Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The New Rationalism and Objective Idealism (The Philosophical Review, 1919-11-01).pdf/6

№ .&#93; follows, as Spaulding holds, that such an entity, if it exists, must be “absolutely simple, since, if it is not, it consists of parts, and thus repeats the very problem, as regards the relation of these parts, which it is supposed to solve.” But obviously an elementally simple being is no Absolute One. Finally Spaulding reiterates, there is no observed instance of a unitary being. “Strictly empirical procedure,” he says, “discloses not a single instance of a one ‘something’ … that mediates the relation between two or more terms.”

These objections may once more best be considered in reverse order. In opposition to the realist, the objective idealist insists—or may insist—that empirical procedure does disclose an instance of a “one something that mediates relations” or more accurately stated, of a “one something that relates.” This is the self (or I, or ego) of every one of us, the realist included, a unitary being which (to say the least) relates its own experiences. This relating self, the idealist continues, is as truly a directly observed, an empirically discovered fact as any one of the physical facts “such as tables and books, batteries and bombs” which, according to Spaulding “the physical sciences” and “common sense accept.” In other words, as directly as observation discloses, for example, the existence of falling bodies, it discloses also the existence of classifying, remembering, and purposing selves, that is to say of beings who unify distinct experiences (and objects) and who unify present with past. The closer study of this unitary being, the self, provides also one answer to Spaulding’s second objection. He contends that a being which mediates relations must be elementally simple. But the idealist points to the empirically discovered self as instance of a relating yet complex entity, ‘ideally’ analyzable indeed, yet incapable of reduction to elements. Within the self it is thus possible to distinguish many aspects, attitudes, processes; but this analysis in situ, this distinctio rationis, this attentive absorption in one or other aspect of the self does not, as already argued, imply the separate existence of any one