Josiah Royce Quotes
Josiah Royce was an American philosopher and the principal American defender of objective idealism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A colleague of William James at Harvard, he engaged in lifelong dialogue with pragmatism while developing his own absolute idealism in The World and the Individual and his social philosophy in The Philosophy of Loyalty. The quotes below are attributed to Josiah Royce, organized by topic.
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Josiah Royce on Freedom
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“We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and ere-long, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody.”
Lecture on Hegel
Josiah Royce on God
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Attributed to Josiah Royce:
“The world is the embodiment of a spiritual order, the expression of an Absolute self.”
Josiah Royce on Knowledge
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“(Royce 1913) In The Problem of Christianity”
the real world is the Community of Interpretation… If the interpretation is a reality, and if it truly interprets the whole of reality, then the community reaches its goal [i.e., a complete representation of Being], and the real world includes its own interpreter -
“Royce 1908 Near the end of The Philosophy of Loyalty”
Human life taken merely as it flows, viewed merely as it passes by in time and is gone, is indeed a lost river of experience that plunges down the mountains of youth and sinks in the deserts of age. Its significance comes solely through its relations to the air and the ocean and the great deeps of universal experience. For by such poor figures I may, in passing, symbolize that really rational rela
Josiah Royce on Mind
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Attributed to Josiah Royce:
“No one finds himself simply by trying to be himself.”
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Attributed to Josiah Royce:
“What you think is what you are; what you do is what you become.”
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“Error is not a mere accident of an untrained intellect, but a necessary stage or feature or moment of the expression of the truth.”
Lectures on Modern Idealism (1919), p. 79
Josiah Royce on Nature
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“the real world is the Community of Interpretation… If the interpretation is a reality, and if it truly interprets the whole of reality, then the community reaches its goal [i.e., a complete representation of Being], and the real world includes its own interpreter”
(Royce 1913) In The Problem of Christianity
Josiah Royce on Politics
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Attributed to Josiah Royce:
“True community is built upon shared interpretation.”
Josiah Royce on Time
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“Human life taken merely as it flows, viewed merely as it passes by in time and is gone, is indeed a lost river of experience that plunges down the mountains of youth and sinks in the deserts of age. Its significance comes solely through its relations to the air and the ocean and the great deeps of universal experience. For by such poor figures I may, in passing, symbolize that really rational relation of our personal experience to universal conscious experience….”
Royce 1908 Near the end of The Philosophy of Loyalty
Josiah Royce on Virtue
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Attributed to Josiah Royce:
“Loyalty is the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.”
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Attributed to Josiah Royce:
“We become individuals through our loyalties.”