Table Of ContentPERSONALISM AND PRACTICAL JUDGMENT
A Critique of Conceptions of Personality
Held "by Borden Parker Bowie and Edgar Sheffield Brightman
by
Merritt Bamum Queen
This dissertation has been approved for final examination
by the student's Dissertation Committee whose written ap
proval is on file in the Advanced School.
Dissertation Committee:
Professor R. Bruce Raup, Chairman
Professor John L. Childs
Professor P. Ernest Johnson
Professor Herbert W. Schneider
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University
1951
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I should like to acknowledge my sincere thanks to
all who have assisted me in any way in the writing of this
dissertation, and particularly to the following persons who
have given especial help:
The publishers who have kindly granted permission
for the use of many quotations.
The librarians who extended unusual courtesies at
Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi; at Tulane University,
New Orleans, Louisiana; at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
at Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts; and at the New
York City Methodist Historical Society as well as at Union
Theological Seminary and Columbia University.
Members of my Dissertation Committee, Professors
John L. Childs and Herbert W. Schneider, and, most of all,
Professors P. Ernest Johnson and R. Bruce Raup, who gave
unstintingly of their time and effort to guide me during
several years of research.
Members of my family, whose constant encouragement
and cooperation made the completion of this work possible:
my parents, Charles and Grace Queen; my father-in-law, Dr.
Benjamin Ernest Mitchell; and my wife, Dorothea Mitchell
Queen.
Merritt B. Queen
Southampton, Long Island
May 25, 1951
TABLE OP CONTENTS
Chapter Page
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . II
Table of C o n t e n t s .............................. ill
I. Introduction . . . . . . . 1
II. Bowne’s Conception of Personality . . . . . 15
III, Brightman*s Conception of Personality . . . . 112
IV. A Naturalistic Conception of Judgmental Method
and of Some Aspects of Personality . . . 151
V. Conclusion........................................177
Bibliography............................ 191
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTIGN
Personality is certainly a focal point in human
thinking at the middle of the twentieth century. A few sug
gestions will suffice to emphasize this fact. The gradual
development of scientific disciplines in the modern era,
beginning -with the formal science of mathematics and succes
sively leading to the more or less empirical sciences of
physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, and psychiatry, has
come to concentrate more attention and skill upon the exami
nation of personality than in any previous period of history.
The social sciences, including, most critically, anthro
pology,! have likewise increased their resources and
interest in the investigation of personality in its cor
porate expressions. Various normative and symbolical
formulations, such as types of ethics, philosophy and
theology, have defined conceptions which characteristically
extol or disparage human nature. Meanwhile, the conflicting
social and political movements in the broad arena of western
culture have released forces which within some democratic
^See J. H. Randall, Jr., "Which Are the Liberating
Arts’?" The American Scholar, 13 (Spring, 1944), pp. 135-148,
esp. p. 142, for an insightful approach to these studies.
Gf. J. H. Randall, Jr., The Nature of Naturalism," Natural
ism and the Human Spirit, Y. H. Krikorian, ed. (New Yorks
Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 373 f.
1
communities bring unprecedented security and dignity to the
individual and in authoritarian contexts confront per
sonality with barbaric threats at least as terrible as
have ever appeared in the past.
In addition to the testimony of these particular
fields, there is the general self-evident observation that
all human situations and activities, regardless of how im
personal they may appear, centrally involve persons, or more
broadly, personality. Tautologous as the last statement
admittedly is, it needs to be emphasized in many quarters;
for as always, there are countless individuals and institu
tions that, from different motives, tend to abstract these
situations and activities from their personal relationships.
Is the activity the study of a technical problem in
astronomy? Man is the astronomer. Is the situation repre
sented as a complex of determinative economic forces?
Persons largely constitute the producing, distributing and
consuming groups involved. Is the enterprise the establish
ment of some standard of true or good action? Human beings
conceive, contain and implement that standard. Physical
laws, statistical analyses, factual or normative generaliza
tions --all are the products of personality interacting with
its physical and social environment.
If, according to the foregoing brief analysis,
the central relevance of personality to all human situations
and activities may now be assumed, it becomes readily
apparent that an adequate conception of personality is one
3
of the essential instruments required for creative,
civilized living# Such a conception is of especial
importance to democratic education as an enterprise de
liberately committed to promoting such living, for, as J. L.
Childs states,
. . . the characteristic of a democratic program of
education which distinguishes it from all authoritarian
programs, is the fact that it seeks to make the growth
of each child the supreme objective.^-
But the simple fact is that there is no view of personality
which has been widely accepted as adequate in a democratic
society and hence in the educational program of such a
society. Even so creative a philosopher as John Dewey is
able to write, concerning the comments of G. A. Allport,
. . . I am obliged to admit what he says about the
absence of an adequate theory of personality. In a
desire to cut loose from the influence of older
uspiritualistic" theories about the nature of the unity
and stability of the personal self (regarded as a
peculiar kind of substantial-stuff), I failed to show
how natural conditions provide support for integrated
and potentially equilibrated personality-patterns.2
It is not difficult to account for the 3a ck of an
adequate conception of personality when one recognizes some
of the complexities involved. Therefore it may be safely
anticipated that such a conception will be developed, if at
all, only after decades, probably generations, of further
labor by countless investigators. It is with the hope of
^Education and Morals (New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1950), p. 155.
^The Philosophy of John Dewey. P. A. Schilpp,
ed. (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1939), pp. 555 f.
4.
making some slight contribution to this development that the
present work is attempted. It is based on a surmise that a
philosophy which takes personality for its governing con
ception may possibly provide insights of some relevance and
value to the task. Personalism is such a philosophy.
Personalism is a term with a confusing variety of
meanings. For convenience they may all be divided into two
categories: broadly personalis tic philosophies or
philosophical ideas, and "typical" personalism. Alterna
tive minimal definitions which leave ample room for
personalism in its broadest sense are: that all personal-
ists believe in the reality of finite persons or selves,
and that "personalism is a way of thinking that makes per
sonality the key to all philosophical problems, both about
value and about epistemology and metaphysics."^ With such
wide latitude, it is not surprising that "personalis tic"
elements are ascribed to certain thinkers of every
philosophical era and locale and of such diverse classifi
cations as monism, dualism, pluralism, idealism, realism,
rationalism, irrationalism, empiricism, theism, pantheism,
-*-A. C. Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism
(New York: Abingdon Press, 1927), pp. 67 f.
%!• S. Bright man, "Personalism," A History of
Philosophical Systems, Vergilius Ferm, ed. (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 340,
5
and. a theism.Well within these extreme limits, however,
are many basic agreements which suggest a more definite out
line and constitute “typical” personalism, although of
course it is contrary to the spirit of personalism to con
ceive of any "orthodoxy.” These agreements may be summa
rized as follows, largely according to Brightman's chapter
in A History of Philosophical Systems:2
The methodology of typical personalism is analytic-
synoptic, beginning with a personal experience as a whole,
analyzing the parts and then relating them back to the whole;
appealing to empirical coherence as the criterion of
validity and resulting in probability rather than in•
logically necessary belief or certainty.
Its epistemology, consequently, is dualis tic,
finding the source of knowledge to be a person's total
private experience, which the mind actively organizes and
interprets so as to give a coherent account of the objects
-1-Lists of these thinkers may be found in ibid.,
pp. 340-351; E. S. Brightman, “Personalism” An Encyclopedia
of Religion (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), p. 576;
R. T. Flewelling, “Personalism,” Dictionary of Philosophy,
D. D. Runes, ed., (New York: Philosophical Library, 1942),
pp. 229 f.; R. T. Flewelling, "Personalism,” Twentieth
Century Philosophy, D. D. Runes, ed. (New York: Philosophi
cal Library, 1943), pp. 323, 327t*334; A. C. Khudson, op.
clt., pp. 21-87, 428-434. Cf. Ph. Kohnstamm, "Types and
Meanings of Personalism," The Personal ist, 18 (April, 1937),
pp. 167-176; J. S. Moore, "Why and How I Am a Personalist,”
The Personalist. 12 (July, 1931), pp. 183-189; H. C. Weld,
“Some Types of Personalism in the United States," unpub
lished Ph. D. dissertation, Boston University, 1944.
2Pp. 345-351.
6
beyond itself; and the probability of this account or
hypothesis becomes subject to unending public verification
or invalidation by appeal to the total unity of personal
experience.-1-
Personalis tic metaphysics is qualitatively ideal
istic in conceiving all existence as "in, of, or for a mind
on some level"2; and quantitatively pluralistic in recog
nizing the separate existence of "many persons or selves
which are uniquely individual, private, and free"3 and
which intercommunicate and interact with each other and
with the apparently material universe, including the human
body. Personality is regarded as the uniquely satisfactory
"substance" which
"combines unity and variety, permanence and change,
causal activity and receptivity, actuality and poten
tiality, subjectivity and objectivity, mechanism and
purpose, identity and creativity."4
Its philosophy of science emphasizes certain pre-
suppostions of personality in experiment; coherence as a
method of verification; the definition of matter and energy
in terms of volition of the cosmic mind; "the system of
physical nature as an abstract and partial expression of
the total resources of the divine person";® the evidences
•^Ibid. t pp. 345 f,; Flewelling, Twentieth Century
Philosophy, p. 336.
^Brightman, A History of Philosophical Systems,
p• 346 •
3Ibid., p. 346.
4Ibid., p. 347.
5Ibid.. p. 348.
7
of holistic principles operating in various processes of
life and combining mechanism and purpose; evolutionary
and orthogenetic development as God’s method of acting;
personality as the constant medium of evolution rather than
its product; the psychology of personality in terms of "the
self psychology and the holistic methods and results of
Gestalt."1
Axiology is a central interest of typical per
sonalis ts, who find all value to be in, of, and for persons,
since "every person . . . has an intrinsic worth for which
there is no equivalent."^ Among the normative sciences, or
branches of axiology, personalis tic logic presupposes
Aristotelian, symbolic and inductive logic and especially
stresses coherence. The starting-point of metaphysics is
found in ethics, which for personalism unites the "good
will" of the intuitionists with the earnest calculation of
consequences of the utilitarians in seeking "the coherent
realization of the ideal possibilities of the self."®
Philosophy of religion is generally conceived to include
theology, both being subject to the same methods and
criteria; and v/hile most personalis ts are theists, they
divide over the issue of divine omnipotence versus God’s
finiteness. Personalis tic aesthetics is underdeveloped, but
at times it has maintained
1Ibid., p. 547.
2Ibid., p. 348.
®E. T. Ramsdellj "The Perfectionism of Personal
is tic Ethics," The Personalist, 23 (Jan., 1942), p. 46.
