Josiah Royce

“ Time, whatever else it is, is given to us as that within whose successions, in so far as for us they have a direct interest and meaning, every event, springing from, yet forsaking, its predecessors, aims on, towards its own fulfilment and extinction in the coming of its successors. Our experience of time is thus for us essentially an experience of longing, of pursuit, of restlessness. And this is the aspect which Schopenhauer and the Buddhists have found so intolerable about the very nature of our finite experience. ”

“ The visible world, when viewed as at rest, therefore interests us little in comparison with the same world when we take note of its movements, changes, successions. As the kitten ignores the dead leaves until the wind stirs them, but then chases them — so facts in general tend to appear to us all dead and indifferent when we disregard their processes. But in the movements of things lies for us, just as truly as in her small way for the kitten, all the glory and the tragedy, all the life and the meaning of our observed universe. ”

“ We watch the moving and tend to neglect the apparently changeless objects about us. And that is why narrative is so much more easily effective than description in the poetic arts; and why, if you want to win the attention of the child or of the general public, you must tell the story rather than portray coexistent truths, and must fill time with series of events, rather than merely crowd the space of experience or of imagination with manifold but undramatic details. For space furnishes indeed the stage and the scenery of the universe, but the world’s play occurs in time. ”

“ And if this be your belief, as it doubtless is, is not your principle of causation for you a principle somehow first known to govern the real world which your experience of resistance is said to make manifest to your senses, before you can use the principle to prove the existence of matter? But if this be true, is not your principle of causation, your assurance that the real world is one where facts stand in rational relations, and where what happens is explicable, already presupposed not only as valid, but as valid for a real world beyond you, from the very outset of your whole inquiry? ”

“ Whatever the deeper reality behind Nature may turn out to be, — our Nature, the realm of matter and of laws with which our science and our popular opinions have to do, is a realm which we conceive as known or as knowable to various men, in precisely the same general sense in which we regard it as known or as knowable to our private selves. Take away the social factor in our present view of Nature, and you would alter the most essential of the characters possessed, for us, by that physical realm in which we all believe. ”

“ Action is more enlightening than speculation. I will work while it is called the day, but I will not try, like the philosophers, to look with naked eyes upon the sun of truth. Such researches only hinder me.”
Both this confession of too many listeners to philosophical discourses, and the resulting question to which I have just referred, are to nobody more familiar, I have said, than to the student of philosophy himself. Nobody, in fact, ought to know better than he does the limitations of mere speculation. Does he not often feel them bitterly himself? ”

“ My Ought is my own will more rationally expressed than, at the instant of a capricious activity, I as yet consciously recognize. The consciousness of the more rational purpose, — of a purpose looming up, as it were, in the distance, beyond my present impulses, and yet even now seen as their own culmination, like a mountain crowning the ascent from the foothills, — the consciousness, I say, of such a purpose, is what we mean in Ethics by the Ought. ”

“ An eternal knowledge is often spoken of as if it were one for which there is no distinction whatever between past, and present, and future. But such a definition is as absurd as if one should speak of our knowledge of a whole musical phrase or rhythm, when we grasped such a whole at once, as if the at once implied that there were for us no temporal distinction between the first and the last beat or note of the succession in question. ”

“ The unseen meteors of interplanetary space, the waves in the far-off seas, the craters in the moon, the ballads and legends of ancient Tartar tribes, the copper mines of Montana, — all such facts, and an infinity of others, equally varied, are lost, at any moment of our human consciousness wherein we do not concretely acknowledge their reality, in the nebulous blur of what we call “the rest of the world.” ”

“ We have to presuppose our facts in order to make concrete our purposes, while we can define our facts, if at all, only in terms of our purposes. This is the fatal circle of our finitude, from which we can indeed escape, as we do in some measure, at every instant, by acting, — more or less blindly, — more or less at haphazard, — seeking in the process of experience both our own purpose, and the means of executing it, both our dream, and the interpretation thereof. ”

“ But when we ask what reality Nature possesses, we must beware of letting our social interests, and the general motives that lead us to conceive the World of Description, blind us to the true principles upon which an interpretation of experience should be founded. The sharp contrast between Matter and Mind, the sharp dualism between the World of Description and the World of Appreciation, — we have seen from what motives in our own lives all such contrasts result. ”

“ But these swift phenomena still baffle her finitude. They escape her sly approaches with a maddening agility. They scold her from above, and throw down bits of bark to insult her. At length she abandons all apparent efforts at direct attack. It becomes her will to lie for hours nearly motionless, simply watching them. She chooses, as it were, to pursue science rather than any more drastic course of action. She will learn their ways, and discriminate one of their habits from another. In her dull patience, she seems to give herself over to the study of the World of Description. ”

“ Now for our theory, that is precisely the way in which the eternal consciousness views the temporal order, — not ignoring one jot or tittle of its sharp distinctions of past or of future, of succession or of duration, — but still viewing the whole time-process as the expression of a single Internal Meaning. What we now call past and future are not merely the same for God; and, nevertheless, they are viewed at once, precisely as the beginning and the end of the rhythm are not the same for our experience, but are yet at once seen as belonging to one and the same whole succession. ”

“ For from our point of view, the Other, the completion that our finite being seeks, is not merely something beyond the present, and is not merely a future experience, but is also inclusive of the very process of the striving itself. For the goal of every finite life is simply the totality whereof this life, in its finitude, is a fragment. When I seek my own goal, I am looking for the whole of myself. ”

“ What deeper human mystery is there than the Ego? On the other hand, if I have completely solved the problem of self-consciousness, and if I am aware at this instant of the solution, so as to verify all that, as a fact, I am, then, for the same reason as the one before cited, I have present to myself an infinity of contents of consciousness. The maintainer of our thesis does not intend to assert that the Ego of this instant, of whom he speaks, does at present consciously verify this infinity of facts. ”

“ Now no philosophy can predetermine in this realm, either what special facts shall be observed, or what particular hypotheses as to their connection shall first be attempted, or what provisional theories shall prove best adapted to the purpose of any special science. Philosophy is powerless to act as a substitute for special science, precisely as it is powerless to add to the products of the industrial arts. It is as unable to formulate a thesis in the realms properly belonging to physics or to biology as it is to build a steam engine. ”

“ But all our experience also has relation to the interests whose play and whose success or defeat constitute the life of our will. Every serial succession of which we are conscious therefore has for us some sort of meaning. In it we find our success or our failure. In it our internal meanings are expressed, or hindered, thwarted or furthered. We are interested in life, even if it be, in idle moments, only the dreary interest of wondering what will happen next, or, in distressed moments, the interest in flying from our present fortune, or, in despairing moments, of wishing for the end ”

“ What is it to believe, as the faithful do, that God is in all their fortunes? What is it to maintain, as our Theory of Being does, that, amidst all the complexities of Nature and man's life, we are dealing with fragmentary glimpses of an Absolute Unity, of the type depicted in our foregoing series of lectures? The two problems, in many respects, resemble each other. What you already know of the solution of one problem goes far to prepare you for the other. ”

“ Whoever says, “In the universe at large only the present state of things is real, only the present movement of the stars, the present streamings of radiant light, the present deeds and thoughts of men are real; the whole past is dead; the whole future is not yet,” — any such reporter of the temporal existence of the universe may be invited to state how long his real present of the time-world is. ”

“ In dealing with the concept of Nature, we shall see what significant use may be made of the hypothesis that there exists or may exist, finite consciousness for which the series of events that we regard as no longer distinguishable from merely elementary and indivisible happenings, are distinguished so minutely as to furnish content as rich as those which, from our point of view, occupy icons of the world’s history. Our right to such hypotheses is incontestable, provided only that they help us to conceive the true unity of experience. ”

“ Anything will do, if only it belongs to the range of one’s specialty. The great world is there in the background all the time, awaiting the discriminating attention, now of this and now of that specialist. What you find must indeed be new, and, nevertheless, capable of being linked to the old. For, after all, even mere discrimination is an expression of the will, which seeks novelty. ”

“ The temporal man, viewed just now in time, appears, at first, to be sundered even from his own past and future, and still more from God. He is a seeker even for to-morrow’s bread, — still more for his salvation. He knows not just at this instant even his own individuality; still less should he immediately observe his relation to the Absolute in his present deed and in his fleeting experience. Only when he laboriously reflects upon his inmost meaning, or by faith anticipates the result of such reflection, does he become aware of how intimately his life is bound up with an Absolute life. ”

“ The forest of our common human ignorance is dark and tangled. Happy indeed are those who are content to live and to work only in regions where the practical labors of civilization have cleared the land, and where the task of life is to till the fertile fields and to walk in the established ways. The philosopher, in the world of thought, is by destiny forever a frontiersman. ”

“ And the true Series is that of the Self, and of its expression in life. The true variety is that of various individual Selves, who together constitute, in their unity, the Individual of Individuals, the absolute. Beyond our own circle of concretely known facts, there are not merely series of data to be discriminated, but volitional processes to be estimated, appreciated, and conceived in their true serial order, as the stages of the world’s life. ”

“ Our logical genesis of the concept of real Law will determine the definition that we shall give to the term. It will also determine the limits of the subjection of fact to law in the universe. It will free us from that bugbear of popular metaphysic, the superstition that whatever is, is somehow subject to an absolutely rigid Necessity. We shall see that necessity is only one aspect of the fact-world, and the more abstract one, which is a valid aspect only in so far as it serves to make possible Individuality and Freedom. ”

“ People come with false expectations to philosophy when they expect it to furnish them any substitute for special science, any peculiar power to anticipate the particular results of experience, any intuitive capacity to see in the finite world facts that other methods of inquiry have not made evident. For the primary purpose of a Theory of Being is not thus to discover what special finite beings are real, but to interpret the sense in which any fact whatever can be real. ”

“ We not only recognize in the concrete the facts that we chance to be making the objects of our present and conscious consideration, but we all acknowledge a realm of truth beyond, whose reality we accept, but whose detail is unknown to us. London is real to us when we think of it; but our acknowledgment of its reality is far from being a concrete recognition of the wealth and variety of facts, social and physical, that we regard as being contained in what is meant by the name. ”

“ What I find in consciousness is that a succession, such as a rhythm of drum-beats, a musical phrase, a verse of poetry, comes to me as one present whole, present in the sense that I know it all at once. ”

“ As we saw before, the brief span of our consciousness, the small range of succession, that we can grasp at once, constitutes a perfectly arbitrary limitation of our own special type of consciousness. But in principle a time-sequence, however brief, is already viewed in a way that is not merely temporal, when, despite its sequence, it is grasped at once, and is thus grasped not through mere memory, but by virtue of actual experience. ”

“ We can at any moment verify the fact that just then we do or do not find present what we seek. And we always do verify the fact in some respect, what we seek is present, since our seeking is already an act, and our act is already an expression of an idea. We also always verify the fact that, in some respect, what we seek is not present, since we are always dissatisfied. But the “objective facts,” in Nature or in the life of Man, are not thus ever to be verified, at any one instant of our lives. ”

“ We shall be dealing with a realm of abstractions, yet they will prove to be fruitful abstractions, everywhere founded upon final truth, although in themselves not final. For, that the world permits us, up to a certain point, to describe it, does help to throw light on the true nature of things. For the rest, I shall of course attempt here no account of the psychological genesis of our describing intelligence, or of its categories. I am concerned only with the logical genesis of these ideas, that is, with the way in which their simpler forms determine their more complex ones. ”

“ But we of course all recognize a sense in which Man is to be conceived as a part of Nature; while on the other hand, nothing is clearer than that, for us, all our beliefs about Nature are determined by conditions which belong, in one aspect, to the mind of Man. A confessedly vague way of stating the definition of the term is to say that by Nature we mean a realm external to our own private experience, and yet this side, so to speak, of the ultimate Reality, — a realm, as it were, between the divine, viewed as the Absolute, and the knowing finite human Subject. ”

“ So I do not base my view on the assertion that the will causes our beliefs and is free to change them. I point out simply that to believe as we do about men and things seems just now more reasonable to us than does any other belief which we chance to have in mind as an alternative. But seeming reasonable means seeming to fulfil a purpose. And I prove my doctrine not only by this appeal to consciousness, but, indirectly, by letting my opponent try to refute me. ”

“ The extremely manifold and subtle implications of this view of our consciousness of the realm of concrete facts can here only be indicated. Our later discussions of Nature and of Man must supply the details. It is plain, at once, that, according to our view, every concrete fact in the universe becomes for us, just in so far as it is acknowledged, the expression of a purpose, and so is never a mere datum of anybody’s present experience, and is never a mere constraining power, that from without simply forces our assent. A fact may be acknowledged while yet many aspects of it remain mysterious. ”