them in the earlier and less predominantly ethical and psychological works of Professor Royce.
In The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892) Dr. Royce explicitly labels himself as “a theist.”[1] In The Conception of God (1895 and 1897) he characterizes his view as “distinctly theistic and not pantheistic,”[2] and insists that “what the faith of our fathers has genuinely meant by God is … identical with the inevitable outcome of a reflective philosophy.”[3] 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[4] 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.[5] 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.[6] The specifically theistic form of this argument stresses the infinite possibility of error and thus leads inevitably to the conclusion[7] that the transcending (yet immanent) 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[8]
- ↑ P. 347.
- ↑ The Conception of God, second edition, p. 49.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 50.
- ↑ Cf. especially, The World and the Individual, I, Lecture III.
- ↑ Cf. especially, The World and the Individual, II, Lectures IV. and V.
- ↑ Cf. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 422 ff.; The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 380; The Conception of God, second edition, pp. 41 et al.; The World and the Individual, II, p. 208 f., Sources of Religious Insight, pp. 108 f.
- ↑ Cf. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, chapter XI, especially, pp. 424 ff., and The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, end of p. 425.
- ↑ The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 354.
