Josiah Royce Quotations

Ideas any one can mould as he wishes.

It is not those innocent of evil who are fullest of the life of God, but those who in their own case have experienced the triumph over evil

It is an old story, this life of ours. There is nothing new under our sun. Nothing new, that is, for us, as we now feel and think.

It is an evil cause in so far as, despite the loyalty that it arouses in me, it is destructive of loyalty in the world of my fellows.

Thinking is like loving or dying. Each of us must do it for ourselves.

The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.

As for you, my beloved friend, I loyally believe in your uniqueness; but whenever I try to tell to you wherein it consists, I helplessly describe only a type.

For by such poor figures I may, in passing, symbolize that really rational relation of our personal experience to universal conscious experience.

No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.

And just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win in our union with him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning.

For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning.

So far as we live and strive at all, our lives are various, are needed for the whole, and are unique.

Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.

No consensus of men can make an error erroneous. We can only find or commit an error, not create it. When we commit an error, we say what was an error already.

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

The world is a progressively realized community of interpretation.

I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.

God is One, all our lives have various and unique places in the harmony of the divine life.

A crowd, whether it be a dangerous mob, or an amiably joyous gathering at a picnic is not a community. It has a mind, but no institutions, no organizations, no coherent unity, no history, no traditions.

Religious faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from that which is within us.

That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed.

The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought.

Man you can define; but the true essence of any man, say, for instance, of Abraham Lincoln, remains the endlessly elusive and mysterious object of the biographer's interest, of the historian's comments, of popular legend, and of patriotic devotion.

Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.

Men accept without questioning that this world is real and important and worthwhile. This is faith. Philosophy is the ongoing questioning of this faith.

If usually the "present age" is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as thehistory of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.

God too longs; and because the Absolute Life itself, which dwells in our life, and inspires these very longings, possesses the true world, and is that world.

And just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness all our lives win in our union with him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning.

This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.

For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.

We seek true individuality and the true individuals. But we find them not. For lo, we mortals see what our poor eyes can see; and they, the true individuals, - they belong not to this world of our merely human sense and thought.

A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see theself, or its shadow, now moving with the stream, now eddying in the currents from bank to bank of its channel, and now strenuously straining onwards in the pursuit of its chosen good.

But you are alone. Yet I never tell what you are. And if your face lights up my world as no other can - well, this feeling too, when viewed as the mere psychologist has to view it, appears to be simply what all the other friends report about their friends.

I never felt a feeling that I knew or could know to be unlike the feelings of other people. I never consciously thought, except after patterns that the world or my fellows set for me.

Our will makes constantly a sort of agreement with the world, whereby, if the world will continually show some respect to the will, the will shall consent to be strenuous in its industry.

The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.

Life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage.

By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists.

If I look to see what I ever did that, for all I now know, some other man might not have done, I am utterly unable to discover the certainly unique deed.

Loyalty is a good for the loyal man; but it may be mischievous for those whom his cause assails.

Interfere with the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very life and heart out of my will.

The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest.

Memory and hope constantly incite us to the extensions of the self which play so large a part in our daily life.

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.

Unless you can find some sort of LOYALTY, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.