Continuation. The Idealist’s Dispute with the Dualist. Truth-Drive and Approval-Drive.

Abstract

In the last lecture, I attempted to clear up the dispute between the spiritualists and the dualists, and to show you the subtle distinction on which it ultimately turns. The supporters of idealism take all of the phenomena of our senses for accidents of the human mind, and deny that a material prototype in which these accidents inhere as qualities is to be found outside the mind. By contrast, the dualist says: in these sensory appearances, which you call accidents of the soul, I find so much agreement among different kinds of senses and between one human being and another, indeed, even between human beings and animals, that I consider myself justified in positing the ground of this agreement not in me myself but instead in something that is to be found outside of me. As accidents in me, sensory phenomena are depictions of this something outside of me and, like all depictions made from a certain point of view, they have, to be sure, some perspectival aspect, but are no less true on account of this. The material prototype contains the ground of the truth and agreement of all these depictions. It arouses in us the representation of extension, movement, figure, impenetrability, and so forth. Therefore, this prototype is itself something extended, moveable, impenetrable, and assumes certain shapes.