Beatrice H. Zedler. Biography

BEATRICE H. ZEDLER. BIOGRAPHY

Mary Whiton Calkins, philosopher and psychologist, was the first woman to be elected president of the American Philosophical Association. She lived during “the golden age” of American philosophy and studied under two of the classic American philosophers, William James and Josiah Royce. Though she was influenced by both of these teachers, her philosophy has been described as a continuation and development of Royce’s idealism.1 Yet it also takes account of her own empirical knowledge of psychology.

Since she achieved distinction in two professional fields, we shall consider her achievements in both of these fields. We shall look first at the main facts of her life, then at her work in psychology, and finally at her work in philosophy.

I.  BIOGRAPHY

Mary Whiton Calkins was born on March 30, 1863 in Hartford, Connecticut. She was the oldest of the five children of Wolcott Calkins and Charlotte Whiton Calkins. She spent her childhood in Buffalo, New York, where her father was a minister at a Presbyterian church. In 1880 her father became pastor of a Congregational church in Newton, Massachusetts, which was to be her home for the rest of her life.2

After graduating from the Newton High School, she entered Smith College with sophomore standing in the fall of 1882. But the next year, after the death of her sister Maud, she stayed at home, studying Greek and tutoring two of her younger brothers. She returned to Smith College with senior standing in the fall of 1884 and graduated with the class of 1885. In 1886, while she was on a trip to Europe with her family, Miss Calkins met an instructor from Vassar College named Abby Leach, with

A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, 103-123.

© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

whom she travelled first to Italy and then to Greece, to visit places of historical interest.

In September of 1887 she began teaching in the Greek Department at Wellesley College. After receiving an M.A. from Smith College in 1888, and after being invited to teach psychology at Wellesley, she studied psychology at Clark University and psychology and philosophy at Harvard University. Although she completed all the work for a Harvard Ph.D. and though William James said her oral examination ranked above any he had previously heard, the Harvard Corporation refused to grant her the degree because Harvard University did not give degrees to women. In 1902 Radcliffe College offered her a doctor’s degree as a substitute for the Harvard degree, but she declined because her work had been done at Harvard, not at Radcliffe. She was awarded the honorary doctoral degrees: Doctor of Letters from Columbia University in 1909, and Doctor of Laws from Smith College in 1910.

While continuing her interest in the field of psychology, she gradu-ally devoted more of her time to the studying, teaching, and writing of philosophy. She was honored by her peers in both fields. In 1905 she became the first woman president of the American Psychological Association, and in 1918 she served as the first woman president of the American Philosophical Association. She was given the title of Research Professor when she retired from Wellesley College in June, 1929.

She had enjoyed good health for most of her life, but after an oper-ation in November, 1929, she learned that she was incurably ill. She died three months later on February 26, 1930. A memorial service was held at the Wellesley College Chapel on April 13, 1930.3

Since she is remembered for her achievements in two fields, we shall take note of her work in each of those fields. We shall begin with her work in psychology.

II. PSYCHOLOGY

1. Education, Contributions, and Publications in the Field of Psychology

Psychology was not Mary Calkins’ first choice of a field of spe-cialization. She had been teaching Greek and she liked philosophy, but when she was invited to prepare herself to teach psychology at 

Wellesley College, she accepted the invitation and sought the best possible preparation.

At that time the opportunities for a woman to do graduate work in psychology were limited, but she received permission to attend a seminar given by William James at Harvard. She says:

I began the serious study of psychology with William James. Most unhappily for them and most fortunately for me the other members of his seminary in psychology dropped away in the early weeks of the fall of 1890; and James and I were left... quite literally at either side of a library fire. The Principles of Psychology was warm from the press; and my absorbed study of those brilliant, erudite, and provocative volumes, as interpreted by their writer, was my intro-duction to psychology.4

During the fall of 1890 she also began work in experimental psy-chology under the guidance of Dr. Edmund Sanford, a teacher at Clark University, and for parts of three years, beginning in the Fall of 1892 she worked in the Harvard Psychology Laboratory under the direction of Hugo Munsterberg who had recently come to Harvard from Freiburg. These three men, James, Sanford, and Munsterberg, she later referred to as her “great teachers in psychology.”5

During the 1891-1892 school year she introduced a new course in psychology at Wellesley and, with Dr. Sanford’s help, she established a psychology laboratory at the college, one of the earliest psychology laboratories in the country and the first one in any college for women.6

In 1892 she also began her work as a publishing scholar. In the field of psychology she has published four books and more than sixty articles. Topics treated in her articles include association, dreams, mental forms, sensation, elements of conscious complexes, emotions, experimental psychology at Wellesley College, genetic and comparative psychology, structural and functional psychology, behaviorism, the Gestalt theory, self in psychoanalytic theory.7

Her books in the field of psychology include Association: An Essay Analytic and Experimental (1896) (her doctoral thesis); An Introduction to Psychology (first published in 1901); a summary of the teaching of the Introduction which she wrote in German and published under the title: Der Doppelte Standpunkt in der Psychologie (1905); and A First Book in Psychology (first published in 1909). Of her works in psychology the two textbooks in English were the most widely known. There were 

two editions of An Introduction to Psychology and four editions of A First Book in Psychology.8

In both psychology textbooks Calkins discusses the nature and methods of psychology, sensation, perception, imagination, attention, association, memory, recognition, thought (conception, judgment and reasoning), emotion, will and belief, religious consciousness, and abnormal psychology. But the order of topics is different in the two works, and Calkins herself says that A First Book in Psychology diverges most strikingly from the earlier work by its abandonment of the “duplex conception of psychology” in favor of a “single-track self-psychology.”9 In the “duplex approach” of the Introduction to Psychology she had treated psychology both as a science of ideas and as a science of selves, but in A First Book in Psychology she presents what she regards as a simpler, more direct and effective treatment of psychology as a study of conscious selves.10

2. What Psychology Is and Is Not

In both of her books and in many of her articles she is concerned with the question: What is psychology?

The early history of psychology is intertwined with the history of philosophy, but whatever differences early 20th century psychologists may have had among themselves they maintained that psychology is not a subdivision of philosophy. Calkins agreed with her fellow psy-chologists that their field is a science, “a systematic study of facts of phenomena; that is, of limited or partial realities, as related to each other without reference to a more fundamental reality.”11 Unlike philosophy, psychology does not try to study the whole of reality nor should it try to relate phenomena to ultimate reality.

Some psychologists have treated their science as a branch of physi-ology; some as a science of ideas; some as a science of mental functions. While trying to be as conciliatory as possible to each of these views Calkins does not think that psychology can be reduced to any one of them. Those who would reduce psychology to physiology hold that consciousness literally consists in bodily reactions. While granting that psychology rightly attempts to ascertain the bodily conditions for con-sciousness, she says that “it does not thereby lose its own identity as a study of conscious phenomena.”12

She agrees that psychology can be studied as “science of ideas;” that is, it can treat “of the contents-of-consciousness as such, of psychic 

phenomena, considered in abstraction from... any self.”13 This was indeed one of the two approaches she has taken in her Introduction to Psychology, but she says that this idea-psychology, by itself, is incomplete:

If I conceive psychology as science of ideas I inevitably raise the scientifically relevant question: Whose idea? and then arbitrarily refuse to answer my own question. In other words, the “idea” is immediately experienced as idea of self.... To refuse to deal with this self is indeed theoretically possible, but is a needlessly abstract, an artificial, an incomplete procedure.14

She has a similar reaction to the view of psychology as science of mental functions or activities. This, too, she thinks turns out to be a needlessly abstract and inadequate view since “the conception of mental activity requires the conception of a mental actor.”15 A science of mental functions must be fundamentally a science of the functioning self.

She points out that there is never perception without a somebody who perceives, and there never is thinking unless some one thinks. And this somebody is a self. For Mary Galkins psychology is therefore properly defined as “science of the self in relation to, or conscious of, its environment.”16 She devoted much of her time to explaining and defending her “self-psychology,” which she refers to as “a form of intro- spectionist psychology.”17

She acknowledges that the methods of psychology are in general the methods of every science: description (analysis and classification) and explanation. But in addition she stresses that psychology has its own special method: introspection, which observes not the common, independent, externalized facts of the physical sciences, but inner facts. In this emphasis she was influenced by her teacher, William James, whom she quotes as saying in his Principles of Psychology: “Introspec-tive observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always....”18

3. The Self and Its Relation to Soul and to Body

While holding that through introspection we know the self, Miss Calkins admits that the self-psychologist cannot directly dispute the statement of the person who asserts that he never finds a self. But she points out that Hume’s famous arguments are incapable of disproving the 

existence of a self and that there is a naive inconsistency in the asser-tion of anyone who says, “I find no self.” She asks:

For who... is this I which denies that it observed an I? In a word, I accuse my critic of assuming, in almost every paragraph, the exis-tence of the very self whom he disbars.19

And elsewhere she reiterates that all the critics of her self-psychology imply a self “in their unguarded moments and paragraphs.”20

The self that she finds through introspection cannot, strictly speaking, be defined, but it can be described. It has the following characteristics or properties, all of which she is directly aware of:

a) It is relatively persistent (“I am in some sense the same as my child-hood self”);

b) It is changing being (“I the adult self differ from that ten-year old”);

c)  It is complex (“I am a perceiving, remembering, feeling, willing self.”);

d) It is a unique irreplaceable self (“I am I and you are you. No one, however similar, can take the place of you or of me”);

e)  It is related to objects, both personal and impersonal.21

Though Calkins intends to be speaking here as a psychologist, limiting her account of the self to what is immediately experienced, the philoso-pher might wonder: What is the relation of this self to the soul? And what is its relation to body?

Calkins carefully distinguishes between the psychologist’s self and the philosopher’s soul and regrets the confusion that results from assuming that they are identical. In “Self and Soul” she says that the traditional doctrine of the soul as simple spiritual substance suffers from two significant defects: (1) it conceives soul after a material analogy (since in the most primitive belief, soul was merely a shadowy sort of body) or as endowed with mere negations of bodily characteristics (such as wnextended, mdivisible); and (2) it lacks the concrete characteristics of the modern concept of self and leaves soul-substance as an empty abstraction.22

What especially concerned Miss Calkins was that some psycholo-gists refused to acknowledge the existence of the self because they had mistakenly identified it with the notion of soul which they could not accept. In “The Case of Self against the Soul” she notes that in the history 

of philosophy soul has had three functions: biological (or vitalistic), metaphysical, and psychological. That is, it has been regarded as the source or explanation of life; as a simple, immaterial substance; and as a source of consciousness. But modern biologists do not think that soul is necessary to account for life-functions, and modern philosophers and psychologists regard the notion of soul as simple spiritual substance as a myth or abstraction. Because the notion of the self, that is, the conscious factor, has been associated with the other two functions which in our time have lost credibility, the self also has been rejected.

Calkins protests against the expulsion of self along with the soul. She seems to be saying: Though you may throw out the soul with its dubiously inferred characteristics, do not throw out the conscious self, which is directly experienced. Self is not soul.23

But one may also wonder: “How is this conscious self related to body?” In one of her articles she asks: “Is the self body?” and gives a negative answer. The self is not body nor is the body part of the self. Some psychologists regard the self as a psychophysical organism, a psycho-soma or conscious body or mind-in-body or a mind-and-body complex, with the body definitely constituting part of the self. But she thinks this view implies that every function would have to be psycho-physical and thus it would fail to account for the admitted distinction of functions that are just psychical (conscious functions) and those that are just physical (such as digestion and circulation). Instead of insisting on a unity of mind and body she finds it simpler and more logical to admit the existence of a psychical functioner in close relation to a physical functioner.24

One psychologist attributed to Mary Calkins the view that self is mind- without-body, self unrelated to body, or pure disembodied spirit, but she says that she never held or meant to teach such a view. Her view is that self is distinct from body but related to it. Its varying experiences may in part be explained by reference to nerve excitations, to muscular contractions, and to organic accommodations.25 There are certain physical facts which regularly precede or accompany certain facts of consciousness, but the reference to physical facts is subsidiary to the psychologist’s description of conscious experience, since the self does not consist in body. It is not made up of body-and-mind. Rather, she says that self has body.26

Whatever questions there might be about the precise relation of body to self in her psychology, she was a leading exponent of self-psychology. In commenting on her work, one critic said: 

Her two books in the field, An Introduction to Psychology (1901) and A First Book in Psychology (1909) are, it is true, dominated by her special point of view, but are nevertheless comprehensive and authoritative works on psychology as a whole, and take careful account of the important experimental work in all fields up to the date of their publication.27

The same critic pointed out that although her self-psychology received a certain amount of support, on the whole it remained a minority opinion among psychologists. But she thought that certain tendencies in psychology were moving in the direction of her view.28 Between 1912 and 1927 she wrote four articles under the title, “The Self in Recent Psychology.” In the fourth of these papers (published in April 1927) she was happy to observe that the self, which had been under grave suspicion among orthodox scientists fifteen years earlier had “become a fairly respectable member of psychological society.”29

In 1927 she was invited to speak to the British Psychological Association on her self-psychology and in 1928 she was made an honorary member of that association which had never before conferred such an honor on a woman.30

4. The Distinction and Relation between Psychology and Philosophy

Although Mary Calkins kept up with developments in the field of psy-chology throughout her life, during the latter half of her career she concentrated more fully on philosophy. She was well aware of the dif-ferences between the two fields. She had said that “the psychologist as such accepts the self as object of introspection, raising no questions about its ultimate reality, whereas the philosopher must attempt to settle the question of the place of the self in the whole scheme of things.”31 But this distinction also suggests that the data of psychology can be helpful to the philosopher. As she pointed out:

... the philosopher should realize that preliminary to his meta-physical treatment is the scientific observation and analysis of the facts... the philosopher’s self, whatever else it is, is at its core, the immediately realized self of the psychologist.32

She maintained that “the scientific study of selves is consistent with any form of philosophy,”33 but to the reader her self-psychology may seem especially consistent with her philosophy of personal idealism. 

III. PHILOSOPHY

1. Education, Contributions, and Publications in Philosophy

Mary Calkins showed some interest in philosophy when she was a student at Newton High School. She chose as the subject of her graduation essay: “The Apology Which Plato Should Have Written: A Vindication of the Character of Xantippe.” At Smith College she majored in classics and philosophy. She was later to acknowledge her indebtedness to her first instructors in philosophy, Professor Charles E. Garman who introduced her to idealism, and Professor Harry N. Gardiner, under whom she studied Hume and Kant. At Harvard she studied metaphysics with Josiah Royce and came to be known as “the most prominent pupil of Royce.”34 At Wellesley College, as we have seen, she was first a teacher of Greek and then a teacher of psychology, but her freshman Greek course included the study of Plato’s Apology and Crito, and in 1888 she mentioned her deep interest in philosophy to Mary S. Case, a teacher of philosophy at Wellesley. After another person who was trained in experimental psychology joined the Wellesley faculty, Mary Calkins was able to devote more time to philosophy.35 The sequence of titles that she held at Wellesley College is at once a summary of her career and of her professional interests. After serving as tutor and instructor in Greek from 1887 to 1890, she held the following titles:

-   Instructor in Psychology, 1890-1896;

-   Associate Professor of Psychology, 1894-1896;

-   Associate Professor of Psychology and Philosophy, 1896-1898;

-   Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, 1898-1929;

-   Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, 1929-1930.36

The 1898 title, by mentioning philosophy first, would seem to be a public statement about her primary field of interest.

She had first taught the course in modern philosophy in 1895-1896, and through the years this course was elected by many of the best students in the college. Miss Case of the philosophy department said of it:

I... regard that course, with its deep and lasting influence upon hundreds of our alumnae, as her chief monument.37

Her best known philosophical book, which between 1907 and 1936 appeared in five editions reflects her interest in both modern philos- 

ophy and in metaphysics. Its full title was: The Persistent Problems of Philosophy: An Introduction to Metaphysics through the Study of Modern Systems. The modern systems she discusses are those of Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and some contemporary philosophers. She tries to give a fair and accurate account of their views, based on their texts, and at the same time to evaluate them from the standpoint of her own personal idealism. In commenting on her work, E. S. Brightman has said:

Few historians of philosophy have ventured to combine, as does she, objective exposition with critical evaluation. Her masterpiece, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (1907), is a remarkable combina-tion of these two factors... it must be conceded that Miss Calkins has shown unusual skill in making her criticisms of the various thinkers grow up out of the internal implications of the systems with which she is concerned, rather than applying any external a priori standards of evaluation...,38

She also revised a translation of La Mettrie’s Man a Machine; edited some of the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Berkeley; and pub-lished an ethics textbook entitled The Good Man and the Good.39 She wrote and published more than thirty philosophical articles on such subjects as time, idealism and realism, soul and self, the personalistic conception of nature, the basis of objective judgments in subjective ethics, Kant’s doctrine of knowledge, Hegelian categories, Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Bergson as a personalist, Royce’s philosophy and Christian theism. She also wrote a statement of her own philosophical credo, which can serve as a guide to her main philosophical ideas.

2. Main Philosophical Ideas

At the beginning of “The Philosophical Credo of an Absolutistic Personalist” Mary Calkins clearly identifies philosophy with metaphysics. By metaphysics she means “the attempt, by reasoning, to know what is ultimately real.”40 Her philosophical credo consists of the following four articles:

1) “The universe contains distinctively mental realities; it may or may not also contain non-mental entities, but in any case irreducibly mental realities exist” 

2) “The second article... embodies the conviction that mental reali-ties are ultimately personal, that the mental phenomena which I directly observe are not percepts, thoughts, emotions, and volitions, in unending succession, but rather perceiving, thinking, feeling, and willing self or selves.”

3).  . the universe is through and through mental in character,...

all that is real is ultimately mental, and accordingly personal in nature.”

4) “... the universe literally is one all-including (and accordingly complete) self of which all the lesser selves are genuine and iden-tical parts or members.”41

If we see what she meant by each of these four articles, we may be able to understand in what sense she was an idealist, a personal idealist, and an absolutistic personalist (or personalistic absolutist).

In holding that mental realities exist, she was associating herself not only with idealists but also with the majority of philosophers. The only metaphysical doctrine inconsistent with the first article of her creed is materialism, which reduces the mental to the non-mental. Her reason for asserting the existence of mental reality if that she directly experiences it and realizes that it is somehow different from what she observes as physical reality.42

With the second article of her creed, which states that mental realities are personal or that “every mental existent is either a self or a part, phase, aspect, or process of a self,”43 she separates herself from Hume. She holds with psychologist William McDougall that one cannot find an idea or sensation lying about loose in the world any more than one can find a falling or a moving without something that falls or moves. She re-affirms in this philosophical context the insight gained in her psy-chology, that is, that she directly experiences the self as a complex, unique, persistent yet changing entity, conscious of an environment.44

With her third step, a step into idealism, she moves beyond many philosophers who have so far agreed with her, for here she maintains that all that is real is ultimately mental, and accordingly, personal in nature. The main question at issue here concerns the nature of the physical world. How can we conceive of rocks and dandelions as mental, and even if that is possible, how would we account for the experienced distinction between physical objects and conscious selves? The idealism of Berkeley would try to answer these questions by reducing the physical world to a system of ideas, but this would be a return to an impersonal idealism. 

She prefers the position of Leibniz and Royce who conceived of the physical world as made up of selves, though of an extra-human type. Influenced by Leibniz’s doctrine of bare simple monads (as distinguished from his rational monads), Miss Calkins conceived the conscious selves that constitute the infra-human world as being like herself in her “inattentive, dazed, inactive, sleepy states.”45 Since they are at a low level of consciousness, there seems no hope of getting them to talk to us, but she would explain the difference between such physical objects and persons not by saying that persons are conscious and things are not conscious, but by using Royce’s distinction between communicative and uncommunicative selves. She holds that a non-human or infra-human being is still a self, though incommunicative.46

She insists that her personalistic nature philosophy should not be regarded as a return to a pre-scientific animism. She is not personifying trees and rivers. She does not interpret every recurring sense- complex as an individual self (for example, a tree-self or a pebble-self); but, more likely as a part or aspect of a non-human self or group of such selves. She says that the modern personalist emphasizes the differences between selves of different levels and does not claim to have a definite conception of any selves with whom he has no communication.47

But how, from her starting point, can she know that any other selves, whether human or non-human exist? She says that she bases her idealism on Berkeley’s fundamental position: “that what any man unchallengeably knows... is himself and his experiencing.” How then can one get beyond oneself and one’s own ideas to a certainly of the existence of another self? Her way of escaping solipsism is by arguing:

In that direct experience of myself which is, as yet, the only imme-diate certainly I have admitted, I am aware of myself as, at many points involuntarily limited, thwarted, and hampered. But this direct awareness of myself as involuntarily limited involves and includes the direct consciousness of something which-is-in-some-sense-outside-me.48

She suggests that the two seemingly contradictory assertions, that she is conscious (1) of limit, but also (2) of somewhat-beyond-the-limit, are reconcilable only if this “somewhat-other” is conceived as a greater self of which she is a part. If this be true, then in fully knowing herself, she knows the nature of that greater including self.49

This reasoning leads to the fourth article of her philosophical credo: 

that the universe literally is one all-including (and accordingly complete) self of which all the lesser selves are parts or members. In this view each entity constitutes a part of an ultimately all-including being, the Absolute. The main philosophical influence for her view of the Absolute was Josiah Royce, and like him she tries to clarify both the concept of the Absolute and the relation of persons and lesser selves to that Absolute.50

In describing the Absolute Self, she explains first what is meant by the Absolute as absolute and secondly, what is meant by the Absolute as self. Insofar as the Absolute Self is absolute, it is all-including. She says:

... no shred of reality, however trivial,... however base, can be outside it. There can be no lazy motion of a moth’s wing, no whirl of dust along the highway, no stab of joy, or throb of pain, or groping question which can fall outside the Absolute, the all-including being.51

By Absolute Self as absolute she also means “a One or unique Whole of parts, not a sum of ultimately independent entities.” Just as a circle is not an aggregate of its sectors but defines them, “so the Absolute deter-mines the nature of the many included within it.”52

Insofar as the Absolute Person is a self, it is a conscious being that perceives, thinks, feels, and wills. Although “absolute” seems to imply “unlimited,” and “person” implies limitation, she sees no contradiction in the notion of an Absolute Person since she means by absolute not “unlimited,” but “self-limited,” that is, limited-by-nothing-external-to- itself.

But it is more difficult to explain how the Absolute can share in some of our human experiences, such as our hearing and smelling, our grieving and our yearning, and our doing of moral evil. She thinks that we must attribute sense experiences to the Absolute, but she regards him as creating, not passively receiving these experiences. She also thinks that he must experience our emotions for, in Royce’s words: “Unless the Absolute knows what we know when we endure and wait, when we love and struggle, when we long and suffer, the Absolute in so far is less and not more than we are.” But she follows Royce in holding that though the Absolute Person shares, he also transcends the experience of the individual selves, as a parent may feel a child’s grief and yet also see the grievous happening as a factor in a larger satisfying situation.53 In a somewhat similar way - though she admits that this is 

harder to see, the Absolute shares the evil of the partial included selves, but he also transcends it since evil here is only a subordinate element in a wider total good, “as a chord which, taken by itself, is a discord, may yet form part of a larger harmony.”54

The relation of finite selves to the Absolute Self is not easy to explain. One might well wonder: How is the Absolute absolute if he includes finite selves? And how do the finite selves retain their individuality if they exist merely as manifestations of an including absolute self? To the first question Calkins would say again that the Absolute is not an aggregate, a sum total of separate independent finite selves, but One Whole which determines the nature of its many included parts.55 To show how that One can keep its unity while still including many, she uses an analogy from our human experience. Each one of us experiences himself or herself as a hierarchy of partial selves: a reasoning and impulsive self, a conscientious and reckless self, a business-like and a speculative self, yet we recognize that no one of these conflicting selves, but the whole of which they are parts constitutes the human me\ so similarly all the finite selves may be parts of the One Absolute Self.56

To understand how the finite selves can retain their individuality we must be aware that the Absolute is not only a thinking self, but a willing self, and that will, “the supreme, assertive attitude,” is “the basal relation of Absolute to partial self.”57 The Absolute is the cause of finite realities which exist as his purposes, and these purposes can be expressed both through non-human selves and through human selves.58 Since each individual represents a different purpose of the Absolute Self, the existence of distinct individuals is not merely reconcilable with the Absolute but essential to him. Calkins tries to assure us that our human individuality will be maintained when she says:

You and I, so far from being swallowed up in the absolute self, so far from being lost or engulfed in the ultimate I, find the guarantee of our individual reality precisely herein that we are essential and unique expressions of this absolute self...,59

To summarize Miss Calkins’ philosophical creed we can say that she conceived the universe as not merely mental but personal, that is as constituted of selves of varying levels or grades of personality, existing as parts or members of the One Absolute Self. This metaphysical position of absolutistic personalism or monistic personal idealism also had implications for other areas of philosophy. 

3. Ethics and Other Philosophical Areas

Implied in Miss Calkins’ metaphysics is a philosophy of nature, a phi-losophy of God, a theory of knowledge, and, taken together with her self-psychology, a philosophy of human nature. Each of these could well be the subject of a long, separate study, as could her work in the history of philosophy as manifested in some of her articles, in her editions of modern philosophers, and in her book, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy.

But in our limited account, we must also take note of her interest in ethics, as reflected in her book, The Good Man and the Good. Ethics, for Miss Calkins, was a division of psychology, yet it also was linked to metaphysics. She thought that a complete metaphysics always must concern itself with the facts of ethics, that is, “the philosopher must rightly know the moral self and his object, the good, in their relation to the rest of the universe.”60 Her purpose in her ethics textbook is to present not a science of abstractions, but a study of live men.61

The title of the book is a concise statement of its contents. Calkins begins by trying to state what a good man is (namely, one who wills the good); then she considers what the good is; and in the last few chapters she discusses how a person becomes good.

Though her description of the good as that which is willed for its own sake echoes Aristotle, its identification with the universal community of selves comes from Royce’s discussion of the Great Society and the philosophy of loyalty. For Calkins, as for Royce, the good man is he who is loyal to the universe of selves of which he himself is a member. This view overcomes the opposition between egoism and altruism since the good man is indeed loyal to himself, but to himself not in isolation from, but as related to the Great Community of which he is an organic part.62

Since she agrees with Aristotle that we study ethics not primarily to know the good, but in order to become good, she moves on to a dis-cussion of good habits or virtues, linking her comments to what she has learned in psychology about instincts. She defines a virtue as “a habit of will through which a man controls his instinctive tendencies in such wise that he furthers the chief good.”63 Like Aristotle she holds that a virtue is a mean, a balance between two opposing vices, but she includes some new applications of that teaching in her discussion, for example, of the conformer and the non-conformer, of the controlled pugnacity of the militant man, and of justice in relation to the question about the 

existence of an inherent individual right to private property. On this last point her own view is that as a member of the Great Society the just man must look upon himself as the steward, not the ultimate owner of property.64

In stressing that each person is a member of a community of selves and in speaking, in the last chapter of the relation of the universe of selves to God, she reiterates the theme of her metaphysical creed. In the ethical context, too, God is the Greater Self who includes yet transcends the universe of selves. She links this doctrine to the Christian teaching that God is the father of men and infers that the universal community of selves thus becomes the family or the kingdom of God.65

She had planned to write a book showing the integration of her phi-losophy and her religion, but though she did not live long enough to carry out this plan her brother tells us that she had worked out “a perfect synthesis between the intellectual framework of her mental world and the essence of the Christian faith.”66

It seems appropriate to speak of one more topic in this introduction of her thought. Considering the fact that she was denied a Ph.D. by Harvard University solely because she was a woman, one might wonder whether she developed a philosophy of feminism. Although she mentions that the Harvard Corporation had not approved the recommendation of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology to grant her a doctor’s degree and though, as a matter of principle, she politely but firmly refused a Radcliffe degree as a substitute, she was not bitter about her Harvard experience. She wrote:

My natural regret at the action of the Corporation has never clouded my gratitude for the incomparably greater boon which they granted me - that of working in the seminaries and the laboratory of the great Harvard teachers.67

She was, however, firmly opposed to the view that there are inherent differences between the minds of men and women. As a consequence she opposed denying women the right to vote and she also opposed establishing a distinctive curriculum for a woman’s college. “Is it not as futile,” she asked, “to differentiate feminine from masculine studies as to distinguish between women’s and men’s foods?”68 Against the psychologist, Joseph Jastrow, she held that the question of any inherent essential differences between the masculine and feminine mind cannot be settled by psychological investigations because of our inability to eliminate 

the effect of environment. In pointing out that the differences in the training of men and women begin with the earliest months of infancy and continue throughout life, she implied that nurture, rather than nature, may account for any apparent mental differences between the sexes.69

Most of her effort, however, was spent not in arguing for women’s intellectual competence, but in quietly revealing it through teaching women students at Wellesley and through her own thoughtful, scholarly writing in two professional fields.

IV. CONCLUSION

Mary Calkins was a steadfast defender of idealism. She will be partic-ularly remembered for her special combination of personal idealism and absolute idealism. But though she wrote in a clear and orderly way, some readers have not been wholly convinced by her views. They have wondered, for example: How can things in the world of nature be “selves” even if they are described as sluggish, uncommunicative selves? And if finite selves are parts of the One Absolute Self, has she really succeeded in showing both how they retain their individuality and how the Absolute remains absolute?

Idealism, which had been a leading movement in American thought in the 19th century, was challenged by realism and pragmatism in the 20th century. Writing in 1925 Miss Calkins characterized the 20th century in philosophy as an age of revolt, and she patiently tried to answer the criticisms of what was termed “anti-empirical rationalism,” “unscientific idealism,” or “rigid absolutism.”70 Her explanations clarified the issues, provided a counterbalance to the new tendencies, and still constitute a key source of information on the philosophical history of the time.

Her work was appreciated by Edgar S. Brightman, the personalist philosopher who spoke at her memorial service; by her peers at the American Philosophical Association who remembered her as “an erudite scholar, a skillful teacher, an incisive thinker, a noble woman;” and by her former students who thought that her great and permanent gift to them was a reverence for personality.71

The unifying theme of Mary Whiton Calkins’ work as well summa-rized by the colleague who said:

... that personalism should prevail both in psychology and in phi-losophy was her most passionate interest as a scholar and as a teacher.72 6. L. Susan Stebbing (1885-1943)