Josiah Royce

“ It occurs as an eternal experience of this my whole striving. Every struggle, every tear, every misery, every failure, and repentance, and every rising again, every strenuous pursuit, every glimpse of God’s truth, — all these are not mere incidents of the search for that which is beyond. They are all events in the life; they too are part of the fulfilment. In eternity all this is seen, and hereby, — even in and through these temporal failures, I win, in God’s presence and by virtue of His fulfilment, the goal of life, which is the whole of life. ”

“ For my thesis to-night will be that the very nature of human ignorance is such that you cannot conceive or define it apart from the assertion that there is, in truth, at the heart of the world, an Absolute and Universal Intelligence, for which thought and experience, so divided in us, are in complete and harmonious unity.
“Man is ignorant,” says one, — “ignorant of the true nature of reality. He knows that in the world there is something real, but he does not know what this reality is. The Ultimate Reality can therefore be defined, from our human point of view, as something unknowable.” ”

“ Finite as we are, lost though we seem to be in the woods, or in the “wide air’s wildernesses,” in this world of time and of chance, we have still, like the strayed animals or like the migrating birds, our homing instinct. It is this homing instinct that we for the first merely articulate when we talk of true Being. Being means something for us, however, because of the positive presence, in finite consciousness, of this inner meaning of even our poorest ideas. We seek. That is a fact. We seek a city still out of sight. In the contrast with this goal, we live. ”

“ The romantic period was the time of bloom and of flowers. Our period, if you will, is, in its matter-of-fact and apparently prosaic realism, the time of the ripened seeds, a time which the warm-hearted usually scorn as a bleak and autumnal period of dry seed-pods and chilly night airs. But the wise love such ages of ripening and of harvest; for they know that a richer growth is erelong to spring from all these barren-seeming seed-kernels of truth. But such metaphors apart, what I want to insist upon is the essential unity of recent philosophy amidst all its transformations. ”

“ It is not because progress is to endure on this planet for a short or for a long time, but because the world in which this progress is so to end seems, thus regarded, wholly indifferent to progress, — this is the gloomy aspect. To-day, even while progress is so swift and sure, at this moment, we are living in a world for which, as science displays it to us, this progress is as indifferent and unessential as the fleeting hues of an evaporating soap-bubble. Is the physical fact of progress, thus regarded, a moral help to us? ”

“ And in all eternity this is, for God, true of all facts, whether called by us past, present, or future. It is as if all of us were cylinders, with their ends removed, moving through the waters of some placid lake. To the cylinders the water seems to move, — what has passed is a memory, what is to come is doubtful. But the lake knows that all the water is equally real, and that, in fact, it is quiet, unruffled, immovable. Speaking technically, time is no reality; things seem past and future, and, in a sense, non-existent to us, but in fact they are just as genuinely real as the present is. ”

“ How does such a view give a man the power to live more reasonably than he otherwise would live? Is a world-embracing reason that sees all things in their unity really that master of life whom our simpler religious intuitions call upon us to seek as our Deliverer from our natural chaos of desires? I have just asserted that there are people who devote their lives to the service of such a divine reason. But if the divine reason is eternal and perfect, and if it sees all reality as an unity, and if this is its only function, how can any one serve it at all? ”

“ That, fair of form, of stature erect, Stands on earth as the giant’s elect, Is called in our speech the son of man, Outcome and crown of the spirit’s plan. From iron slumber, from dreaming set free, Now marvels the spirit who he may be. Looks on himself with wondering gaze, Measures his limbs in dim amaze, Longs in terror once more to be hid In nature’s slumber, of sentience rid. But nay, his freedom is won for aye, No more in nature’s peace may he lie; In the vast dark world that is all his own, He wanders his life’s narrow path alone. ”

“ For the longing and the misery of finitude that in my present form of human consciousness now so frequently bound the horizon of my darkened instants of fragmentary experience — this longing and misery, when they beset me, I say, involve that very search for Another, that very dissatisfaction with the abstractness and dreary generality of my present ideas, which I express in my own way whenever, out of the depths, I cry after Reality. People often object to Schopenhauer’s view of the world as the will, that that doctrine, as Schopenhauer frequently expresses it, is a mere Animism. ”

“ This evil that I fight here in this finite world is a delusion. So then, why fight it? If I do good works, the world is infinitely good and perfect. If I seem to do evil works, the world is in truth no worse. Seeming good is not better than seeming evil, for if it were, then the seeming evil would be a real defect in God, in whose life is everything. If I have never loved aught but God, even so I have never hated aught but God. It is all alike. God does not need just me. Or rather I may say, in so far as he needs me to complete his infinite truth, he already has me from all eternity. ”

“ I live looking before and after, and pining for what is not, and grasping after unity; and I find each moment crumbling as it flies; and each thought and each sentence of my discourse drops into momentary forgetfulness so soon as I have carefully built up its passing structure. In our life all thus flows. We fly from one flash of insight to another.
But nevertheless our opinions, so we say, reflect sometimes the common-sense of mankind. They conform to the verdict of humanity. But who amongst us ever goes beyond thus confidently holding that he reflects the common-sense of mankind? ”

“ This, in fact, is the model that Plato’s dialogues set before the thinker. However often one might win this pearl of truth, one’s frailty, and one’s fleeting moments, would ever again turn the possession of it into a mere memory of former insight; and so one must ever seek afresh. This is the thinker’s ideal. If fortune makes him a poor professor, telling over and over again his old tale in lectures; an anxious author, unready to deny his former books; a human disputant, eager not to be worsted in his dialectics, — well, these are the doings of fortune, and of his wretched earthly self. ”

“ How this can be, is precisely our present problem. The mathematician, in his own exact way, is thus like Browning’s lover. His instant is an eternity. He sees in a transient moment. Every one of his glimpses of fact is like the flash of the moonlight on the water. Yet what he sees outlasts the ages of ages. But nothing in all this eternal validity of his outcome makes him less empirical in his actual scrutiny. The validity is to be eternal. But his form of his experience is precisely that of any other human creature of the instant’s flight. ”

“ No, his peace is the peace of triumphing in the midst of our world of agony and of passion, as the tragic poet triumphs even while losing himself in the sufferings of his own creations. God’s life is simply all life, and it is not concealed, but revealed by our own lives. God lives in every kindly friendship, in every noble deed, in every well-ordered society, in every united people, in every sound law, in every wise thought. He has no life beyond such rationality. His personality is just this, the communion, the intercourse, the organization of all finite persons. ”

“ The truth is that all this world of life about thee is as real as thou art. All conscious life is conscious in its own measure. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere even as in thee. The result of thy insight will be inevitable. The illusion vanishing, the glorious prospect opens before thy vision. Seeing the oneness of this life everywhere, the equal reality of all its moments, thou wilt be ready to treat it all with the reverence that prudence would have thee show to thy own little bit of future life. ”

“ Those questions could only be answered, those bitter problems that pierce our hearts with the keen edge of doubt and of wonder, — when friends part, when lovers weep, when the lightning of fortune blasts our hopes, when remorse and failure make desolate the lonely hours of our private despair, — such questions, such problems, I say, could only be answered if the flickering ideas then present in the midst of our darkness shone steadily in the presence of some world of superhuman experience, of which ours would then seem to be only the remote hint. ”

“ Is not a fact an object? Is not an object real? Have we not ourselves called it so? Aye, but we have not said that death is by itself a Whole object. Death, as far as it comes into our experience, is indeed a glimpse of fact, but in the moral world it is the most fragmentary of such glimpses of reality. Whoever faces it faces nothing that he finds as an individual and present reality. What he observes is the absence of precisely what he himself defines as the Whole of Being that he seeks, — the very longing of an unfulfilled idea, which defines the Other, and looks elsewhere for the reality. ”

“ My life is a longing to be somewhere else in life than here, where I am.
Here, then, is the solution of our mystery in so far as it can have a solution. The world is the Will. In time and space I see only the behavior of phenomena. I never get at things in themselves; but I, in my timeless and spaceless inner nature, in the very heart, in the very germ, of my being, am not a mere outward succession of jihe- nomena. I am a Will, — a will which is not there for the sake of something else, but which exists solely because it desires to exist. ”

“ For human society as it now is, in this world of care, is a chaos of needs; and the whole social order groans and travails together in pain until now, longing for salvation. It can be saved, as the individual can be saved, only in case there is some way that leads upward, through all our turmoil and our social bickerings, to a realm where that vision of unity and self-possession which our clearest moments bring to us becomes not merely vision, but fulfilment, where love finds its own, and where the power of the spirit triumphs. ”

“ The possibilities of error are infinite. Infinite then must be the inclusive thought. Here is this stick, this brickbat, this snow-flake: there is an infinite mass of error possible about any one of them, and notice, not merely possible is it, but actual. All the infinite series of blunders that you could make about them not only would be blunders, but in very truth now are blunders, though you personally could never commit them all. You cannot in fact make a truth or a falsehood by your thought. You only find one. From all eternity that truth was true, that falsehood false. ”

“ So far, older theories of the individual have gone, when they defined the individual as the brute fact of sense. But our theory of the individual has gone still further. We have seen that mere immediacy of experience, the mere fact of sense as such, is not yet enough to constitute individuality. The individual is not merely this, but such a this that its place can be taken by “no other.” And, as such, the individual this, as we have seen, thus exists only as the object of an exclusive interest, and not merely as the object of a defining thought, or as the immediate datum of experience. ”