Abstract
We have come now to that notion in Royce’s later philosophy which he himself regarded as his main metaphysical tenet. Even a cursory reading of the early, middle and mature works indicates that his later considerations of the individual self and the Absolute gradually diminish by contrast with an increasing emphasis upon the community and the spirit of community. In the autobiographical remarks delivered after a dinner in his honor in 1915, Royce expressed the judgment that his entire life, although he had not always realized it, had gravitated around the notion of community.
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Notes
HGC, 129. Cf. Moses Judah Aronson, La philosophie morale de Josiah Royce (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927), xiii: “La philosophie de Josiah Royce gravite autour de l’idée de la communauté.” Note also John Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy, 84.
Cf. HGC, 124: “I was a born non-conformist.”
HGC, 130–131.
“Provincialism,” Putnam’s Magazine (November, 1909), 239.
Cf. Vol. 84, “An untitled paper,” 1915?, 56a: “Some of you who hear this account may ask how this doctrine of Charles Peirce’s differs from what William James taught as Pragmatism…. I can say at once that in so far as I understand James, his theory of truth was in its essence very highly individualistic.”
Vol. 76, Urbana Lectures 1907, Lecture I, “The Problem of Ethics,” 36.
Ibid., 9–10.
Ibid., 10.
“Immortality,” Hibbert Journal,’ July, 1907) 741.
Ibid.
From the notebook of E. W. Friend for his metaphysics course taught by Royce, 1913–14, preserved at Harvard University Archives. The entry cited is dated Dec. 9, and titled “Tentative Definition of a Community.”
In The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) Royce devoted the whole volume to a consideration of that which he construed as the unifying principle of all genuine communal relationships.
PC, 253.
PC, 255–256. (Italics in text.)
PC, 256.
Cf. PC, 316.
Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto,” Men and Women (1891). The pertinence of Browning’s lines is not surprising. Royce devoted two excellent studies to Paracelsus and to Browning’s Theism, both found in the Anthology of Boston Society Papers (Macmillan, 1897). Marcel remarks that we ought to give much weight to the poets who influenced Royce, and above all to Browning. Cf. La métaphysique de Royce, 9: “[I]l faudrait faire une très grande place aux poetes dont il médita ou revécut profondement l’expérience intime, et avant tout à Browning. Ce que Dante, Shelley ou Keats purent être pour un Bosanquet, c’est incontestablement Browning qui le fut pour Royce.”
Cf. PC, 197, 199. In both places Royce identifies the Beloved Community with the Kingdom of Heaven. Some Roycean commentators, however, suggest that the Beloved Community of Royce is an earthly rather than heavenly reality. See, e.g., Marcel in op. cit., 194, and John Smith in Royce’s Social Infinite (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1950), 127 ff. Both Marcel and Smith equate Royce’s notion of Church with that of the ideal Beloved Community. Admitting that the invisible Church is not in any sense an institutionalized church in Royce’s thought, the writer would nonetheless maintain that this invisible Church is itself a presently existing reality, while the Beloved Community remains the ideal of the Church — an ideal not yet realized, viz., the Kingdom of Heaven.
Cf. John Wright Buckham, “The Contribution of Professor Royce to Christian Thought,” 230: “It is never the Community in its empirical nature or its mass aspect, that Professor Royce presents to us as divine and worthy of devoted loyalty, but always the Community as an Ideal in process of realization.”
Cf. PC, 234 and 403–4.
Use of the terms spirit and Spirit follows the text of Royce (cf., e.g., PC, 234). Evidently, Royce sees a relation between the Spirit in the Community and the Holy Spirit in the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Nonetheless, when he identifies the second person of the Trinity, the Logos, with the spirit or Spirit, basing this interpretation on the gospel of John, he seems to be departing from the traditional trinitarian doctrine. This appears to be another instance in which Royce steps from philosophy into theology.
PC, 234.
PC, 197. In general the terms “love” and “loyalty” are used by Royce interchangeably, although he prefers the latter term. Cf. Vol. 78, Smith College Lectures (1910), “Present Problems of Philosophy,” 42–3: “To that word love, in well known Christian context, I have of course no objection to offer. But my present purpose requires the use of another term. My own common name for both these motives [i.e., love of God and love of man] to which the higher life of man whatever his religion or his notion has been due, is the term Loyalty.” E. A. Singer supports this interpretation in his ”Love and Loyalty,” Philosophical Review 25 (May, 1916), 456–65.
Vol. 76, Lecture IV: “Loyalty as a Factor in American Life” (incomplete), 27.
Vol. 76, Lecture III; “Loyalty as a Personal and as a Social Virtue,” 34.
Cf. Vol. 95, “Comments upon the Problem of the Mid-Year Examinations,” 18 ff.
HGC, 31.
Cf. Smith, Royce’s Social Infinite, 162.
HGC, 37.
Josiah Royce, War and Insurance (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914), ix. Hereafter, War.
Recall April 6, 1917 as the date of U.S. entry into World War I, and January 8, 1918 as the date when President Wilson issued his Fourteen Points stressing the need for a League of Nations.
HGC, 71.
Ibid.
War, x, xi.
Cf. Ibid.
Cf. War, xi.
HGC, 62.
HGC, 65, 66–7.
HGC, 49, 50.
Cf. HGC, 39.
Ibid.
Smith remarks that Royce dared here to undertake a task that could only have been attempted within the framework of American religious pluralism and freedom of religious thought. Regarding his enterprise as a “metaphysical analysis of experience, ‘Royce sought to show the philosophically minded that there is a logical and experiential content in many classical theological doctrines. It is not surprising, then, that there seems to be much theological content included in Royce’s philosophizing, but this is not the equivalent of claiming that Royce is “doing” theology. Cf. The Spirit of American Philosophy, 112–113.
SRI, 280.
SRI, 273.
Cf. PC, 72: “Membership in that community [i.e., the Christian Church] is necessary to the salvation of man.”
SRI, 291.
Cf. PC, 118. Also cf. “Comment by Prof. Royce to Miss Mary Whiton Calkins” in Philosophical Review 25, 3 (May, 1916), 295: “For me, at present, genuinely and loyally united community which lives a coherent life, is, in a perfectly literal sense, a person. Such a person, for Paul, the Church of Christ was.” To which one might add: Such a person or new being, for Royce, the Church of Christ is.
SRI, 295. Paul’s “hymn of charity” is in II Cor. 13.
Cf. SRI, 296: “[W]hat Paul said about charity must be universalized if it is true. When we universalize the Pauline Charity, it becomes once more the loyalty that, as a fact, is now justified in seeking her loyal own; but that still, like charity, rejoices in the truth.”
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© 1972 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Mahowald, M.B. (1972). Community as Perfective of the Individual. In: An Idealistic Pragmatism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2736-6_11
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