes that the realist must meet the egocentric predicament, the fact that ‘the only world which we can ‘get at’ [is] one that is related to our knowing or to our experiencing.” The realistic solution of the predicament seems to him simple. To be sure, the ego or knowing cannot be “experimentally” removed from any situation; but by analysis in situ (Spaulding’s term for abstracting attention) knowing may be ideally eliminated. It can be shown moreover that the knowing thus ideally eliminable makes no difference to the world that we know. For the idealist, like every philosopher, “presupposes” that his solution of the problem of knowing is “not causally dependent upon being known either by himself or by any one else.” In other words, idealism is presupposed to be the ‘genuine’ state of affairs and as such “independent not only of the specific knowing and experiencing process in the knowing individuals who maintain it, but also of … knowing in other individuals.” And in thus presupposing an object (namely the theory of idealism) which is true independently of being known by any one in particular, idealism is virtually adopting the absolutistic theory of truth—in other words it is unwittingly admitting the realistic contention that some objects at least are independent of knowledge and accordingly non-mental.

Intertwined with this, his emphasized argument against what he calls subjective idealism, is Spaulding’s criticism of the non-Humian idealist’s conception of the self or knower. Such a knower or self, he holds, would have to be identical with the Aristotelian “substance-like, unitary ego,” conceived “after the analogy of a physical thing with only the difference that the substratum here is regarded as spiritual instead of as material.” Now a thing-like substance,