Royce, Josiah
Royce, Josiah
(I855-1916) Bom in California, taught philosophy at Harvard. Neo-Hegelian idealist, conceives Reality as the career of an all-inclusive absolute mind, of which our minds are fragmentary manifestations. Nothing short of such a mind can terminate the quest of each finite consciousness for the true and final object of its experience, which is found always in more experience fulfilling and giving significance to the experience in question. In an absolute experience alone, to which all things are present and by which all things are understood, can the ultimate explanation and meaning of any and all finite experience be revealed, all error be corrected, all impelfectlon be overcome.
Though fragments of the absolute experience, our minds somehow remain separate selves and persons. Though infinite and all-comprehensive in extent, and reviewing ad infinitum its own infinity in knowing that it knows that it knows, the Absolute is nevertheless a finished and closed whole. Though shot through and through with error and evil and sin and suffering, the Absolute is nevertheless perfect, and perfect because of them, since struggle with them and triumph over them is of the essence of its perfection. Though a temporal process, it is nevertheless overarches that process in a single act of comprehension in which past, present, and future are grasped, even as the successive notes of a musical phrase are grasped, as an eternally present completed fact.
The will, like the intellect, reaches after and finds its peace in the Absolute. The moral life lies in seeking the ever widening meaning of our individual lives and identifying ourselves with it. This self-identification with larger meaning is loyalty — the basis and the essence of all human virtue. — B.A.G.F.
Main works
The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 1885;
The Spirit of Modem Philosophy, 1892;
The World and the Indidvidual, 1900;
Lectures on Modem Idealism, 1919.