We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Josiah Royce Quotes. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.
So far as we live and strive at all, our lives are various, are needed for the whole, and are unique.
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.
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.
So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.
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.
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.
For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning.
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.
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.
