Mary Whiton Calkins

“ The mother which is a republic is a community which is also a person, and not merely an aggregate, and not merely by metaphor a person. Precisely so, the individual patriot who leaves his home behind and steadfastly serving presses on in ardent quest of the moment when his life can be fulfilled by his death for his country, is all the more richly and deeply an individual that he is also a community of interpretation, whose life has its unity in its restless search for death on behalf of the great good cause,—its ever-living Logos in its fluent quest for the goal. ”

“ But all this proves not at all that a community is a self, or person, but merely—to quote Royce himself—that it ‘behaves’ and is treated ‘as if’ a person.
This interpretation of Royce’s conception is in complete harmony with the detailed teaching of a relatively recent paper. [45] “God,” he writes, ‘as our philosophy ought to conceive him, is indeed a spirit and a person; but he is not a being who exists in separation from the world, simply as its external creator. He expresses himself in the world, and the world is simply his own life as he lives it out. ”

“ Christian theism is distinguished from many forms of ‘natural religion’ by its conception of God as essentially like-minded with us human selves. There can be no doubt that this is also Royce’s teaching about the Absolute. “Unless,” he says, “the Absolute knows what we know when we endure and wait, ... when we long and suffer, the Absolute in so far is less and not more than we are.” [22] In truth, all that exists, including my own feeling and thought and percept, exists only by virtue of being experienced by the Absolute Self. ”

“ Now this religious teaching, also, is metaphysically justified by the Roycian doctrine that every man is the expression of a unique purpose of the Absolute Self. To the conventional critic’s protest that the human self would be lost in the Absolute ‘as a river in the sea,’ Royce replies that on the contrary, the rich variety, the distinctness, and the stability of the Absolute’s purposes furnish the only guarantee of the individuality of the human self. ... The identity of the partial self with the Absolute is never, in his view, a mere identity without a difference. ”

“ By these words Royce clearly indicates that, in his view, the Absolute has an experience transcending, though not ‘external to,’ that of the human selves. Many other quotations might be made to substantiate my conclusion that the Absolute of Royce’s system is ‘a person’ in the sense in which the Christian’s God is a person, and neither an aggregate nor an Unknown Reality. A similar conclusion must be drawn from Royce’s trenchant criticism of Bradley’s conception of an Absolute Experience which is not to be regarded as an Absolute Self. ”

“ There is no need to argue that the conception of God as spirit, or person, is fundamental to Christian theism but I must make good my assertion that Royce should be interpreted as using the words ‘self-conscious,’ ‘person,’ and ‘individual’ in what is qualitatively the sense in which they are applied to human beings. ”

“ The coherent life which includes past, present, and future, and holds them reasonably together, is the life of what I have called a Community of Interpretation, in which the present, with an endless fecundity of invention, interprets the past to the future, precisely as, in the Pauline–Johannine type of theology, Christ, or the Spirit, interprets the united individuals who constitute the human aspect of the Church to the divine being in whom these members seek, at once their fulfilment, their unity, their diversity, and the goal of their loyalty. ”

“ The Christian conception, based on the Master’s teaching, of God as father, although not literally an innovation in religious doctrine, was so vitalized by the life and words of Jesus that it rooted itself in the hearts of men. ”

“ To the discussion of this problem the next following paragraphs are devoted.
Unquestionably, Royce seems by certain statements to make the universal community equivalent to the Self of his earlier books. He declares ‘this essentially social universe ... to be real, and to be in fact the sole and supreme reality—the Absolute,” [35] and he asks: “‘What kind of salvation does it offer? ... What does it call upon a reasonable man to do?’’ Yet, in spite of expressions like these, I believe that Royce does not actually identify the Absolute Self with the Universal Community. ”

“ Even in its supreme conception of God as suffering, as ‘touched with the feeling of our infirmities’ and ‘afflicted in our affliction,’ the Christian doctrine that God is Father of men follows at once from the absolutist’s conception of God—and from this conception only. The pluralistic theist, who teaches that God shares human experience, must meet insistent difficulties: How should God know me if I am separate from him? ”

“ Yet with all these qualifications the question persists: how can a human self be free to oppose the will of Him by whose selective attention all that exists has its being? how can I, in Royce’s phrase, “choose to forget”? how can I “become a conscious and deliberate traitor”? [53] The truth is that Royce seems to discuss sin psychologically and ethically rather than metaphysically. And the result is that we have in his pages a masterly psychological analysis of that violation of moral loyalty which he calls sin [54] and which he will not have smoothed away or ignored. ”

“ The argument by which this theistic position is reached is so well-known that it need be suggested in only the briefest fashion. It will be found, in greater or less elaboration, in every one of Royce's books, beginning with The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. The realistic conception of reality external to mind is found to involve internal inconsistency [8] and the universe is accordingly conceived as through and through ideal. This ideal world, in the second place, is shown to be rightly viewed only as a world of interrelated selves. ”

“ The cardinal defect in Royce’s conception is—psychologically stated—his undue subordination of the rôle of the leader to that of the group, or—historically stated—his underestimation of the fact that passionate loyalty to the person of Christ was the bond of unity in the early Christian church. On the other hand, Christianity truly is, as Royce insists, an inherently social religion; and loyalty to the universal community is indeed the essential moral factor of the Christian religion.⁠⁠Mary Whiton Calkins. ”

“ Self is infinite, all-including. The characteristic features of this argument, as is well known, are, first, the completely empirical starting-point from facts of the scientific and the moral life, and, second, the substitution for a causal argument to the existence of God of an argument based, in Royce’s phrase, on correspondence [12] —the correspondence of individual purpose with super-individual experience. The outcome is the conception of the Universe as Absolute Self—as All-Knower to whom “is present all possible truth” ”

“ But the two central ideas upon which my Problem of Christianity turns, the idea of the community, and the idea of what the historical theology of the Christian church early learned to call ‘the holy spirit’ are ideas which are as living, and growing, as they are ancient. They grew when the prophets of Israel began to formulate their doctrine of Jerusalem, which, in the beginning was a city, of somewhat questionable architecture and morals, in the hill districts of Judea ”

“ You can indeed distinguish between the world as our common sense, properly but fragmentarily, has to view it and as our sciences study it ... and God, who is infinitely more than any finite system of natural facts or of human lives can express. ”

“ These two ideas, the Community, and the Spirit, have been growing ever since. They are growing today. They certainly have assumed, in my own mind, a new vitality, and a very much deeper significance than, for me, they ever had before I wrote my Problem of Christianity. ”

“ And each of these selves, it is argued, directly knows—as well through its error as through its aspiration—the existence of a reality-greater-than-itself. This Greater Reality must, finally—in accordance with the personalistic premiss of the argument—be a Greater Self of which each lesser self is an identical part yet by which it is transcended. ”

“ Thus, it is at least compatible with the main trend of The Problem of Christianity to suppose that Royce, while primarily conceiving Christianity in its relation to the church, or beloved community, none the less distinguishes God as spirit, counsellor, or interpreter from the church in which he expresses himself and from the world which he interprets. ”

“ The Christian theologian will not fail to remark the virtual identity, explicitly stressed by Royce, between God conceived as spirit indwelling in the beloved community and the Holy Spirit, third Person of the Christian Trinity. ”