Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The New Rationalism and Objective Idealism (The Philosophical Review, 1919-11-01).pdf/8

№ &#93; of its manifold experiences, of its past and its present but of the physical and social world which it systematizes and orders.

It may profitably be noted, in conclusion, that the objective idealist finds in Spaulding’s illuminating doctrine of “the whole which has characteristics qualitatively different from the characteristics of the parts” a conception readily adapted to the description of the self, whether partial ‘or absolute. According to the personalist, relating is, in truth, a specific characteristic of those fundamentally real ‘wholes,’ or complex entities, known as selves, or egos. , on the other hand, are cases of relating (relatings) when regarded, for practical or methodological purposes, independent of the self or selves whom they characterize. Thus conceived, as readily as if they were ‘external,’ relations may in truth become subject matter of the ‘new logic.’ .

 REJOINDER.

Tue editor having given me the opportunity of examining Miss Calkins’s manuscript, I offer the following comments and questions. In my reply I hall refer by number to Miss Calkins’s successive paragraphs.

I. I do not say (The New Rationalism, p. 244) that “positivism contradicts itself in that it can not define impressions and ideas ex- cept in terms of the selves and physical objects whose existence it denies.” The contradiction consists, rather, in denying, and yet in using, universals.

II. The justification of my recognizing only two major types of idealism, namely, subjective and objective, and of my placing Miss Calkins’s peculiar type under the second of these, is to be found in her own statement, Persistent Problems, (pp. 418-90), that “Ultimate reality is an absolute. .. the universe is self.” If there is a third type that is coérdinate with these two, and not either a species or a composite of the two, I shall be pleased to have such a type defined.

2. I do not deny, as Miss Calkins seemingly would have me, per- sonalities, but I do deny that all mental entities are personal. Per- sonality—for me—is a specific organization of mental entities. I should say that there is empirical evidence of the presence of mental processes and the absence of personality (a) in many lower organisms,