Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The New Rationalism and Objective Idealism (The Philosophical Review, 1919-11-01).pdf/7

Rh of them. Up to this point the objective idealist, in his reply to the realist, has been insisting on an ignored fact—the self. There is no instance, the realist has asserted, of a unitary being; the idealist points to the self. Every complex being must reduce to elements, the realist has argued; the idealist confutes this argued conclusion by the observed instance of an irreducible complex, the self. But these are, after all, supplementary considerations which do not affect the fundamental argument of Spaulding in opposition to numerical monism: The Absolute, he has argued, would of necessity underlie its members and mediate their relation. But no being, complex or simple, can underlie its parts and mediate their relation since such mediation presupposes an infinite series of relations between mediating and mediated terms. This statement, over and over again repeated, constitutes, it must once more be insisted, the central position of The New Rationalism. The argument is fundamental, as has now so often been pointed out, not only to the pluralistic but to the realistic part of the system since the realistic solution of the egocentric predicament is contingent on the disproof of objective idealism. Ina word the whole argument of The New Rationalism pivots at precisely this crucially significant point. It is accordingly startling to discover that Spaulding’s specific argument is not directed at all against objective, or monistic, idealism but against an extraordinary travesty of the theory. He conceives objective idealism as the doctrine of a One, or “extra-entity that mediates the relations between other entities;” and he has no difficulty in showing that such an ‘extra-entity,’ so far from being absolute, itself turns out to be a member of an infinite series. But this conclusion is the inevitable outcome of an obvious petitio principii. The supposedly ‘underlying one,’ whose self-contradiction is so triumphantly shown up, has never really been conceived as either absolute or as underlying. For when anything is.thought as an extra-entity it is not thought as absolute or all-including; and when anything is conceived as mediating relations, then the relations are thought of as existing outside it. In a word, Spaulding makes his point against objective idealism only by stating the doctrine so that it presupposes the existence of many entities externally related. The truly monistic conception, on the other hand, is that of a being which, so far from mediating the relations of entities outside itself relates, or unifies, its own members. And if it be objected that this is an arbitrarily conceived, a fictitious conception, the monistic personalist points once more to the empirically observed self, the unifier not only