Josiah Royce

“ 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. ”

“ The preciousness of your present purposes to yourself is only a hint of that preciousness which in the end links their meaning to the entire realm of Being.
And despite the vastness, the variety, the thrilling complexity of the life of the finite world, the ultimate unity is not far from any one of us. All variety of idea and object is subject, as we have seen, to the unity of the purpose wherein we alone live. Even at this moment, yes, even if we transiently forget the fact, we mean the Absolute. We win the presence of God when most we flee. ”

“ Nothing else is for us men knowable about the constitution of Being. Now when you talk about Being as a final fulfilment of ideas, and of human experience as a mere fragment of such a final fulfilment, you transcend human experience. Your view is too abstruse and artificial for plain men. We no longer seek, in these days, for any absolute or final Being. We believe what we find. Nothing final is experienced by men. The realm of the empirical is always, as you say, fragmentary. But then this is the only realm known to men. ”

“ The Self is precisely the very Knower, not as a thing that first is real and then knows, but as the very act of seeing, hearing, thinking, in so far as the mediating presence of some Other, of some object that is known, seen, heard, thought, is simply removed, and in so far as the very diversity of the acts of knowing, seeing, hearing, thinking, is also removed.
Most obvious about the Self, from our finite point of view, is its perfection as a fulfilment of our striving. For us to win oneness with the Self means to attain a state of perfect finality, simplicity, peace. ”

“ Thought it is which goes on when, our present ideas failing to light up sufficiently the chaos of immediacy, we look for other ideas, in terms of which to interpret our problems. Thought it is which we may regard as possessing the countless ideal weapons, the storehouse of what we call memories of our past, the arsenal of what we call general principles for the interpretation of fact, the vast collection of traditional ideas with which our whole education has supplied us. Thought possesses, — nay, thought rather is, this whole collection of ideas taken as in contrast with facts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You talk of reality as fact. Well,” insists the mystic, “here shall be your fact, your datum, an absolutely pure datum. As pure it will fulfil the purpose of thinking, which always desires its own Other, or in other words always really desires just the cessation of all its strife in peace. Only in the immediate that has no beyond, is such peace. Now that is the Reality, that is the Soul. ”

“ At all events, any man actually knows only his own contents of experience, and with more or less probability he guesses at the existence of other contents than his own in other men. But nobody can assert, with real or positive assurance, any Being that transcends his own present experience. Yet you talk of final Being, and of its constitution. Perhaps there is no final Being. Perhaps there is only the present fragment of empirical life. Even my own past and future, as you say, are not present to me. How should I myself at this instant know that there exists more than what is now present to me? ”

“ What if this moment of despair be but the beginning, or the fragment, of your whole life as this winning of the object that you now seek? Our theory maintains that, in fact, this is the case. That the fulfilment of the whole of a purpose may involve the defeat of a part of this very purpose, every experience of the beauty of tragedy, of the glory of courage, of the nobility of endurance, of the triumph over our own selves, empirically illustrates. ”

“ And we observe the constitution of that realm. It is through and through a constitution that answers our questions, embodies our meanings, integrates our purposes. It is then in essence a realm of fact fulfilling purpose, of life embodying idea, of meaning won by means of the experience of its own content. The now present but passing form of our human consciousness is fragmentary. We wait, wonder, pass from fact to fact, from fragment to fragment. What a study of the concept of Being reveals to us is precisely that the whole has a meaning, and is real only as a Meaning Embodied. ”

“ There is left us, I reply, just this world of our daily experience, with precisely its stars and milky ways, with its human life and its linkages — this world, only given already a deeper meaning by this very study. For now we already begin to see, as from afar, the realm of truth that is not independent of, but the very heart and life of this fragmentary finite experience of ours. ”

“ Such disquietude is our almost normal experience as finite wanderers. The situation may be one of private toil or of public controversy, of practical struggle or of theoretical uncertainty; but in any such case, amid the endless variety of our lives, the conflict retains essentially and profoundly similar features, — purpose at war with fortune, idea with datum, meaning with chaos, — such is the life of our narrow flickering moments, and in so far as we are indeed finite, in so far as our will wins not yet its whole battle, our intellect grasps not the truth that it seeks. ”

“ For it is natural to imagine that you can still keep the convenient part of Realism, the practically unapproachable indifference, dignity, and compelling authority, of the Independent Beings, while sacrificing so much of the abstractions of pure Realism as it proves to be logically inconvenient to retain. “The world,” you perhaps now say, “is there, of course, whether or no this or that man knows it. And a man has practically to submit his knowledge to the Real, just as if it were wholly independent of him in every way. Of course no independence is ever really absolute. ”

“ And now what our Fourth Conception asserts is that God’s life, for God’s life we must now call this absolute fulfilment which our Fourth Conception defines, sees the one plan fulfilled through all the manifold lives, the single consciousness winning its purpose by virtue of all the ideas, of all the individual selves, and of all the lives. No finite view is wholly illusory. Every finite intent taken precisely in its wholeness is fulfilled in the Absolute. The least life is not neglected, the most fleeting act is a recognized part of the world's meaning. ”

“ Conversely, whoever grasps only the nature of a general concept, whoever merely thinks of light or colors, or gravitation, or of man, whoever lacks, longs, or in any way seeks another, has not in his experience the full expression of his own meaning. Hence it is that he has to seek his object elsewhere. And so he has not yet faced any ultimate Being. He has upon his hands mere fragments, mere aspects of Being. Thus an entire instance of Being must be precisely that which permits your ideas to seek no other than what is present. Such a being is an Individual. ”

“ I refer to the very conception of the Meaning of an idea. One very fair way to define an idea, had we chosen to use that way, might have been to say: An Idea is any state of mind that has a conscious meaning. Thus, according to my present usage of the word “idea,” a color, when merely seen, is in so far, for consciousness, no idea. A brute noise, merely heard, is no idea. But a melody, when sung, a picture, when in its wholeness actively appreciated, or the inner memory of your friend now in your mind, is an idea. ”

“ The world is real, — ay, but what world? The world, so our Fourth Conception has answered, — the world that any idea views as its own wholly expressed meaning and object. “Yes,” you may say, “but are not our ideas many and various? Is it not one thing to think of mathematical truth, and quite another to think of physical truth? Is not the world of the mathematician a different object from the world of the moralist? Are these not then various worlds adapted to express various meanings? Do these worlds constitute one realm, — a single universe? ”

“ For all that I now know, a single realistic entity may be as simple as Herbart wished, or as complex as the whole arch of the heavens. I shall only say that if, in the realistic world, we were to find two objects that were as independent of each other as, in our definition of the general realistic conception of what it is to be, the object of knowledge was independent of any knowledge of that object, then, and then only, we should call those objects two real beings, really different from each other. ”

“ One can define what it is to be without asserting that he has yet faced the object which fulfils the definition. No realist supposes himself to have an exhaustive knowledge of the independent reality, just as no mathematician hopes, in any finite time, to see his science completed. Being is once for all, to a finite thinker, at least in part, the Other that he seeks. The case of the mystic must not stand or fall with his personal perfection, or with his winning of the Other, but with the inner consistency of his definition, and its adequacy to express the constitution of our search for truth. ”

“ A momentary human idea is indeed not by itself alone a self, although it does fragmentarily contain the partial will of a self. But the meaning that it contains belongs in truth to some individual thinker, to this soul, to this man, to you or to me. Now, however mysterious may be the difference between you and me, we are in such wise different beings, that the unity of Being must find room for our variety. Above all, our ethical freedom, our practical, even if limited, moral independence of one another, must be preserved. The world then is a realm of individuality. ”

“ What is, does not in any essential way fulfil ideas. What is real, is once more whatever experience shows to exist. And experience contains all sorts of non-fulfilments and irrationalities. Chaos or order, joy or defeat, tears of despair and shouts of victory, mysteries, storms, north winds, wars, the wreck of hearts, the might of evil, the meteors that wander in interplanetary darkness, the suns that waste their radiant energy in the chill depths of lifeless space, — these all are facts, — these are Beings. ”

“ But what form of Being shall this fact of the non-expression of the meaning of our ideas, this refusal of the universe concretely to fulfil our purposes, actually possess? Shall this brute fact that our ideas are not expressed possess the reality of an object independent of all ideas? But such a reality, as we now know, is a logical impossibility. Moreover, an object independent of all ideas, even if such an object were otherwise possible, could defeat, or could refuse real expression to no idea whatever. ”

“ If the dualism is to be abandoned, must we instead define Being as an absolute and simple unity? Must we say, the phrase “to be real” means something that cannot be asserted of any object whatever, so long as this object is defined through ideas that refer to it, or so long as the ideas themselves, with their endless search for the Other, trouble our consciousness, emphasize differences, and by their very striving after something beyond, keep our knowledge from its true goal? ”

“ Nothing whatever besides yourself determines either causally or otherwise just what constitutes your individuality, for you are just this unique and elsewhere unexampled expression of the divine meaning. And here and now your individuality in your act is your freedom. This your freedom is your unique possession. Nowhere else in the universe is there what here expresses itself in your conscious being. And this is true of you, not in spite of the unity of the divine consciousness, but just because of the very uniqueness of the whole divine life. For all is divine, all expresses meaning. ”

“ For the sake of its illustration and defence, the thinkers of the Upanishads seize, at first, upon every legend, upon every popular interpretation of nature, which may serve to make the sense of this unity living in the reader’s or hearer’s mind. For the writers of the greater Upanishads, this unity of Being is not so much a matter of argument as it is an object of intuition. You first look out upon the whole circle of the heavens, and upon the multitudes of living forms, and you say of the whole: It is One, because at first you merely feel this to be true. ”

“ The mathematician’s realm is in one sense his free creation. In another sense it is a world where that comes to light which he, in his private capacity, had neither intended nor anticipated. In that world he can long go astray, can hold false views as to his own creations, and, just as if he were working in a laboratory, can have these views set right by the outcome of further carefully planned experience, whose instruction he submissively awaits as if he were in no sense the creator of any object present. Like any other student of Real Being, he observes and experiments. ”

“ And so, when we speak of the final unity of the world-life, we have no right to define that unity merely in terms of the special categories of the distinctively human type of consciousness. Our foregoing sketch of the manner in which, for us men, present, past, future, physical, mental, mathematical, and moral reality seem to be linked in a single system, is not therefore by itself a sufficient basis for stating the way in which the whole meaning of reality gets presented to the single unity of the consciousness that we have already called divine. ”

“ The idea, I have said, seeks its own. It can be judged by nothing but what it intends. Whether I think of God or of yesterday’s events, of my own death, or of the destiny of mankind, of mathematical truth, or of physical facts, of affairs of business, or of Being itself, it is first of all what I mean, and not what somebody merely external to myself might desire me to mean, that both gives me an object, and determines for me the standard of correspondence to the object whereby I must be judged. ”

“ If you view philosophy in this fashion, you subordinate the study of the World as Fact to a reflection upon the World as Idea. Begin by accepting, upon faith and tradition, the mere brute Reality of the World as Fact, and there you are, sunk deep in an ocean of mysteries. ”

“ For in conceiving of all that is as a single whole, as the life, the meaning, and the consciousness of a single Self, we are not limited to merely universal considerations. Human thought has long been conscious of some aspects of the unity of Being. The world of ordinary experience, of common sense, and of science, has already its provisional unity, which our own idealism must view as a genuine, if fragmentary, hint of the final unity. ”

“ I regard our ethical common sense as meaning precisely the very fact that our present will, as the will of an individual, is unique. By our activity, then, I mean just the unique significance of the present expression of our will. If a general law, — a merely universal type, — if our characters or temperaments, or some other such universal nature of things, are expressed in our present experience, then, in so far, we are indeed mere cases of types. ”

“ You want yourself, — the Self in its completeness, in its fulfilment, in its final expression. In brief, when you talk of reality, you talk of self-possession, of perfection, and of peace. And that is, therefore, all that you mean by the Being of the world or of any type of facts. Being therefore is nothing beyond yourself. You even now hold it within you, in your heart of hearts. Being therefore is just the purely immediate. To be means to quench thought in the presence of a final immediacy which completely satisfies all ideas. ”

“ For the mystic, the common sense antitheses on the one hand, between the immediate and the ideal, and on the other hand, between the real and the desirable, are deliberately and consciously rejected, as something to be overcome. One overcomes them not, indeed, through an indulging of our fickle, momentary impulses, but through a transformation of these impulses. One wins the truth not through a cultivation of what we ordinarily call Reason, but through a quenching of Reason in the very presence of the absolute goal of all finite thought. ”

“ To think in universal terms is thus to attempt, as it were, to exhaust the abstractly possible alternatives, and to define what exists in yonder external world as what survives the various stages of ideal destruction through which one passes as one judges. So long as thus, separating ideas from their external meanings, you struggle through universal judgments towards the far-off truth, your principle is the one that Spinoza stated, Omnis Determinatio est Negatio. The universal truth is the slayer of what seemingly might have been, but also of what, as a fact, proves to be not possible. ”

“ It is not merely in the mystic trance, but in every rational idea, in so far as it is already a partially embodied purpose, that we now shall in our own way and measure come upon that which is, and catch the deep pulsations of the world. Our instant is not yet the whole of eternity; but the eternal light, the lux eterna, shineth in our every reasonable moment, and lighteth every idea that cometh into the world.
And, thirdly, if you follow our Fourth Conception, you will now agree with the critical rationalist when he asserts that Being essentially involves what gives the validity to ideas. ”

“ For the idea, in seeking for truth, does not seek for your aims, so far as you are a merely external observer. The idea is selective. It seeks its own. It attends as itself has chosen. It desires in its own way. If you, having somehow first finished and established your own definition of Being, choose to regard the idea and its object as entities in your own supposed world, then, indeed, you can talk, from your own point of view, of the various real relations of these entities, precisely as a psychologist does when he discusses the origin or the results of ideas. ”

“ And this question is one whose answer, for the mathematician, is indeed hereupon not at all a matter of his arbitrary choice. He has, to be sure, created his world of mathematical objects. This world is there, as it were, by his decree, or is real, as ordinary realists would say, only in his head. It is so far like a child’s fairyland. But once created, this world, in its own eternal and dignified way, is as stubborn as the rebellious spirits that a magician might have called out of the deep. ”

“ Only the Self which is your world is your completely integrated Self, the totality of the life that at this instant you fragmentarily grasp. Your present defect is a matter of the mere form of your consciousness at this instant. Were your eyes at this instant open to your own meaning, your life as a whole would be spread before you as a single and unique life, for which no other could be substituted without a less determinate expression of just your individual will. Now this complete life of yours, is. Only such completion can be. Being can possess no other nature than this. ”

“ To say that All A is B, is, in fact, merely to assert that the real world contains no objects that are A’s, but that fail to be of the class B. To say that No A is B is to assert that the real world contains no objects that are at once A and B. Neither judgment, strictly interpreted, tells you that A exists, but only that if it exists, it is B. Now those mathematical judgments, of whose endless wealth and eternal validity we have heretofore spoken, are very frequently, although by no means always, of the universal type. ”

“ To know facts is to destroy mere possibilities. To know that there is even a single righteous man in your universe of discourse, is to destroy so far the abstractly possible alternative that that individual man is unrighteous. This result so far holds with absolute generality, and without regard to your special definition of the concept of Being. Accordingly every realist regards the real as the selection from the possible. ”

“ There remains to hint what the being of the Self is only what we now call the immediacy of present experience. Only henceforth we must regard the absolute immediacy not as the raw material of meaning, but as the restful goal of all meaning, — as beyond ideas, even because it is simpler than they are. It is at once nothing independent of knowledge and nothing that admits of diversity within knowledge. ”