Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The New Rationalism and Objective Idealism (The Philosophical Review, 1919-11-01).pdf/3

Rh ever else it is, is causally related to other entities—in other words, it alters or modifies them. An ego, therefore, if it exists, must modify the objects related to it. But the specific relation of an ego to objects can be no other than its consciousness or knowledge of them; and the realist has argued that objects are independent of—unmodified by—being known. Obviously, therefore, the realist concludes, if knowledge does not modify its objects there can be no modifying or causal ego.

It will be convenient to comment on these arguments in reverse order and to protest at once that the argument just stated is based on an arbitrary misconception of the knower, or self. For though the self; or I, has indeed too often been confused with a ‘thing-like causal entity’ (the soul), this misconception is quite unwarrantably foisted on the idealist. This statement must be stressed. For by self is meant simply the conscious being, whatever one’s conception of the nature of consciousness; and such a self, the idealist insists—the self as a complex, unique, persistent and yet changing conscious being—is either discovered or presupposed by every philosophic system not excepting realism. This contention is, in truth, well borne out by Spaulding’s own procedure. He sets forth, to be sure, a theory of consciousness as ‘linear series’ or ‘dimension’ of conscious processes—a conception, it may be noted, which is in essence indistinguishable from the positivism which he has so effectively criticized. But he states the theory with hesitation and offers no argument save a bare analogy: sensational and other sorts of conscious elements, he argues, might conceivably be related to each other as are the members of a series, without thereby losing their characteristic mental quality. But in the face of this doctrine of the nature of consciousness Spaulding throughout assumes the existence of the concrete self—the ‘I’ or