Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The New Rationalism and Objective Idealism (The Philosophical Review, 1919-11-01).pdf/4

№ &#93; the ‘you’—not only by numberless more or less incidental allusions but in passages whose meaning turns upon the assumption of such a self. Thus, he says explicitly that “there are processes of self-perception;” he asserts that “in acts of will we discover a push … against our better nature or against our appetites;” and, even more significantly, he founds his argument against positivism on the distinction, quite impossible on a dimensional theory of consciousness, between the ‘I’ and the ‘you.’

This criticism, however, of Spaulding’s argument against the conceivableness of the ego, still leaves on our hands his more formidable argument against idealism. For to Spaulding, whatever might prove to be the nature of knower or of knowledge (of self or of consciousness), the known object still would exist, independent of both, by virtue of the realistic solution of the egocentric predicament. This solution it will be remembered first seeks to eliminate the ego by an analysis in situ and then argues that the user of the egocentric predicament contradicts himself by presupposing a true state of affairs. In comment on this argument, it should be observed that the analysis in situ is not only rather naively claimed as peculiar to “the new logic” and kindred disciplines but is also mainly irrelevant to the reasoning. For one may ‘ideally eliminate’ almost any obstinately existing object or quality by an effort of abstracting attention, without thereby annihilating it. One may be said, for example, to eliminate the color of a fabric when one is examining its texture, but the fabric keeps on being green or blue as well as smooth or rough. And similarly, though one may ideally eliminate the self when discussing the thing; yet the thing may none the less keep on being an object analyzed (perhaps even constituted) by a self or selves. The only significant part, therefore, of the realistic solution of the egocentric predicament is the assertion that subjective idealism, in asseverating its own truth, presupposes a distinction between true and false and therefore a more-than-subjective reality. But it is at once evident that this argument is effective not at all against idealism in general, but against subjectivism (in the sense of relativity). From the fact that the known object is “independent of the specific knowing process” does not follow the