Josiah Royce

“ For the scientific student too, the dust of the moment flies, and this dust often fills his eyes, and blinds him with its whirl of chance almost as much as it torments his neighbour who knows no Platonic ideas. I insist: Science throughout makes use of the contrast between this flying experience which we have, and which we call an experience of unreality, and the ideal experience, the higher sort of organised experience which we have not, and which we call an experience of reality. Upon this contrast the whole confession of our human ignorance depends. ”

“ And now, once more, the very remoteness and ideality of the goal assures the unity of your life. For the ideal is not something that you can to-morrow attain and so have done with. Your ideal is precisely harmony, organisation, unity of life. This, you as you are can never completely fulfil. But for just that reason the ideal goal, shining through all your experience, makes that experience seem to you as one in intent, in purpose, in meaning, despite its empirical variety. Just because your ideal is above you, your real life becomes a single life, for it is now a life of seeking for the goal. ”

“ Is the necessity objective, or is it merely subjective? — is such a thought the infallible witness of how reality has to be, or merely the unimpeachable witness of how the thinker has to think? — is it the sign of real power and genuine knowledge, or only of limitation and impenetrable ignorance? Here, the agnostic says it is the latter; the idealist, it is the former; and then the idealist undertakes to show, once more, that the supposition of thought being really limited and merely subjective is a flat self-contradiction, a proposition inevitably withdrawn in the very act of putting it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the very life-blood of that more vigorous moral order which is the manifest distinction of the West from the Orient. Personal responsibility and its correlate of free reality, or real freedom, are the whole foundation on which our enlightened civilisation stands; and the voice of aspiring and successful man, as he lives and acts in Europe and in America, speaks ever more and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm and of stability — Duty and Rights. But these are really the signals of his citizenship in the ideal City of God. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ In this sense, and in this only, he seeks, as such a student, for self-consciousness. But otherwise, ideally speaking, he ought as a philosopher to have no personal property in ideas, no private cause to defend, no pet thesis to maintain, no argument for whose fate he fears, no selfish concern whether he refutes or is refuted, no author’s fondness for his past productions, no advocate’s pride in maintaining his old notions. Naked of all private treasures, he ought to seek, each time anew, the priceless pearl of truth. ”

“ Yet, as soon as you admit them, you admit an element transcending concrete experience. You admit something whose presence you cannot escape, but whose nature you find it as hard to define as I find it hard to tell precisely what I mean by that transcendent something which my theory frankly admits, and glories in, but which your theory grudgingly recognises, even in trying to conceal the fact of the recognition. Your possibilities are either mere illusions, or else facts. If facts are not experienced, they are beyond experience. ”

“ To assert that all human experience is illusory, is to say that an absolutely inclusive experience, if there were one, would have present, as part of its content, something involving the utter failure of our experience to attain that absolute content as such. To conceive that absolute reality consists of material atoms and ether, is to say that a complete experience of the universe would find presented to it nothing but experiences analogous to those that we have when we talk of matter in motion. ”

“ For truth means idea fulfilled in fact. And one who knows, knows truth. But while such a formal generalisation of the essence of our own experience is common to all efforts to define the Absolute as above us in conscious grade, it is much harder to generalise accurately the phenomena of such a complex and human a structure as is our will, — this labyrinth of desires, lighted by choice, and illustrated by a constantly accompanying language of bodily deeds, which in their turn are coloured by a normal, but in us certainly largely illusory, sense of power and of free control. ”

“ The impressive close of the argument by the venerated man who has but just now ceased addressing you is such as must awaken a deep response in every human heart not touched with apathy. It is one of those rare outbreaks of accumulated expectation, hope, and longing, into which, at the contemplation of the reason that is apparently struggling to get a footing in the world, human nature pours forth all its commingled doubt and faith. ”

“ We therefore say to the moral individual: “This your act, in so far as you meant it, that is, in so far as it expressed your striving toward your goal, is an embodiment of your freedom, and, in so far, nobody in the whole universe of God besides yourself is responsible for it, is expressed in it, or is to be judged for it. In so far, your acts show what you are. Viewed with reference to your goal, they are part of you. In the long run, what they are, you are; and no will besides your own, no Divine choice beyond yourself, determines what, in the most individual aspect of your being, you are.” ”

“ Our ignorance, our fallibility, our imperfection, and so, as forms of this ignorance and imperfection, our experience of longing, of strife, of pain, of error, — yes, of whatever, as finite, declares that its truth lies in its limitation, and so lies beyond itself. These things, wherein we taste the bitterness of our finitude, are what they are because they mean more than they contain, imply what is beyond them, refuse to exist by themselves, and, at the very moment of confessing their own fragmentary falsity, assure us of the reality of that fulfilment which is the life of God. ”

“ Can we prove the conception real, and thus alone show it is the right conception? But the all-important question beyond will be: Are we now at length certain that we take the ideal view of the conception — that the light in which we see it is indeed the light of the whole, the final unit-vision under which alone our ideal can turn real? Not until we are able to aver securely that this is so, have we a right to assert the conception as philosophic, and the only philosophic conception. ”

“ Is an evolutional origin of man, then, compatible with a Divine creation? If so, in what sense, only, of the word “man”? Is it not man the phenomenon merely — man the experience-contents, physical (governed by Space) on the one hand, and psychical (governed by Time) on the other, instead of man the noumenon — the completely real man who is the Inclusive Active Unit that embraces and grounds all its being in its own active self-consciousness? — in short, is not the field of human evolution just the human body and the human states of mind? ”

“ A tradition may be true; but only a present and living insight can be philosophical. If this is the case with any tradition, — even a sacred tradition, — it is above all the case with the very poor and perhaps, if you will, very profane sort of tradition that an individual student of philosophy may find in the shape of a past piece of his own writing. It is the death of your philosophising, if you come to believe anything merely because you have once maintained it. ”

“ But, for such an experience, this constitution of the finite is a fact determined from an absolute point of view, and every finite incompleteness and struggle appears as a part of a whole in whose wholeness the fragments find their true place, the ideas their realisation, the seeking its fulfilment, and our whole life its truth, and so its eternal rest, — that peace which transcends the storms of its agony and its restlessness. ”

“ Can an argument like Professor Royce’s prove an Absolute Mind distinct from each thinker’s mind, or an Absolute Mind coexisting with other genuine minds, unquestionably as real as itself? What is the true test of reality? — and how alone can finitude coexist with unabated reality? Is not that test self-active intelligence? — and, in order to our being real notwithstanding our finitude, must not Nature be conceived as conditioned by human nature, instead of conditioning it? ”

“ But even such relative reduction of the chaos as we get never lasts long and continuously in the life of any one person. Your moments of unfragmentary and more scientific experience fill of themselves only fragments of your life. A wandering attention, the interruption of intruding sensations, — such fragments may at any time be ready, by their intrusion, to destroy the orderliness of even the best-equipped scientific experience. The student of science, like other men, knows in fragments, and prophesies in fragments. ”

“ Theoretically definable individuality there is, to be sure, in plenty, if by definition you merely mean the process of designating new individuals through an appeal to relationships to the presupposed individuality of other individuals. Such is the process which I just now exemplified. Individuality is like a ferment. Introduce the germ of it into your world of knowledge, and the universe soon swarms as with yeast, and individuality bubbles out everywhere. For in relation to any one individual, you can define countless other individuals. ”

“ Still otherwise put, our whole argument for the Absolute implies that just because every thought of an object involves a beyond, as well as its own inclusion in the unity of the experience which embodies the beyond, therefore every thought is a moment in a world of fact which, in its wholeness, transcends mere thinking. Or, again, thought in itself is a mere abstraction from and yet in the whole of experience. But all this means that there must be, above every must, that which includes, indeed, the necessity expressed by the must, but transcends such necessity. ”

“ When we turn that mood into literal philosophy, and cause our centre of selfhood to vanish into God’s, or God’s to vanish into ours, we lose the tone of religion that is true and wholesome. For true religion is built only on the firm foundations of duty and responsibility; and these, again, rest only on the footing of freedom. Hence the passing remark of Dr. Le Conte on the nature of religion, though indeed beautiful and noble, is yet, I think, neither noble enough nor beautiful enough. ”

“ A common definition of a relatively organised experience is, the consensus of the competent observers. Deeper than our belief in any physical truth is our common-sense assurance that the experience of our fellows is as genuine as our own, is in actual relation to our own, has present to it objects identical with those that we ourselves experience, and consequently supplements our own. Apart from our social consciousness, I myself should hold that we men, growing up as we do, can come to have no clear conception of truth, nor any definite power clearly to think at all. ”

“ It is not mine to-night to declare the glory of the Divine Being, but simply to scrutinise the definition of the Absolute. The heart of my whole argument, here as in my book, has been the insistence that all these seemingly so transcendent and imprudent speculations about the Absolute are, as a fact, the mere effort to express, as coherently as may be, the commonplace implications of our very human ignorance itself. ”

“ The contrast of ego and non-ego grows, however, still more and more complex as all the foregoing motives join in endlessly varied interweaving, in that long drama of social warfare and of social harmony, of friendship and of enmity, of private interest and of public spirit, which passes before us as mind daily meets mind in the expression of feeling and of opinion, in the play of love and of hate, throughout our long, and, by nature, far too flickering existence. ”

“ The world, as a whole, is emptied of meaning: art is no longer real; morality ceases to be. For morality is victory achieved over temptation, and not temptation following upon victory. Temptation does succeed to victory in our experience, but the growth of temptation out of victory is not morality. The very life of morality is toil, struggle, achievement; we must overcome difficulties; the stream of morality must rise higher than its source. Take progress away, and you destroy morality. This, after all, is very obvious, nor would I be understood to say that Professor Royce denies this. ”

“ As against a half-idealist, who should attempt to reduce the contents of his neighbour’s inner life to mere possibilities of his own personal and private experience, Professor Howison is unquestionably right. But as against an Absolute Idealism, which admits that fact transcends the bare assertion of any real possibility of experience, but which recognises, for that very reason, that all fact, as such, has to be present to an Absolute Experience, Professor Howison’s ethical enthusiasm is logically defenceless. I agree that Individuality is a fact. ”

“ By some slip, through some oversight, a changeling has been put into the cradle of Reason, but Reason, when she sees it, knows that it is none of hers. Professor Royce rightly says that it is not the conception of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore. For, in very fact, it is not the conception of a being that we can adore at all. The fault of it at the bar of the religious reason is, that by force of the argument leading to it all the turmoil and all the contradictions and tragic discords belonging to experience must be taken up directly into the life of the Absolute ”

“ We apply, indeed, formally, our must to the Absolute, in so far as the Absolute is viewed as the object of our conception; that is, precisely, not yet as the Absolute for itself, but as the Absolute defined from our finite point of view. But the Absolute finds fact in its wholeness, where we find only mediation, or where we appeal from our experience to “experience other than ours,” and so see necessity and not immediacy. Therefore, it is indeed true that every conception of the Absolute is, when you take it barely as thought, inadequate to its object. ”

“ It is indeed well for us that we have such defeated illusions to contrast with the prosaic reality of life’s ordinary self-consciousness; for from the ashes of dead selves the very life of the spirit may spring, and, being such as we are, we never win ideals except through first lamenting dear and lost realities. But the ideal self, in the proper sense, comes into sight only in so far as we can learn from life that whatever we are, or plan or carry out, in the world that we see or touch, it is none of it an expression of ourselves as we ought to be ”

“ Again, if we try to tear our lives from their setting in the world, we find that the line that bounds them is jagged and broken throughout. At times one feels that his life is exhaustively summed up in relations to other lives, and that what is left over when those bonds are snapped is too poor to be worth saving. Not so the Absolute. His life is completely finished, rounded and whole, and has no relations to any beyond. And now I will ask you to look at this attribute of Absoluteness or Completeness under the conception of time. For, temporally speaking, Completeness is eternal existence. ”

“ Why might not our world of facts be of this sort, — an individual whole of mutually contingent parts, conforming to law in whole and in part, embodying universals, fulfilling ideas, yet with freedom not only for the whole but also for the parts? Why might not the Absolute Will be a complex of many wills in one unity of consciousness, and so its object be an Individual consisting of individuals, all expressive of law, but all still mutually free with a freedom that is a part of the freedom of the Whole? ”

“ Such is the impassioned force of the argument from analogy, fortified, as it can be in these later days, by the doctrine of evolution. As Dr. Le Conte has so eloquently and so forcibly shown, it does seem clear, through the long and agonising path of evolution, — through struggle, and death, and survival, — that a rational, a moral, a self-active being is on the way toward realised existence; and it is true that, unless there is immortality awaiting it, this long and hard advance through Nature will be balked, and the whole process of evolution turn futile. ”

“ The love of one career, which excludes other ways of living, tends to individualise the professional man. The exclusive love of God, whom nobody else can serve in just the way open to you, tends to individuate your idea of your moral self. In another realm, the vaguer affections, as youth first knows them, are abstract universals, and may demoralise. The love for one beloved, and one only, is an accident which for the first time individuates both the lover and the beloved. The mother’s love, for this infant, is exclusive, and so individuates both mother and child. ”