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.[1] The conception of the Beloved Community thus illuminates one of the most dimly apprehended of Christian doctrines.)[2] A second confirmation of this view, that Royce distinguishes God from the community, is gained by a scrutiny of the argument by which he seeks to establish the existence of the community as ‘a sort of supra-personal being’[3] with ‘a mind of its own.’[4] The argument, like most of those in Royce’s later books, differs toto cælo from the closely articulated, logically ordered reasoning of his strictly metaphysical works. It consists partly in the observation that custom, language, and religions are products of community life[5] and partly in the significant teaching that an individual “may love his community as if it were a person.”[6] 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.[7] “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. … 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
- ↑ Ibid., II, pp. 14 ff. It may be noted that this doctrine is in harmony with Hegel’s teaching, though entirely independent of it.
- ↑ The two preceding sentences have been added to the paper as read.
- ↑ The Problem of Christianity, I, p. 67.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 62; cf. II, p. 87.
- ↑ The Problem of Christianity, I, p. 62.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 67; cf. p. 101 and II, pp. 91 ff.
- ↑ “What is Vital in Christianity.” Prepared for a series of addresses to the Young Men’s Christian Association of Harvard University in 1909. In William James and Other Essays.
