The Temporal and the Eternal

This chapter, taken from Josiah Royce's Gifford Lectures of 1899, argues that any rational decision as between a pessimistic and an optimistic view of the world, any account of the relations between God and Man, any view of the sense in which the evils and imperfections of the Universe can be comprehended or justified, any account of our ethical consciousness in terms reconcilable with our Idealism must turn in part upon a distinction between the Temporal and the Eternal, and upon an insight into their unity in the midst of their contrast. The problem at issue is one of the most delicate and, at the same time, one of the simplest of the great issues of philosophy. The chapter deals with it at first in a purely theoretical fashion and then proceeds to its practical applications.

The Linkage of Facts

This chapter, taken from Josiah Royce's Gifford Lectures of 1899, argues that all our acknowledgment of facts is a conscious submission to an Ought, which is a principle that still leaves numerous aspects of the world of human experience very ill-defined. Thus, it examines some of these aspects and their corresponding most fundamental Categories. It concludes that the true series of facts in the world must be a Well-Ordered Series, in which every fact has its next-following fact. The series discoverable by us in the World of Description are characterized by the prevalence, for our view, of the relation Between. Hence, they do not appear to us as Well-Ordered Series. But just insofar they are inadequate expressions of the truth.

The Possibility of Error

This chapter considers the possibility of error, the actual existence of those conditions that make error possible. It elaborates the notion that the conditions that determine the logical possibility of error must themselves be absolute truth. However, readers are warned that the path to be travelled is very thorny and stony. It is a path of difficult philosophical investigation. Nobody ought to follow it who does not desire to. The reader is urged to skip the whole of this chapter unless he wants to find even more of dullness than the rest of this sleepy book has discovered to him. For the author, the arid way would seem hard, were it not for the precious prize at the end of it.

The Rediscovery of the Inner Life: From Spinoza to Kant

This chapter considers stages of growing intelligence, and even of growing spiritual knowledge, marked by an inevitable and lamentable decline in apparent depth and vitality of spiritual experience. In such stages, the greatest concerns of our lives are somehow for a while hidden, even forgotten. We become more knowing, more clever, more critical, more wary, more skeptical, but we seemingly do not grow more profound or more reverent. Such a stage in human experience is represented, in great part, by the philosophical thinkers who flourished between the time of Spinoza's death, in 1677 and the appearance of Kant's chief philosophical work, “The Critique of Pure Reason” in 1781. It is the period which has been especially associated, in historical tradition, with the eighteenth century.

Pessimism and Modern Thought

The problem of the worth of life is often regarded as one that the healthy have no wish to discuss, and the unhealthy no right to decide. However, reflective beings must sooner or later to consider the worth of conscious life; for self-criticism is an essential part of all mental growth. But as every new step in critical thought is made by means of a negative criticism of old positions, the question of the worth of life must distinctly appear for the first time in the form of what is inexactly called pessimistic doubt about human life. This chapter considers the doctrine popularly named pessimism, which believes that evil is on the whole triumphant. The ultimate aim of the discussion is to present some thoughts on the method of estimating the worth of human life.

The Religious Problems and the Theory of Being

This chapter, taken from Josiah Royce's Gifford Lectures of 1899, begins by setting out the three conceptions of natural religion. The first regards natural religion as a search for what a well-known phrase has called “the way through nature to God.” The second views religion less as a doctrine to be proved or disproved through a study of the external world than as a kind of consciousness whose justification lies in its rank amongst the various inner manifestations of our human nature. The third conception identifies the doctrine in question with the fundamental philosophy of religion. The chapter then states that the focus of these lectures is the most neglected and arduous of the methods of studying the relations between religion and the ultimate problems of the Theory of Being. The central problem of the discussion will be the question: What is Reality?

Immortality

This chapter discusses Josiah Royce's thoughts on immortality. Specifically, he presents a sketch of the doctrine of immortality summarized as follows: “Since the time order is the expression of a will continuous with my own, my life cannot ever become a wholly past fact unless my individual will is one that, after some point of time, becomes superfluous for the further temporal expression of the meaning of the whole world life. But as an ethical personality I have an insatiable need for an opportunity to find, to define, and to accomplish my individual and unique duty. This need of mine is God's need in me and of me. Seen, then, from the eternal point of view, my personal life must be an endless series of deeds.”

The Conception of God Address by Professor Royce

This chapter presents Josiah Royce's address regarding the conception of God. He believes that a really fruitful philosophical study of the conception of God is inseparable from an attempt to estimate what evidence there is for the existence of God. When one conceives of God, one does so because one is interested, not in the bare definition of a purely logical or mathematical notion, but in the attempt to make out what sort of real world this is in which we live. If it is worthwhile even to speak of God before the forum of the philosophical reason, it is so because one hopes to be able, in a measure, to translate into articulate terms the central mystery of our existence, and to get some notion about what is at the heart of the world.

Shelley and the Revolution

This chapter presents Josiah Royce's thoughts on poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. As a great man of the age of Revolution, and as a most characteristic man, Shelley is a form of life that must not be left out of sight in any effort to survey the most important tendencies in modern thought and feeling. As undeveloped as he was many-sided and unfortunate, Shelley is an image of the modern spirit itself—ardent, keen-sighted, aspiring, striving to be tolerant, yet often angry with misunderstanding; studious of the past, yet determined to create something new; anxious for practical reforms, yet conscious how weary the work of reform must be. In studying the relation of Shelley to the Revolution, one studies him not in his most peculiar and most individual aspect, but in that aspect of his nature which means the most for the world at large.

William James and the Philosophy of Life

This chapter presents some comments about the significance of William James's philosophy. James was a friend of Josiah Royce from his youth to the end of James's beneficent life. As a pupil of James for a brief time, Royce thought of himself as James's disciple; although perhaps a very bad one. According to Royce, James is an American philosopher of classic rank because he stands for a stage in our national self-consciousness—for a stage with which historians of our national mind must always reckon. This statement shall be the focus of the present discussion, which also estimates the significance of the stage in question, and of James's thought insofar as it seems to express the ideas and ideals characteristic of this phase of national life.