infinitely more than any finite system of natural facts or of human lives can express. … This entire world is present at once to the eternal, divine consciousness as a single whole, and this whole is what the absolute chooses as his own expression.”[1] Evidently Royce teaches, to use the traditional theological phraseology, not only the immanence but the transcendence of God; he conceives God not only as “the divine being” who is “the very life of the community”[2] but as a spirit who views the world “from above.”[3]
II. Royce’s doctrine of the relation of man to God more obviously coincides with the teaching of Christian theism. In conformity with the profoundest Christian conceptions he holds (a) that God shares every human experience, and that the life which man shares with God is essentially good, not evil; (b) that every human being is an expression of God’s individuating will; (c) that the human self has a relative freedom; that he may and actually does, act in opposition to the divine will and that his sin must be atoned for; (d) that the human self is an essentially social being.
(a) 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. Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of Royce to Christian thought consists precisely in the fact that he argues the inherent metaphysical necessity of this conception which Jesus revealed to his disciples and which traditional theology laboriously tries to establish by a ‘cosmological’ argument to God as ‘first’ of temporal causes or by a design-argument based on arbitrarily selected facts. To Royce, on the other hand, this doctrine is an immediate consequence of the conception of God as All-Experiencer, as Absolute Knower. For, according to his absolutistic yet personalistic philosophy, the percepts, the thoughts, the sorrows, the fidelities of every least human self are real only in so far as the Absolute Self
