Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/263

Josiah Royce 245 Sill/ and his own reading of Mill and Spencer as well as of the great German philosophers, Kant, ScheUing, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. In 1882 he went to Harvard, where his prodigious learning, his keen and catholic appreciation of poetry, and the biblical eloquence with which he expressed a rich inner experience, at once made a profound impression. His singularly pure and loyal, though shy, spirit attracted a few strong friendships; but his life at Cambridge was in the main one of philosophic de- tachment. As a citizen of the great intellectual world, however, he closely followed its multitudinous events ; and his successive books only partly reflected his unusually active and varied intellectual interests. In his earliest published papers he is inclined to follow Kant in denying the possibility of ultimate metaphysical solutions except by ethical postulates, but in his first book. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), he comes out as a full-fledged metaphysical idealist. This brilliant book at once made a profound impression, especially with the argu- ments that the very possibility of error cannot be formulated except in terms of an absolute truth or rational totality which requires an absolute knower. Like the parts of a sentence, all things find their condition and meaning in the final totality to i which they belong. The world must thus be either through and through of the same nature as our mind, or else be utterly ' unknowable. But to affirm the unknowable is to involve one's self in contradictions. Royce delights in these sharp antitheses and the reduction of opposing arguments to contradictions. In his next book, an unusually eloquent one entitled The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), the element of will rather than knowledge receives the greater emphasis. The Berkeleian analysis of the world as composed of ideas is taken for granted, and the emphasis is rather on the nature of the World Mind or Logos. Following Schopenhauer, he points out that even in the idealistic view of the world there is an irrational element, namely, the brute existence of just this kind of world. The great and tragic fact of experience is the fact of effort and passionate toil which never finds complete satisfaction. This eternal frustration of our ideals or will is an essential part of spiritual life, and enriches it just as the shadows enrich the ' See Book III, Chap. x.