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Josiah Royce's Philosophy of the Community: Danger of the Detached Individual
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
The popular mind is deep and means a thousand times more than it knows.
It is fitting that the Royal Institute of Philosophy series on American philosophy include a session on the thought of Josiah Royce, for his most formidable philosophical work, The World and the Individual, was a result of his Gifford lectures in the not too distant city of Aberdeen in 1899 and 1900. The invitation to offer the Gifford lectures was somewhat happenstance, for it was extended originally to William James, who pleaded, as he often did in his convenient neurasthenic way, to postpone for a year on behalf of his unsettled nerves. James repaired himself to the Swiss home of Theodore Flournoy, with its treasure of books in religion and psychology, so as to write his Gifford lectures, now famous as The Varieties of Religious Experience. In so doing, however, James was able to solicit an invitation for Royce to occupy the year of his postponement. Royce accepted with alacrity, although this generosity of James displeased his wife Alice, who ranted, ‘Royce!! He will not refuse, but over he will go with his Infinite under his arm, and he will not even do honour to William's recommendation.’ Alice was partially correct in that Royce, indeed, did carry the Infinite across the ocean to the home of his intellectual forebears, although on that occasion as on many others, he acknowledged the support of his personal and philosophical mentor, colleague and friend, William James.
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- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 19: American Philosophy , March 1985 , pp. 153 - 176
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1985
References
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22 Royce, , The Conception of God (found in ‘The City of God, and the True God as Its Head’. Comments by Professor Howison, 108–109)Google Scholar. It may be of significance here to reflect on the idiosyncratic events which brought Royce to Harvard University instead of at the time the more deserving Howison.
The biographers of Howison point to the irony of this reversal of roles for Howison and Royce. They cite James in a letter to Thomas Davidson of August 1883, that ‘Royce has unquestionably the inside track for any vacancy in the future. I think him a man of genius, sure to distinguish himself by original work.’They add, however, that James goes on to remark: ‘But when I see the disconsolate condition of poor Howison, looking for employment now, and when I recognize the extraordinary development of his intellect in the past 4 years, I feel almost guilty of having urged Royce's call hither. I did it before Howison had returned, or at least before I had seen him, and with my data, I was certainly right. But H. seems now to me to be quite a different man, intellectually, from his former self; and being so much older, ought to have had a chance, which (notwithstanding the pittance of a salary), he would probably have taken, to get a foothold in the University.’
Buckham, John Wright and Stratton, George Malcolm, George Holmes Howison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), 70.Google Scholar
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24 In my view, Royce's 1895 essay on ‘Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness and Nature’, in Studies of Good and Evil, is a forerunner to the work of the American philosopher George Herbert Mead. In fact, Mead's book on Mind, Self and Society, reflects the original table of contents in Royce's papers, as a task to be done.
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26 Ibid., I, 338–339.
27 White, Morton, ‘Harvard's Philosophical Heritage’, in Religion, Politics and the Higher Learning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 53.Google Scholar
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37 Ibid., 294.
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