Josiah Royce - Ideas

Ideas

The years between 1882 and 1895 established Royce as one of the most eminent American philosophers. His publication in 1885 of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and in 1892 of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, both based on Harvard lectures, secured his place in the philosophical world. The former of these contained a new proof for the existence of God based upon the reality of error. All errors are judged to be erroneous in comparison to some total truth, Royce argued, and we must either hold ourselves infallible or accept that even our errors are evidence of a world of truth. Having made it clear that idealism depends upon postulates and proceeds hypothetically, Royce defends the necessity of objective reference of our ideas to a universal whole within which they belong, for without these postulates, “both practical life and the commonest results of theory, from the simplest impressions to the most valuable beliefs, would be for most if not all of us utterly impossible.” (see The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 324) The justification for idealistic postulates is practical (a point Royce made repeatedly in his maturity, accepting the label of "pragmatist" for himself, to the extent that it embraced practical life as the guide and determiner of the value of philosophical ideas. Royce accepted the fact that he had not and could not offer a complete or satisfactory account of the "relation of the individual minds to the all-embracing mind” (see RAP, p. 371), but he pushes ahead in spite of this difficulty to offer the best account he can manage. This stance is called "fallibilism" by the philosophers of his generation, and Royce's embrace of it may be attributed to the influence of Peirce and James. Royce also defends a view that was later to be called personalism: “The ambiguous relation of the conscious individuals to the universal thought . . . will be decided in the sense of their inclusion, as elements in the universal thought. They will indeed not become 'things in the dream' of any other person than themselves, but their whole reality, just exactly as it is in them, will be found to be but a fragment of a higher reality. This reality will be no Power, nor will it produce the individuals by dreaming of them, but it will complete the existence that in them, as separate beings, has no rational completeness.” (RAP, pp. 380–381) This is an unavoidable hypothesis, Royce believed, and its moral and religious aspect point to the existence of an Absolute.