Josiah Royce

“ Why should there be any world at all for us? Isn’t it just because we are all actually minded to see one? And isn’t this being minded to see a world as ultimately and brutally unreasonable a fact as you could name? Let us find for this fact, then, a name not so exalted as Fichte’s high-sounding speech would love. Let us call this ultimate nature of ours, which forces us all alike to see a woild of phenomena in the show forms of space and time, simply our own deep common Will. ”

“ The fact is that, for Fichte, my own vocation is the central fact of consciousness. But what my vocation is, is a matter for deeper consideration. And, if I duly consider my vocation, I find that there is a measureless strength of restless will about me, which demands an infinity of time in which to work out my vocation, and an infinite business to meet, with its magnitude, the endlessly significant office that I choose for myself. Plainly, then, I, the true self, am not the mere self of the world of sense, the self who eats and talks, and has this name. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Schelling was himself, always, even as philosopher, a creature of the moment. His moments were indeed often very great ones and might need each a whole volume to express itself. But Schelling is not, like Kant, a systematic and long-plotting thinker; nor yet, like Fichte, a man who, after many adventures, is completely overwhelmed and thenceforth possessed by a single idea. No, Schelling possesses directly the wavering passion of his romantic friends. His kaleidoscopic philosophy, which changed form with each new essay that he published, was like their whole scheme of life and of art. ”

“ You philosophize when you reflect critically upon what you are actually doing in your world. What you are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage. The critical inquiry into what all these things mean and imply is philosophy. We have our faith in life; we want reflectively to estimate this faith. We feel ourselves in a world of law and of significance. Yet why we feel this homelike sense of the reality and the worth of our world is a matter for criticism. Such a criticism of life, made elaborate and thorough-going, is a philosophy. ”

“ The opposition between will and contemplation reaches for the first time its height at this point in the system. On one side, the world of passion, throbbing, sorrowing, longing, hoping, toiling, above all, forever fleeing from the moment, whatever it be; on the other side, the majesty of artistic contemplation, looking in sacred calm upon all this world, seeing all things, but itself unmoved. Plainly, in this contemplative intellect the will has capriciously created for itself a dangerous enemy, who will discover its deep irrationality. ”

“ And flowers the beauty showed that lay entombed, — Yes, now, wherever light, as dawn begins, A new created world from chaos wins, — And in the thousand eyes that, from the sky, Show night and day the heavenly mystery, — Onwards, to where, in thought’s eternal truth Nature’s deep self rewords itself in truth, — There stirs one might, one pulse-beat all sufficing, All power retaining, aye, — and sacrificing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why, then, is this world of the senses the world for the truly wise man? Because it is but the embodiment of one eternal and divine spirit. Then follows a Schellingian sketch of a process of evolution which, proceeding through the animals, culminates in us. The world of nature is thus full of the struggle of the great spirit to win his own higher life. The end and crown of this whole process is man. In him, blind nature gets a voice; in him the spirit comes to himself. And all the universe is one glorious life, in whose contemplation the mystic soul rejoices. ”

“ One has so many temptations to forgetfulness of lofty ideals. One is, after all, but twenty-six; one loves discussion, friends, philosophy; one plainly has even a good appetite; and alas! this world is so fair, this age in which one lives is so inspiring! Nay, one is not yet quite worthy of the world of free spirits, nor of Sophie. So the days go by; and when the year of the preparation for the great Entschluss is done, not Novalis, but Sophie has passed — this time not merely into the world of spirits, but even into the realm of the pure Platonic Ideas themselves. ”

“ Of all sorts of curiosity one of the most human and the most singular is the reflective curiosity whose highest expression is philosophy itself. This form of curiosity scrutinizes our own lives, our deepest instincts, our most characteristic responses to the world in which we live, our typical “reflex actions.” It tries to bring us to a self-consciousness as to our temperaments. Our temperaments, our instincts, are in one sense fatal. We cannot directly alter them. What philosophy does is to find them out, to bring them to the light, to speak in words the very essence of them. ”

“ Not the particular griefs of life, not the pangs of cold and hunger and of disease, not the horrors of the baseness that runs riot in humanity, — not these things do they weigh in the balance with any sort of precision or particularity, although these things, too, they see and pity. No, the source of all these griefs, the will itself, its paradox, its contradictory longing to be forever longing, its irrational striving to be forever ever as one that suffers lack, — this they condemn, compassionate, and — resign. They do not strive or cry. ”

“ My very existence is practical; it is self-assertion. I exist, so to speak, by hurling the fact of my existence at another than myself. I limit myself thus, by a foreign somewhat, opaque, external, my own opposite; but my limitation is the free choice of my true self. By thus limiting myself I give myself something to do, and thus win my own very existence. Yet this opposition, upon which my life is based, is an opposition within my deepest nature. I have a foreign world as the theatre of my activity; I exist only to conquer and win that apparently foreign world to myself ”

“ It is for just this reason, so I now suggest, that when you study philosophy, you have to be tolerant, receptive, willing to look at the world from many sides, fearless as to the examination of what seem to be even danoerous doctrines, patieat in listening to views that look even abhorrent to common sense. It is useless to expect a simple and easy account of so paradoxical an affair as this our universe and our life. When you first look into philosophy you are puzzled and perhaps frightened by those manifold opinions of the philosophers of which we have thus far had so much to say. ”

“ Let us thank Schopenhauer, then, for at least this, that in his pessimism he gives us an universal expression for the whole negative side of life. If you will let me speak of private experience, I myself have often found it deeply comforting, in the most bitter moments, to have discounted, so to speak, all the petty tragedies of experience, all my own weakness and caprice and foolishness and ill fortune, by one such absolute formula for evil as Schopenhauer’s doctrine gives me. It is the fate of life to be restless, capricious, and therefore tragic. ”

“ Such a universe as this of Kant, viewed as it were from without, suggests irresistibly an interpretation which at first sight may seem as romantic as indemonstrable, but which is at all events not excluded by the facts. Let us look at them dispassionately, — these moral agents, blind to absolute truth, but each and all properly destined to be willing servants of an unseen order; world-creators, meanwhile, each and all of them, but creators solely of their inner worlds, communing somehow with one another, by virtue of their common rationality, but cut off from things in themselves. ”

“ Just so, for Schopenhauer, if you exist you will, and if you will you are striving to escape from your present nature. It is of the essence of will to be always desiring a change. If the Will makes a world, the Will as such will be sure, then, thinks Schopenhauer, to be endlessly dissatisfied with its world. For, once more, when you will, the very essence of such will is discontentment with what is yours now. I no longer make that an object of desire which I already possess. I will what I have not yet, but hope to get, as a poor man wills wealth, but a rich man more wealth. ”