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.”[1] In truth, all that exists, including my own feeling and thought and percept, exists only by virtue of being experienced by the Absolute Self.
To prove the equivalence of the Absolute to the Christian’s God it is, in the second place, necessary to show that by ‘Absolute Self’ Royce means a genuine person who “is … and knows us,”[2] in whose ‘presence’ I may stand,[3] who “values and needs” my *deed”;[4] and, conversely, that he docs not mean by ‘Absolute Self’ a mere aggregate of finite selves; that his self-conscions, absolute person is not an unknown Absolute ‘coming to consciousness’ in the totality of finite, or partial, selves. In truth, Professor Royce has fully guarded himself against this essentially pluralistic interpretation of his doctrine. “The Absolute Unity of Consciousness,” he writes, “contains not merely finite types of self-consciousness but the … consciousness of its own being as Thinker, Experiencer, Seer, Love, Will.”[5] By this statement Dr. Royce invests the Absolute with a ‘consciousness of its own? explicitly contrasted with ‘finite types of consciousness.’ In the following words he attributes to the Absolute both the human and the more-than-human experience. “I hold,” he says, “that all finite consciousness just as it as in us—ignorance, striving, defeat … narrowness—is all present from the Absolute point of view but is also seen in unity with the solution of problems … the overcoming of defeats … the supplementing of all narrowness.”[6] 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
