The Ancient Landmarks: A Comment on Spiritualistic Materialism

by Mary Whiton Calkins

The Ancient Landmarks: A Comment on Spiritualistic Materialism

“Remove not the ancient landmark.” Proverbs, XXII: 28.

“Philonous. Tell me, Hylas, hath every one a liberty to change the current proper signification annexed to a common name in any language? For example, suppose a traveller should tell you, that in a certain country men might pass unhurt through the fire; and … you found he meant by the word fire that which others call water … Would you call this reasonable?

“Hylas. No; I should think it very absurd. Common custom is standard of propriety in language. And for any man to affect speaking improperly, is to pervert the use of speech and can never serve to a better purpose than to protract and multiply disputes where there is no difference of opinion.”

—Berkeley, Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II.

In my recent philosophical wanderings I have met a surprising number of travellers who seem to mean “by the word fire that which others call water.” I have, for example, encountered, in the successive spring numbers of the Philosophical Review, two who appear to me to play very fast and loose with the terms “spiritual” and “material.” (i) One of these, Professor Sheldon, writes in defense of what he calls “positive” or “enlightened” materialism,^[1] though he fills the greater number of his pages with “the indictment of materialism”^[2] of the popular type, the description of mind and consciousness “in terms of physical process.”^[3] In these pages Dr. Sheldon sets forth what he calls “the definite ineompatibilities between admitted facts of consciousness and … material process.”^[4] Of the specifie properties of consciousness which are incompatible with the conditions of material reality he especially stresses the following: first, the ‘presence of the past in memory”;^[5] second, the annihilation of distance, in the perception of far-away objects;^[6] third, the fact that ”in selective attention what physically is, psychically is not”;^[7] fourth, the effectiveness of the future event in purposed action;^[8] finally, the ”self-continuing” aspect of pleasure^[9] and the self-checking tendency of pain.^[10] The first three of these are “incompatibilities of cognition” from which Sheldon derives the conception of mind as “a unity both inclusive and exclusive, or preferential.” From the incompatibilities of affection–conation he argues that mind possesses “an organic systematic character that makes [it] into an independent agent.“^[11] For he rightly insists that ”there are no impersonal bits of consciousness,” that ”there is no consciousness that has not selfhood”;^[12] and he stresses over and over again “that individuality which constitutes a self.”^[13] His general conclusion is that “materialism, conceived in exclusive terms, denying unique spiritual being, is false.”^[14]

But at this point Sheldon’s argument makes a sharp turn. He reminds us that the mind “occupies space and time,” that “it acts upon the external world,” that “it resides in living organisms and extends itself far beyond the limits of those organisms, without losing its place in the latter.”^[15] The student of philosophy will recognize this as little other than Henry More’s conception of the extendedness of spirit. But Sheldon, so far from concluding that extension is spiritual, teaches explicitly that “mind is material, because it displays all the positive attributes of matter,” that while “dualism is right in declaring that mind as compared with the matter of our sense-world is unique; dualism and spiritualism are quite wrong … when they deny materiality and substantiality to mind.”^[16] And he enlarges this initial doctrine of mind as “material” by a hypothetical conception of matter in a new sense. “There might be,” he says, “a kind of body which … would be material because it offers resistance and possesses inertia’? which would yet “have one surface in two places at once”; and “there might well be atoms,” unlike those “which the evidence of sense observation leads us to believe in … equally material, because equally potent in controlling the motions of other atoms, which exercise their powers in many places at once.”^[17]

The theory thus briefly summarized is immensely significant in its stress on the substantiality and individuality of mind and in its call upon “a spiritualistic psychology” for a statement of the “precise laws” of mind.^[18] As enlightened materialism the doctrine may, to be sure, be challenged at several points. One may, for example, call attention to Sheldon’s unargued identification of the “physical” with the material^[19] and to his parallel claim of “the evidence of sense observation” for materialism.^[20] Or again, one may point out that so long as Sheldon “deliberately” neglects to take into account personalistic philosophy^[21] he can hardly argue that his ”enlightened materialism, freed from the negations … men have read into it, forms the only warrant of subtantiality to the self.”^[22] For substantiality, in the sense of persistence through change, is precisely one of the characters of the personalist’s self. But the main purpose of the present paper is neither to emphasize the significance of Sheldon’s rediscovery of mind nor to criticize his doctrine of its extendedness but simply to challenge his right to the term “materialism” as descriptive of his doctrine. For Sheldon’s conception of “the absolute reality of both matter and mind”^[23] is, as he himself sometimes recognizes,^[24] a form of dualism. And certainly a philosophy which begins by arguing the existence of unique spiritual being is not materialism in the sense which the usage of centuries has given to the word; a doctrine which “forms the only warrant of substantiality to the self” is neither “positive” nor “enlightened” materialism. Anybody with a vestige of respect for “ancient landmarks” in language will protest to the end against this “perversion of the use of speech.”

(ii) Professor Sheldon, as has appeared, seeks to materialize the mind. The aim of Professor Loewenberg is, on the contrary, to spiritualize matter.^[25] This feat he readily accomplishes by the simple device, on which his whole argument turns, of identifying the “spiritual” with the “valued,” or “significant.” Thus he refers to “meaning, significance, dignity, rationality—in short, spirituality”^[26] and he explicitly uses ”spirituality” as synonym for ”congruity with ideals.”^[27] Once this meaning is attached to the term, Loewenberg brilliantly demonstrates that mind may be ”essentially unspiritual”^[28] and that “matter is capable of sublimation as much as is mind.”^[29] For on the one hand, mind may be, as Schopenhauer describes it, ”blind, foolish, capricious, sordid and miserable”;^[30] on the other hand, materialism is ”accepted by its votaries” as satisfying both the spiritual ”sentiment of rationality”^[31] and ”the quest for unity … behind and beyond the superficial medley and flow of things.”^[32]

I have no quarrel with these conclusions. Like all technically trained contemporary ”idealists,” I do not &ream of denying either the ”speculative possibility” of a world that is ”through and through mental, but … at variance with our ideals”^[33] or the fact that materialism may well satisfy genuine ”human needs” of those who hold it. Nor am I concerned with the virtual implications of Dr. Loewenberg’s closing paragraphs: that philosophy reduces to a form of differential psychology or to biography,^[34] that ”the assertions of philosophy” are essentially ”expressions of conflicting motives and needs” and that *the strife of rival theories in philosophy is a tragic struggle not of competing … hypotheses but of incompatible passions and values.”^[35] My main purpose is, once more, to protest against the wresting of a word from its time-honored meaning. The term ”spiritual,” whatever the divagations in the use of it, has always carried a meaning directly opposed to that of ”material.” Many idealists, doubtless, before and after and including Leibniz and Berkeley, have combined with a spiritualistic doctrine an uncritical optimism; but, however unfounded their inference from the mental nature of the world to its value, they have not (to my knowledge) confounded the meaning of the term ”spiritual” with that of “valued,” or ”significant.” ”Spiritual” means simply ”pertaining to spirit.” The ambiguity in the use of the term is due mainly to the diverse tendencies now to identify ”spirit” (after Berkeley’s fashion)^[36] with “mind,” “soul,” and ”self,” again to limit the meaning of spirit and to denote by the word, “mind (or self) in its higher reaches.” In either of these uses, however, the spiritual is roughly speaking the personal and, as such, sharply distinguished from the material.^[37] Dr. Loewenberg’s essential conclusions are, of course, unaffected by this criticism of his use of terms. But, stripped of its paradoxical and unhistorical identification of “spiritual” and “material,” this portion of his paper, it would seem, reduces to a dispute ”where there is no difference of opinion.”

Mary Whiton Calkins.

Wellesley College.

1. ”The Soul and Matter,” by W. H. Sheldon. Read as the President’s Address at the December, 1921, meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division). Philosophical Review, 1922, XXXI, pp. 103–134.
2. Ibid., p. 110².
3. Ibid. p. 109³.
4. Pp. 128² et al.
5. Pp. 110² f.
6. Pp. 112² f.
7. P. 117³.
8. P. 118.
9. P. 124².
10. P. 126³.
11. P. 128³.
12. P. 128².
13. P. 116².
14. P. 128⁴. Cf. p. 182¹.
15. P. 132¹.
16. P. 132¹.
17. Pp. 130²–131.
18. Op. cit., p. 133.
19. Pp. 131¹ et al.
20. P. 131¹, Cf. p. 133² et al.
21. P. 106³.
22. P. 129¹. Italics mine.
23. P. 133².
24. P. 129¹.
25. Cf. J. Loewenberg, “The Apotheosis of Mind in Modern Idealism,” Philosophical Review, 1922, XXXI, pp. 215 ff.
26. Op. cit., p. 219.
27. Op. cit., p. 218¹. Cf. pp. 217², 230.
28. P. 219 et al.
29. P. 229.
30. P. 219.
31. P. 229.
32. Pp. 230²–231.
33. P. 218.
34. This is the writer's inference, not a statement of Loewenberg himself.
35. P. 236.
36. Cf. Principles of Human Knowledge, II.
37. Since Hume wrote, the term “spiritual” has served also to differentiate the personalistic from the ideistic form of idealism.