‘The full acceptance of process gets us further and further away from the old controversies. The thought I have been trying to indicate is neither conventional idealism nor realism. It is neither mechanism nor vitalism: we see mechanism as true within its own barriers; we see the élan vital (still a thing-in-itself) as a somewhat crude foreshadowing of a profound truth.’
Follett, p. 90
‘In the arts, especially in painting, the swing of the pendulum between “subjectivity” and “objectivity” is most interestingly apparent. In psychology we have the introspectionists and the behaviourists.
‘I do not see how such opposing tendencies can be avoided while we see reality either in subject or in object; I do not see how we can run fast enough from one to the other to keep ourselves within the region of truth. But our latest psychology is taking us a step beyond this and putting itself in line with the oldest philosophy. Holt, more clearly perhaps than any other recent writer, has shown us that reality is in the relating, in the activity-between. He shows us how in the “behaviour-process” subject and object are equally important and that reality is in the relating of these, is in the endless evolving of these relatings. This has been the grain of gold of the profoundest thinkers from Aristotle to the present day. Of course the subject is no more a mere reflex arc than it is an evangelical soul; nor are subject and object “products” of a vital force. For a century, roughly speaking, objective idealism has given us – its innermost truth – existence as unitary experience which upon analysis resolves itself into the two generic differings which have been called subject and object. Now physiologists and psychologists in their treatment of response are approaching this view.’
Follett, pp. 54, 55