Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The New Rationalism and Objective Idealism (The Philosophical Review, 1919-11-01).pdf/5

Rh conclusion that it is on that account non-mental. For, as Spaulding admits, numerically monistic idealism, the doctrine of the Absolute Self, unites idealism with an absolutistic doctrine of truth, since it defines truth in terms of the Absolute’s consciousness. Unless then Spaulding succeeds in his arguments—presently to be discussed—against objective, or monistic idealism, his realistic solution of the egocentric predicament, though it effectively combats relativism, does not prevail against idealism.

We are thus led at last to the consideration of Spaulding’s criticism of numerically monistic idealism, that is of Absolutism in the ontological sense of the term. For, as the preceding paragraphs have shown, the very core of his argument for realism is his solution of the egocentric predicament; and this solution consists simply in the demonstration that subjective idealism really presupposes absolute truth, becoming thus a self-contradictory system. But the objective idealist claims that absolute truth is conceivable in terms of his theory and it is therefore imperative for Spaulding, not only as pluralist but as realist, to disprove this numerically monistic doctrine. As he conceives it, objective idealism is the doctrine that an Absolute Unity, spiritual or mental in nature, “underlies”? the many entities empirically known to exist and “mediates” their relationship. Spaulding finds three main objections to this doctrine; of which the most important is the first: There is, he insists, palpable self contradiction in the conception of an underlying unity as mediating the relations of the many individuals which are its parts. “Such a unity,” he says, “is really never reached, since, as mediating the relation between the terms which lie above it, it is to those terms and therefore presupposes  mediating unity and so on in an infinite series.”  The second criticism is a corollary of the first. If once it be admitted that a unitary being can not, without self-contradiction, be conceived as ‘including’ its parts it