Meantime the mantle of philosophical authority had fallen at Harvard
upon other shoulders. A young Californian, Josiah Royce, had come back
from Germany with a reputation for wisdom; and even without knowing that
he had already produced a new proof of the existence of God, merely to
look at him you would have felt that he was a philosopher; his great
head seemed too heavy for his small body, and his portentous brow,
crowned with thick red hair, seemed to crush the lower part of his face.
“Royce,” said William James of him, “has an indecent exposure of
forehead.” There was a suggestion about him of the benevolent ogre or
the old child, in whom a preternatural sharpness of insight lurked
beneath a grotesque mask. If you gave him any cue, or even without one,
he could discourse broadly on any subject; you never caught him napping.
Whatever the text‐books and encyclopædias could tell him, he knew; and
if the impression he left on your mind was vague, that was partly
because, in spite of his comprehensiveness, he seemed to view everything
in relation to something else that remained untold. His approach to
anything was oblique; he began a long way off, perhaps with the American
preface of a funny story; and when the point came in sight, it was at
once enveloped again in a cloud of qualifications, in the parliamentary
jargon of philosophy. The tap once turned on, out flowed the stream of
systematic disquisition, one hour, two hours, three hours of it,
according to demand or opportunity. The voice, too, was merciless and
harsh. You felt the overworked, standardised, academic engine, creaking
and thumping on at the call of duty or of habit, with no thought of
sparing itself or any one else. Yet a sprightlier soul behind this
performing soul seemed to watch and laugh at the process. Sometimes a
merry light would twinkle in the little eyes, and a bashful smile would
creep over the uncompromising mouth. A sense of the paradox, the irony,
the inconclusiveness of the whole argument would pierce to the surface,
like a white‐cap bursting here and there on the heavy swell of the sea.
His procedure was first to gather and digest whatever the sciences or
the devil might have to say. He had an evident sly pleasure in the
degustation and savour of difficulties; biblical criticism, the struggle
for life, the latest German theory of sexual insanity, had no terrors
for him; it was all grist for the mill, and woe to any tender thing, any
beauty or any illusion, that should get between that upper and that
nether millstone! He seemed to say: If I were not Alexander how gladly
would I be Diogenes, and if I had not a system to defend, how easily I
might tell you the truth. But after the sceptic had ambled quizzically
over the ground, the prophet would mount the pulpit to survey it. He
would then prove that in spite of all those horrors and contradictions,
or rather because of them, the universe was absolutely perfect. For
behind that mocking soul in him there was yet another, a devout and
heroic soul. Royce was heir to the Calvinistic tradition; piety, to his
mind, consisted in trusting divine providence and justice, while
emphasising the most terrifying truths about one’s own depravity and the
sinister holiness of God. He accordingly addressed himself, in his chief
writings, to showing that all lives were parts of a single divine life
in which all problems were solved and all evils justified.
It is characteristic of Royce that in his proof of something sublime,
like the existence of God, his premiss should be something sad and
troublesome, the existence of error. Error exists, he tells us, and
common sense will readily agree, although the fact is not
unquestionable, and pure mystics and pure sensualists deny it. But if
error exists, Royce continues, there must be a truth from which it
differs; and the existence of truth (according to the principle of
idealism, that nothing can exist except for a mind that knows it)
implies that some one knows the truth; but as to know the truth
thoroughly, and supply the corrective to every possible error, involves
omniscience, we have proved the existence of an omniscient mind or
universal thought; and this is almost, if not quite, equivalent to the
existence of God.
What carried Royce over the evident chasms and assumptions in this
argument was his earnestness and passionate eloquence. He passed for an
eminent logician, because he was dialectical and fearless in argument
and delighted in the play of formal relations; he was devoted to chess,
music, and mathematics; but all this show of logic was but a screen for
his heart, and in his heart there was no clearness. His reasoning was
not pure logic or pure observation; it was always secretly enthusiastic
or malicious, and the result it arrived at had been presupposed. Here,
for instance, no unprejudiced thinker, not to speak of a pure logician,
would have dreamt of using the existence of error to found the being of
truth upon. Error is a biological accident which may any day cease to
exist, say at the extinction of the human race; whereas the being of
truth or fact is involved indefeasibly and eternally in the existence of
anything whatever, past, present, or future; every event of itself
renders true or false any proposition that refers to it. No one would
conceive of such a thing as error or suspect its presence, unless he had
already found or assumed many a truth; nor could anything be an error
actually unless the truth was definite and real. All this Royce of
course recognised, and it was in some sense the heart of what he meant
to assert and to prove; but it does not need proving and hardly
asserting. What needed proof was something else, of less logical
importance but far greater romantic interest, namely, that the truth was
hovering over us and about to descend into our hearts; and this Royce
was not disinclined to confuse with the being of truth, so as to bring
it within the range of logical argument. He was tormented by the
suspicion that he might be himself in the toils of error, and fervently
aspired to escape from it. Error to him was no natural, and in itself
harmless, incident of finitude; it was a sort of sin, as finitude was
too. It was a part of the problem of evil; a terrible and urgent problem
when your first postulate or dogma is that moral distinctions and moral
experience are the substance of the world, and not merely an incident in
it. The mere being of truth, which is all a logician needs, would not
help him in this wrestling for personal salvation; as he keenly felt and
often said, the truth is like the stars, always laughing at us. Nothing
would help him but _possession_ of the truth, something eventual and
terribly problematic. He longed to believe that all his troubles and
questions, some day and somewhere, must find their solution and quietus;
if not in his own mind, in some kindred spirit that he could, to that
extent, identify with himself. There must be not only cold truth, not
even cold truth personified, but victorious _knowledge_ of the truth,
breaking like a sun‐burst through the clouds of error. The nerve of his
argument was not logical at all; it was a confession of religious
experience, in which the agonised consciousness of error led to a strong
imaginative conviction that the truth would be found at last.
The truth, as here conceived, meant the whole truth about everything;
and certainly, if any plausible evidence for such a conclusion could be
adduced, it would be interesting to learn that we are destined to become
omniscient, or are secretly omniscient already. Nevertheless, the
aspiration of all religious minds does not run that way. Aristotle tells
us that there are many things it is better not to know; and his sublime
deity is happily ignorant of our errors and of our very existence; more
emphatically so the even sublimer deities of Plotinus and the Indians.
The omniscience which our religion attributes to God as the searcher of
hearts and the judge of conduct has a moral function rather than a
logical one; it prevents us from hiding our sins or being unrecognised
in our merits; it is not conceived to be requisite in order that it may
be true that those sins or merits have existed. Atheists admit the
facts, but they are content or perhaps relieved that they should pass
unobserved. But here again Royce slipped into a romantic equivocation
which a strict logician would not have tolerated. Knowledge of the
truth, a passing psychological possession, was substituted for the truth
known, and this at the cost of rather serious ultimate confusions. It is
the truth itself, the facts in their actual relations, that honest
opinion appeals to, not to another opinion or instance of knowledge; and
if, in your dream of warm sympathy and public corroboration, you lay up
your treasure in some instance of knowledge, which time and doubt might
corrupt, you have not laid up your treasure in heaven. In striving to
prove the being of truth, the young Royce absurdly treated it as
doubtful, setting a bad example to the pragmatists; while in striving to
lend a psychological quality to this truth and turning it into a
problematical instance of knowledge, he unwittingly deprived it of all
authority and sublimity. To personify the truth is to care less for
truth than for the corroboration and sympathy which the truth, become
human, might bring to our opinions. It is to set up another thinker,
ourself enlarged, to vindicate us; without considering that this second
thinker would be shut up, like us, in his own opinions, and would need
to look to the truth beyond him as much as we do.
To the old problem of evil Royce could only give an old answer, although
he rediscovered and repeated it for himself in many ways, since it was
the core of his whole system. Good, he said, is essentially the struggle
with evil and the victory over it; so that if evil did not exist, good
would be impossible. I do not think this answer set him at rest; he
could hardly help feeling that all goods are not of that bellicose
description, and that not all evils produce a healthy reaction or are
swallowed up in victory; yet the fact that the most specious solution to
this problem of evil left it unsolved was in its way appropriate; for if
the problem had been really solved, the struggle to find a solution and
the faith that there was one would come to an end; yet perhaps this
faith and this struggle are themselves the supreme good. Accordingly the
true solution of this problem, which we may all accept, is that no
solution can ever be found.
Here is an example of the difference between the being of truth and the
ultimate solution of all our problems. There is certainly a truth about
evil, and in this case not an unknown truth; yet it is no solution to
the “problem” which laid the indomitable Royce on the rack. If a younger
son asks why he was not born before his elder brother, that question may
represent an intelligible state of his feelings; but there is no answer
to it, because it is a childish question. So the question why it is
right that there should be any evil is itself perverse and raised by
false presumptions. To an unsophisticated mortal the existence of evil
presents a task, never a problem. Evil, like error, is an incident of
animal life, inevitable in a crowded and unsettled world, where one
spontaneous movement is likely to thwart another, and all to run up
against material impossibilities. While life lasts this task is
recurrent, and every creature, in proportion to the vitality and
integrity of his nature, strives to remove or abate those evils of which
he is sensible. When the case is urgent and he is helpless, he will cry
out for divine aid; and (if he does not perish first) he will soon see
this aid coming to him through some shift in the circumstances that
renders his situation endurable. Positive religion takes a naturalistic
view of things, and requires it. It parts company with a scientific
naturalism only in accepting the authority of instinct or revelation in
deciding certain questions of fact, such as immortality or miracles. It
rouses itself to crush evil, without asking why evil exists. What could
be more intelligible than that a deity like Jehovah, a giant inhabitant
of the natural world, should be confronted with rivals, enemies, and
rebellious children? What could be more intelligible than that the
inertia of matter, or pure chance, or some contrary purpose, should mar
the expression of any platonic idea exercising its magic influence over
the world? For the Greek as for the Jew the task of morals is the same:
to subdue nature as far as possible to the uses of the soul, by whatever
agencies material or spiritual may be at hand; and when a limit is
reached in that direction, to harden and cauterise the heart in the face
of inevitable evils, opening it wide at the same time to every sweet
influence that may descend to it from heaven. Never for a moment was
positive religion entangled in a sophistical optimism. Never did it
conceive that the most complete final deliverance and triumph would
_justify_ the evils which they abolished. As William James put it, in
his picturesque manner, if at the last day all creation was shouting
hallelujah and there remained one cockroach with an unrequited love,
_that_ would spoil the universal harmony; it would spoil it, he meant,
in truth and for the tender philosopher, but probably not for those
excited saints. James was thinking chiefly of the present and future,
but the same scrupulous charity has its application to the past. To
remove an evil is not to remove the fact that it has existed. The tears
that have been shed were shed in bitterness, even if a remorseful hand
afterwards wipes them away. To be patted on the back and given a
sugar‐plum does not reconcile even a child to a past injustice. And the
case is much worse if we are expected to make our heaven out of the
foolish and cruel pleasures of contrast, or out of the pathetic
obfuscation produced by a great relief. Such a heaven would be a lie,
like the sardonic heavens of Calvin and Hegel. The existence of any evil
anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
Nevertheless philosophers have always had a royal road to complete
satisfaction. One of the purest of pleasures, which they cultivate above
all others, is the pleasure of understanding. Now, as playwrights and
novelists know, the intellect is no less readily or agreeably employed
in understanding evil than in understanding good—more so, in fact, if in
the intellectual man, besides his intelligence, there is a strain of
coarseness, irony, or desire to belittle the good things others possess
and he himself has missed. Sometimes the philosopher, even when above
all meanness, becomes so devoted a naturalist that he is ashamed to
remain a moralist, although this is what he probably was in the
beginning; and where all is one vast cataract of events, he feels it
would be impertinent of him to divide them censoriously into things that
ought to be and things that ought not to be. He may even go one step
farther. Awestruck and humbled before the universe, he may insensibly
transform his understanding and admiration of it into the assertion that
the existence of evil is no evil at all, but that the order of the
universe is in every detail necessary and perfect, so that the mere
mention of the word evil is blind and blasphemous.
This sentiment, which as much as any other deserves the name of
pantheism, is often expressed incoherently and with a false afflatus;
but when rationally conceived, as it was by Spinoza, it amounts to this:
that good and evil are relations which things bear to the living beings
they affect. In itself nothing—much less this whole mixed universe—can
be either good or bad; but the universe wears the aspect of a good in so
far as it feeds, delights, or otherwise fosters any creature within it.
If we define the intellect as the power to see things as they are, it is
clear that in so far as the philosopher is a pure intellect the universe
will be a pure good to the philosopher; everything in it will give play
to his exclusive passion. Wisdom counsels us therefore to become
philosophers and to concentrate our lives as much as possible in pure
intelligence, that we may be led by it into the ways of peace. Not that
the universe will be proved thereby to be intrinsically good (although
in the heat of their intellectual egotism philosophers are sometimes
betrayed into saying so), but that it will have become in that measure a
good to us, and we shall be better able to live happily and freely in
it. If intelligibility appears in things, it does so like beauty or use,
because the mind of man, in so far as it is adapted to them, finds its
just exercise in their society.
This is an ancient, shrewd, and inexpugnable position. If Royce had been
able to adhere to it consistently, he would have avoided his gratuitous
problem of evil without, I think, doing violence to the sanest element
in his natural piety, which was joy in the hard truth, with a touch of
humour and scorn in respect to mortal illusions. There was an observant
and docile side to him; and as a child likes to see things work, he
liked to see processions of facts marching on ironically, whatever we
might say about it. This was his sense of the power of God. It attached
him at first to Spinoza and later to mathematical logic. No small part
of his life‐long allegiance to the Absolute responded to this sentiment.
The outlook, however, was complicated and half reversed for him by the
transcendental theory of knowledge which he had adopted. This theory
regards all objects, including the universe, as merely terms posited by
the will of the thinker, according to a definite grammar of thought
native to his mind. In order that his thoughts may be addressed to any
particular object, he must first choose and create it of his own accord;
otherwise his opinions, not being directed upon any object in particular
within his ken, cannot be either true or false, whatever picture they
may frame. What anything external may happen to be, when we do not mean
to speak of it, is irrelevant to our discourse. If, for instance, the
real Royce were not a denizen and product of my mind—of my deeper self—I
could not so much as have a wrong idea of him. The need of this initial
relevance in our judgements seems to the transcendentalist to drive all
possible objects into the fold of his secret thoughts, so that he has
two minds, one that seeks the facts and another that already possesses
or rather constitutes them.
Pantheism, when this new philosophy of knowledge is adopted, seems at
first to lose its foundations. There is no longer an external universe
to which to bow; no little corner left for us in the infinite where,
after making the great sacrifice, we may build a safe nest. The
intellect to which we had proudly reduced ourselves has lost its
preeminence; it can no longer be called the faculty of seeing things as
they are. It has become what psychological critics of intellectualism,
such as William James, understand by it: a mass of human propensities to
abstraction, construction, belief, or inference, by which imaginary
things and truths are posited in the service of life. It is therefore on
the same plane exactly as passion, music, or æsthetic taste: a mental
complication which may be an index to other psychological facts
connected with it genetically, but which has no valid intent, no ideal
transcendence, no assertive or cognitive function. Intelligence so
conceived understands nothing: it is a buzzing labour in the fancy
which, by some obscure causation, helps us to live on.
To discredit the intellect, to throw off the incubus of an external
reality or truth, was one of the boons which transcendentalism in its
beginnings brought to the romantic soul. But although at first the sense
of relief (to Fichte, for instance) was most exhilarating, the freedom
achieved soon proved illusory: the terrible Absolute had been simply
transplanted into the self. You were your own master, and omnipotent;
but you were no less dark, hostile, and inexorable to yourself than the
gods of Calvin or of Spinoza had been before. Since every detail of this
mock world was your secret work, you were not only wiser but also more
criminal than you knew. You were stifled, even more than formerly, in
the arms of nature, in the toils of your own unaccountable character,
which made your destiny. Royce never recoiled from paradox or from
bitter fact; and he used to say that a mouse, when tormented and torn to
pieces by a cat, was realising his own deepest will, since he had
sub‐consciously chosen to be a mouse in a world that should have cats in
it. The mouse really, in his deeper self, wanted to be terrified,
clawed, and devoured. Royce was superficially a rationalist, with no
tenderness for superstition in detail and not much sympathy with
civilised religions; but we see here that in his heart he was loyal to
the aboriginal principle of all superstition: reverence for what hurts.
He said to himself that in so far as God was the devil—as daily
experience and Hegelian logic proved was largely the case—devil‐worship
was true religion.
A protest, however, arose in his own mind against this doctrine. Strong
early bonds attached him to moralism—to the opinion of the Stoics and of
Kant that virtue is the only good. Yet if virtue were conceived after
their manner, as a heroic and sublimated attitude of the will, of which
the world hardly afforded any example, how should the whole whirligig of
life be good also? How should moralism, that frowns on this wicked
world, be reconciled with pantheism and optimism, that hug it to their
bosom? By the ingenious if rather melodramatic notion that we should hug
it with a bear’s hug, that virtue consisted (as Royce often put it) in
holding evil by the throat; so that the world was good because it was a
good world to strangle, and if we only managed to do so, the more it
deserved strangling the better world it was. But this Herculean feat
must not be considered as something to accomplish once for all; the
labours of Hercules must be not twelve but infinite, since his virtue
consisted in performing them, and if he ever rested or was received into
Olympus he would have left virtue—the only good—behind. The wickedness
of the world was no reason for quitting it; on the contrary, it invited
us to plunge into all its depths and live through every phase of it;
virtue was severe but not squeamish. It lived by endless effort, turbid
vitality, and _Sturm und Drang_. Moralism and an apology for evil could
thus be reconciled and merged in the praises of tragic experience.
This had been the burden of Hegel’s philosophy of life, which Royce
admired and adopted. Hegel and his followers seem to be fond of
imagining that they are moving in a tragedy. But because Aeschylus and
Sophocles were great poets, does it follow that life would be cheap if
it did not resemble their fables? The life of tragic heroes is not good;
it is misguided, unnecessary, and absurd. Yet that is what romantic
philosophy would condemn us to; we must all strut and roar. We must lend
ourselves to the partisan earnestness of persons and nations calling
their rivals villains and themselves heroes; but this earnestness will
be of the histrionic German sort, made to order and transferable at
short notice from one object to another, since what truly matters is not
that we should achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel contemptuously
called ideal) but that we should carry on perpetually, if possible with
a _crescendo_, the strenuous experience of living in a gloriously bad
world, and always working to reform it, with the comforting speculative
assurance that we never can succeed. We never can succeed, I mean, in
rendering reform less necessary or life happier; but of course in any
specific reform we may succeed half the time, thereby sowing the seeds
of new and higher evils, to keep the edge of virtue keen. And in reality
we, or the Absolute in us, are succeeding all the time; the play is
always going on, and the play’s the thing.
It was inevitable that Royce should have been at home only in this
circle of Protestant and German intuitions; a more refined existence
would have seemed to him to elude moral experience. Although he was born
in California he had never got used to the sunshine; he had never tasted
peace. His spirit was that of courage and labour. He was tender in a
bashful way, as if in tenderness there was something pathological, as
indeed to his sense there was, since he conceived love and loyalty to be
divine obsessions refusing to be rationalised; he saw their essence in
the child who clings to an old battered doll rather than accept a new
and better one. Following orthodox tradition in philosophy, he insisted
on seeing reason at the bottom of things as well as at the top, so that
he never could understand either the root or the flower of anything. He
watched the movement of events as if they were mysterious music, and
instead of their causes and potentialities he tried to divine their
_motif_. On current affairs his judgements were highly seasoned and
laboriously wise. If anything escaped him, it was only the simplicity of
what is best. His reward was that he became a prophet to a whole class
of earnest, troubled people who, having discarded doctrinal religion,
wished to think their life worth living when, to look at what it
contained, it might not have seemed so; it reassured them to learn that
a strained and joyless existence was not their unlucky lot, or a
consequence of their solemn folly, but was the necessary fate of all
good men and angels. Royce had always experienced and seen about him a
groping, burdened, mediocre life; he had observed how fortune is
continually lying in ambush for us, in order to bring good out of evil
and evil out of good. In his age and country all was change,
preparation, hurry, material achievement; nothing was an old and
sufficient possession; nowhere, or very much in the background, any
leisure, simplicity, security, or harmony. The whole scene was filled
with arts and virtues which were merely useful or remedial. The most
pressing arts, like war and forced labour, presuppose evil, work immense
havoc, and take the place of greater possible goods. The most
indispensable virtues, like courage and industry, do likewise. But these
seemed in Royce’s world the only honourable things, and he took them to
be typical of all art and virtue—a tremendous error. It is very true,
however, that in the welter of material existence no concrete thing can
be good or evil in every respect; and so long as our rough arts and
virtues do more good than harm we give them honourable names, such as
unselfishness, patriotism, or religion; and it remains a mark of good
breeding among us to practise them instinctively. But an absolute love
of such forced arts and impure virtues is itself a vice; it is, as the
case may be, barbarous, vain, or fanatical. It mistakes something
specific—some habit or emotion which may be or may have been good in
some respect, or under some circumstances the lesser of two evils—for
the very principle of excellence. But good and evil, like light and
shade, are ethereal; all things, events, persons, and conventional
virtues are in themselves utterly valueless, save as an immaterial
harmony (of which mind is an expression) plays about them on occasion,
when their natures meet propitiously, and bathes them in some tint of
happiness or beauty. This immaterial harmony may be made more and more
perfect; the difficulties in the way of perfection, either in man, in
society, or in universal nature, are physical not logical. Worship of
barbarous virtue is the blackest conservatism; it shuts the gate of
heaven, and surrenders existence to perpetual follies and crimes,
Moralism itself is a superstition. In its abstract form it is moral, too
moral; it adores the conventional conscience, or perhaps a morbid one.
In its romantic form, moralism becomes barbarous and actually immoral;
it obstinately craves action and stress for their own sake, experience
in the gross, and a good‐and‐bad way of living.
Royce sometimes conceded that there might be some pure goods, music, for
instance, or mathematics; but the impure moral goods were better and
could not be spared. Such a concession, however, if it had been taken to
heart, would have ruined his whole moral philosophy. The romanticist
must maintain that _only_ what is painful can be noble and _only_ what
is lurid bright. A taste for turbid and contrasted values would soon
seem perverse when once anything perfect had been seen and loved. Would
it not have been better to leave out the worst of the crimes and plagues
that have heightened the tragic value of the world? But if so, why stop
before we had deleted them all? We should presently be horrified at the
mere thought of passions that before had been found necessary by the
barbarous tragedian to keep his audience awake; and the ear at the same
time would become sensitive to a thousand harmonies that had been
inaudible in the hurly‐burly of romanticism. The romanticist thinks he
has life by virtue of his confusion and torment, whereas in truth that
torment and confusion are his incipient death, and it is only the
modicum of harmony he has achieved in his separate faculties that keeps
him alive at all. As Aristotle taught, unmixed harmony would be
intensest life. The spheres might make a sweet and perpetual music, and
a happy God is at least possible.
It was not in this direction, however, that Royce broke away on occasion
from his Hegelian ethics; he did so in the direction of ethical
dogmatism and downright sincerity. The deepest thing in him personally
was conscience, firm recognition of duty, and the democratic and
American spirit of service. He could not adopt a moral bias
histrionically, after the manner of Hegel or Nietzsche. To those
hardened professionals any rôle was acceptable, the more commanding the
better; but the good Royce was like a sensitive amateur, refusing the
rôle of villain, however brilliant and necessary to the play. In
contempt of his own speculative insight, or in an obedience to it which
forgot it for the time being, he lost himself in his part, and felt that
it was infinitely important to be cast only for the most virtuous of
characters. He retained inconsistently the Jewish allegiance to a God
essentially the vindicator of only one of the combatants, not in this
world often the victor; he could not stomach the providential scoundrels
which the bad taste of Germany, and of Carlyle and Browning, was wont to
glorify. The last notable act of his life was an illustration of this,
when he uttered a ringing public denunciation of the sinking of the
_Lusitania_. Orthodox Hegelians might well have urged that here, if
anywhere, was a plain case of the providential function of what, from a
finite merely moral point of view, was an evil in order to make a higher
good possible—the virtue of German self‐assertion and of American
self‐assertion in antithesis to it, synthesised in the concrete good of
war and victory, or in the perhaps more blessed good of defeat. What
could be more unphilosophical and _gedankenlos_ than the intrusion of
mere morality into the higher idea of world‐development? Was not the
Universal Spirit compelled to bifurcate into just such Germans and just
such Americans, in order to attain self‐consciousness by hating,
fighting against, and vanquishing itself? Certainly it was American duty
to be angry, as it was German duty to be ruthless. The Idea liked to see
its fighting‐cocks at it in earnest, since that was what it had bred
them for; but both were good cocks. Villains, as Hegel had observed in
describing Greek tragedy, were not less self‐justified than heroes; they
were simply the heroes of a lower stage of culture. America and England
remained at the stage of individualism; Germany had advanced to the
higher stage of organisation. Perhaps this necessary war was destined,
through the apparent defeat of Germany, to bring England and America up
to the German level. Of course; and yet somehow, on this occasion, Royce
passed over these profound considerations, which life‐long habit must
have brought to his lips. A Socratic demon whispered No, No in his ear;
it would have been better for such things never to be. The murder of
those thousand passengers was not a providential act, requisite to
spread abroad a vitalising war; it was a crime to execrate altogether.
It would have been better for Hegel, or whoever was responsible for it,
if a millstone had been hanged about his neck and he, and not those
little ones, had been drowned at the bottom of the sea. Of this
terrestrial cock‐pit Royce was willing to accept the agony, but not the
ignominy. The other cock was a wicked bird.
This honest lapse from his logic was habitual with him at the sight of
sin, and sin in his eyes was a fearful reality. His conscience spoiled
the pantheistic serenity of his system; and what was worse (for he was
perfectly aware of the contradiction) it added a deep, almost remorseful
unrest to his hard life. What calm could there be in the double
assurance that it was really right that things should be wrong, but that
it was really wrong not to strive to right them? There was no conflict,
he once observed, between science and religion, but the real conflict
was between religion and morality. There could indeed be no conflict in
his mind between faith and science, because his faith began by accepting
all facts and all scientific probabilities in order to face them
religiously. But there was an invincible conflict between religion as he
conceived it and morality, because morality takes sides and regards one
sort of motive and one kind of result as better than another, whereas
religion according to him gloried in everything, even in the evil, as
fulfilling the will of God. Of course the practice of virtue was not
excluded; it was just as needful as evil was in the scheme of the whole;
but while the effort of morality was requisite, the judgements of
morality were absurd. Now I think we may say that a man who finds
himself in such a position has a divided mind, and that while he has
wrestled with the deepest questions like a young giant, he has not won
the fight. I mean, he has not seen his way to any one of the various
possibilities about the nature of things, but has remained entangled,
sincerely, nobly, and pathetically, in contrary traditions stronger than
himself. In the goodly company of philosophers he is an intrepid martyr.
In metaphysics as in morals Royce perpetually laboured the same points,
yet they never became clear; they covered a natural complexity in the
facts which his idealism could not disentangle. There was a voluminous
confusion in his thought; some clear principles and ultimate
possibilities turned up in it, now presenting one face and now another,
like chips carried down a swollen stream; but the most powerful currents
were below the surface, and the whole movement was hard to trace. He had
borrowed from Hegel a way of conceiving systems of philosophy, and also
the elements of his own thought, which did not tend to clarify them. He
did not think of correcting what incoherence there might remain in any
view, and then holding it in reserve, as one of the possibilities, until
facts should enable us to decide whether it was true or not. Instead he
clung to the incoherence as if it had been the heart of the position, in
order to be driven by it to some other position altogether, so that
while every view seemed to be considered, criticised, and in a measure
retained (since the argument continued on the same lines, however
ill‐chosen they might have been originally), yet justice was never done
to it; it was never clarified, made consistent with itself, and then
accepted or rejected in view of the evidence. Hence a vicious and
perplexing suggestion that philosophies are bred out of philosophies,
not out of men in the presence of things. Hence too a sophistical effort
to find everything self‐contradictory, and in some disquieting way both
true and false, as if there were not an infinite number of perfectly
consistent systems which the world might have illustrated.
Consider, for instance, his chief and most puzzling contention, that all
minds are parts of one mind. It is easy, according to the meaning we
give to the word mind, to render this assertion clear and true, or clear
and false, or clear and doubtful (because touching unknown facts), or
utterly absurd. It is obvious that all minds are parts of one flux or
system of experiences, as all bodies are parts of one system of bodies.
Again, if mind is identified with its objects, and people are said to be
“of one mind” when they are thinking of the same thing, it is certain
that many minds are often identical in part, and they would all be
identical with portions of an omniscient mind that should perceive all
that they severally experienced. The question becomes doubtful if what
we mean by oneness of mind is unity of type; our information or
plausible guesses cannot assure us how many sorts of experience may
exist, or to what extent their development (when they develop) follows
the same lines of evolution. The animals would have to be consulted, and
the other planets, and the infinite recesses of time. The straitjacket
which German idealism has provided is certainly far too narrow even for
the varieties of human imagination. Finally, the assertion becomes
absurd when it is understood to suggest that an actual instance of
thinking, in which something, say the existence of America, is absent or
denied, can be part of another actual instance of thinking in which it
is present and asserted. But this whole method of treating the
matter—and we might add anything that observation might warrant us in
adding about multiple personalities—would leave out the problem that
agitated Royce and that bewildered his readers. He wanted all minds to
be one in some way which should be logically and morally necessary, and
which yet, as he could not help feeling, was morally and logically
impossible.
For pure transcendentalism, which was Royce’s technical method, the
question does not arise at all. Transcendentalism is an attitude or a
point of view rather than as system. Its Absolute is thinking “as such,”
wherever thought may exert itself. The notion that there are separate
instances of thought is excluded, because space, time, and number belong
to the visionary world posited by thought, not to the function of
thinking; individuals are figments of constructive fancy, as are
material objects. The stress of moral being is the same wherever it may
fall, and there are no finite selves, or relations between thinkers;
also no infinite self, because on this principle the Absolute is not an
existent being, a psychological monster, but a station or office; its
essence is a task. Actual thinking is therefore never a part of the
Absolute, but always the Absolute itself. Thinkers, finite or infinite,
would be existing persons or masses of feelings; such things are dreamt
of only. _Any_ system of existences, _any_ truth or matter of fact
waiting to be recognised, contradicts the transcendental insight and
stultifies it. The all‐inclusive mind is my mind as I think, mind in its
living function, and beyond that philosophy cannot go.
Royce, however, while often reasoning on this principle, was incapable
of not going beyond it, or of always remembering it. He could not help
believing that constructive fancy not only feigns individuals and
instances of thought, but is actually seated in them. The Absolute, for
instance, must be not merely the abstract subject or transcendental self
in all of us (although it was that too), but an actual synthetic
universal mind, the God of Aristotle and of Christian theology. Nor was
it easy for Royce, a sincere soul and a friend of William James, not to
be a social realist; I mean, not to admit that there are many collateral
human minds, in temporal existential relations to one another, any of
which may influence another, but never supplant it nor materially
include it. Finite experience was not a mere element in infinite
experience; it was a tragic totality in itself. I was not God looking at
myself, I was myself looking for God. Yet this strain was utterly
incompatible with the principles of transcendentalism; it turned
philosophy into a simple anticipation of science, if not into an
indulgence in literary psychology. Knowledge would then have been only
faith leaping across the chasm of coexistence and guessing the presence
and nature of what surrounds us by some hint of material influence or
brotherly affinity. Both the credulity and the finality which such
naturalism implies were offensive to Royce, and contrary to his
sceptical and mystical instincts. Was there some middle course?
The audience in a theatre stand in a transcendental relation to the
persons and events in the play. The performance may take place to‐day
and last one hour, while the fable transports us to some heroic epoch or
to an age that never existed, and stretches through days and perhaps
years of fancied time. Just so transcendental thinking, while actually
timeless and not distributed among persons, might survey infinite time
and rehearse the passions and thoughts of a thousand characters.
Thought, after all, needs objects, however fictitious and ideal they may
be; it could not think if it thought nothing. This indispensable world
of appearance is far more interesting than the reality that evokes it;
the qualities and divisions found in the appearance diversify the
monotonous function of pure thinking and render it concrete. Instances
of thought and particular minds may thus be introduced consistently into
a transcendental system, provided they are distinguished not by their
own times and places, but only by their themes. The transcendental mind
would be a pure poet, with no earthly life, but living only in his
works, and in the times and persons of his fable. This view, firmly and
consistently held, would deserve the name of absolute idealism, which
Royce liked to give to his own system. But he struggled to fuse it with
social realism, with which it is radically incompatible. Particular
minds and the whole process of time, for absolute idealism, are _ideas_
only; they are thought of and surveyed, they never think or lapse
actually. For this reason genuine idealists can speak so glibly of the
mind of a nation or an age. It is just as real and unreal to them as the
mind of an individual; for within the human individual they can trace
unities that run through and beyond him, so that parts of him, identical
with parts of other people, form units as living as himself; for it is
all a web of themes, not a concourse of existences. This is the very
essence and pride of idealism, that knowledge is not knowledge of the
world but is the world itself, and that the units of discourse, which
are interwoven and crossed units, are the only individuals in being. You
may call them persons, because “person” means a mask; but you cannot
call them souls. They are knots in the web of history. They are words in
their context, and the only spirit in them is the sense they have for
me.
Royce, however, in saying all this, also wished not to say it, and his
two thick volumes on _The World and the Individual_ leave their subject
wrapped in utter obscurity. Perceiving the fact when he had finished, he
very characteristically added a “Supplementary Essay” of a hundred more
pages, in finer print, in which to come to the point. Imagine, he said,
an absolutely exhaustive map of England spread out upon English soil.
The map would be a part of England, yet would reproduce every feature of
England, including itself; so that the map would reappear on a smaller
scale within itself an infinite number of times, like a mirror reflected
in a mirror. In this way we might be individuals within a larger
individual, and no less actual and complete than he. Does this solve the
problem? If we take the illustration as it stands, there is still only
one individual in existence, the material England, all the maps being
parts of its single surface; nor will it at all resemble the maps, since
it will be washed by the sea and surrounded by foreign nations, and not,
like the maps, by other Englands enveloping it. If, on the contrary, we
equalise the status of all the members of the series, by making it
infinite in both directions, then there would be no England at all, but
only map within map of England. There would be no absolute mind
inclusive but not included, and the Absolute would be the series as a
whole, utterly different from any of its members. It would be a series
while they were maps, a truth while they were minds; and if the Absolute
from the beginning had been regarded as a truth only, there never would
have been any difficulty in the existence of individuals under it.
Moreover, if the individuals are all exactly alike, does not their exact
similarity defeat the whole purpose of the speculation, which was to
vindicate the equal reality of the whole and of its _limited_ parts? And
if each of us, living through infinite time, goes through precisely the
same experiences as every one else, why this vain repetition? Is it not
enough for this insatiable world to live its life once? Why not admit
solipsism and be true to the transcendental method? Because of
conscience and good sense? But then the infinite series of maps is
useless, England is herself again, and the prospect opens before us of
an infinite number of supplementary essays.
Royce sometimes felt that he might have turned his hand to other things
than philosophy. He once wrote a novel, and its want of success was a
silent disappointment to him. Perhaps he might have been a great
musician. Complexity, repetitions, vagueness, endlessness are hardly
virtues in writing or thinking, but in music they might have swelled and
swelled into a real sublimity, all the more that he was patient, had a
voluminous meandering memory, and loved technical devices. But rather
than a musician—for he was no artist—he resembled some great‐hearted
mediæval peasant visited by mystical promptings, whom the monks should
have adopted and allowed to browse among their theological folios; a
Duns Scotus earnest and studious to a fault, not having the lightness of
soul to despise those elaborate sophistries, yet minded to ferret out
their secret for himself and walk by his inward light. His was a gothic
and scholastic spirit, intent on devising and solving puzzles, and
honouring God in systematic works, like the coral insect or the spider;
eventually creating a fabric that in its homely intricacy and fulness
arrested and moved the heart, the web of it was so vast, and so full of
mystery and yearning.