Josiah Royce

The American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was the last and the greatest spokesperson for systematic philosophical idealism in the United States.

Josiah Royce was born on Nov. 20, 1855, at Grass Valley, Calif. His forceful mother gave him his early education. He attended school in San Francisco, where the family moved when he was 11 years old. At the University of California the precocious youth's interests shifted from mining engineering to literature and philosophy.

When Royce graduated in 1875, his burgeoning intellectual powers won him a year of graduate study in Germany, where he immersed himself in philosophical idealism. On his return to the United States in 1876, he accepted a fellowship to Johns Hopkins University and took his doctorate in 1878. After teaching literature and composition at the University of California for 4 years, Royce was invited to teach philosophy at Harvard in 1882. The rest of his life as teacher and philosopher centered at Harvard.

His mother had impressed on Royce a concern for basic religious issues; his youth in California and his own solitary disposition had posed the problem of the relationship between the individual and the community. All of his philosophical writings revolved around these issues. His first major work, significantly entitled The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), presented the central ideas that his later writings elaborated and refined. He developed this philosophy in a series of major works, the most important of which were The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), The Conception of God (1897), Studies of Good and Evil (1898), The World and the Individual (2 vols., 1900-1902), and his summary statement, The Problem of Christianity (2 vols., 1913).

Royce's philosophy rested on the conviction that ultimate reality consisted of idea or spirit. "The world of dead facts is an illusion," he wrote. "The truth of it is a spiritual life." His central conception was the Absolute. The world exists in and for an all-embracing, all-knowing thought, Royce explained. This amounted to a philosophical conception of God, the Absolute which united all thought and all experience. Given this reality, the individual's task is to understand the meaning of the Absolute and to adopt its purposes freely.

Royce's ethical theory rested on his striking principle of loyalty, which he presented most effectively in The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908). He argued that loyalty was the cohesive principle of all ethical behavior and of all social practice. The moral law, he thought, could be reduced to the precept "Be loyal." Loyalty also linked the individual to the community. The loyal man was one who gave himself to a cause, but each individual must choose his cause so that it would advance the good of all. He should act to further loyalty to the very principle of loyalty.

In his later years Royce's increasing concern about the practical bearings of philosophy was reflected in his War and Insurance (1914) and The Hope of the Great Community (1916). By the time of his death on Sept. 14, 1916, Royce had become one of America's most important philosophers. His influence on his contemporaries was a tribute to his intellectual power and to his concern with fundamental religious issues.

Further Reading

The Letters of Josiah Royce, edited by John Glendenning (1970), is the companion volume of Royce's Basic Writings (2 vols., 1969). Stuart Gerry Brown edited two collections of Royce's writings and provided excellent introductory essays: The Social Philosophy of Josiah Royce (1950) and The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce (1952).

A fine presentation of Royce's complete ethical philosophy, using Royce's unpublished papers, is Peter Fuss, The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce (1965). Thomas F. Powell, in Josiah Royce (1967), argues that Royce's philosophy is relevant to contemporary religious thought. Vincent Buranelli, Josiah Royce (1964), gives considerable attention to Royce as a literary figure. For background see also Clifford Barrett, Contemporary Idealism in America (1932); and for a description of the rise of scientific methodology of inquiry during Royce's time at Harvard see Paul Buck, ed., Social Sciences at Harvard, 1860-1902: From Inculcation to the Open Mind (1965).

Additional Sources

Clendenning, John, The life and thought of Josiah Royce, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Hine, Robert V., Josiah Royce: from Grass Valley to Harvard, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

Kuklick, Bruce, Josiah Royce: an intellectual biography, Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co., 1985. □

Royce, Josiah (1855–1916), born in California, graduated from the state university (1875), was an advanced student in Germany and at Johns Hopkins, and became an instructor of English at his alma mater (1878–82). Although the remainder of his life was spent as a professor of philosophy at Harvard, his deep feeling for his native background is exhibited in California …A Study of American Character (1886) and his only novel, The Feud of Oakfield Creek (1887), treating the same conflict that is central to Frank Norris's The Octopus. Brought to Harvard by William James, he at first believed himself in complete accord with James's philosophy, but, though they remained friendly, they soon split on philosophic ideas. James's Will To Believe referred to specific human minds, whereas Royce considered consciousness to be a universal principle; James was a pluralist, believing God only one of many, Royce was a monist, affirming the essential, necessary oneness of things. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) first postulates a goodness at the heart of things that “satisfies the highest moral needs,” and then proceeds to prove that there is an absolute or universal knower affirming judgments and experiencing objects transcending man's limitations. The Conception of God (1897) sustains the autonomy of the individual in face of this absolute, by contending that the absolute Will is distributed among human beings for independent use. His lectures at the University of Aberdeen were published as The World and the Individual (2 vols., 1900–1901), which first analyzes other philosophies and argues for an idealism in which reality is the possession solely of an all‐enveloping mind, and then applies this to practical matters on the same basis developed in The Conception of God. He accounts for sin in the individual by contending that the highest value of the world lies in a moral conflict and victory, and that what is sinful in the finite view is in the higher view accepted as giving the necessary resistance to the moral will. After 1900 Royce became more interested in technical logic and the application of his philosophy to specific contemporary moral issues. The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) contends that individual salvation lies in loyalty to a cause, supplemented by “loyalty to loyalty,” and these ideas are further propounded in The Problem of Christianity (2 vols., 1913), lectures delivered at Oxford. His emphasis on the problem of loyalty and belief that knowledge is a social affair, resulting from a community of interpretation, was applied to the moral issues of World War I in The Hope of the Great Community (1916). Among his many other works, the most popular was The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), which brilliantly examines the whole field, with particular attention to such German idealists as Fichte, to whom his beliefs were indebted.

Royce, Josiah (1855-1916)

Philosopher and a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research. He was born on November 20, 1855, at Grass Valley, California. He studied at University of California (B.A., 1875) and later did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D., 1878) and in Germany at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen. In 1880 he married Katharine Head.

After his return from Germany he became an instructor in English literature and logic at the University of California. Then in 1882 he joined the Harvard faculty where in 1914 he was named Alford Professor of Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity. He authored a number of books and professional papers.

As a prominent modern American philosopher, Royce investigated the problem of the individual self as part of the world mind. In part due to his friendship with William James, he became a founding member of the ASPR in 1884 and served as chairman and vice president of the Committee on Apparitions and Haunting Houses. The committee's name was changed later to Committee on Phantasms and Presentiments; it classified cases sent in from individuals all over the United States and published his report in the first volume of the Proceedings of the ASPR. Royce died September 14, 1916, at Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sources:

Royce, Josiah. "Report of the Committee on Phantasm and Presentiments." Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1, 3 (December 1877); 1, 4 (March 1889).

——. William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life. N.p., 1911. Reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969.

Josiah Royce 1855–1916, American philosopher, b. California, grad. Univ. of California, 1873. After studying in Germany and at Johns Hopkins, he returned to California to teach (1878–82). From 1882 until his death he was at Harvard, becoming a professor in 1892. Among his works are The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), The World and the Individual (1900–1901), The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), and Lectures on Modern Idealism (1919). Royce, thoroughly grounded in history and cognizant of scientific thought, was the foremost American idealist. He held that reality is the life of an absolute mind. We know truth beyond ourselves because we are a part of the logos, or world-mind. Science successfully depends on description, but appreciation must precede description and consequently ideals must be deeper than the mechanism of science. The natural order of the world must be also a moral order. Our ethical obligation is to the moral order and takes the form of loyalty to the great community of all individuals.

Bibliography: See biography by B. Kuklick (1972, repr. 1985); studies by G. Marcel (tr. 1965), P. L. Fuss (1965), T. F. Powell (1967), B. B. Singh (1973), F. M. Oppenheim (1980), and J. Clendenning (1985).