The World and the Individual First Series: The Four Historical Conceptions of Being The World and the Individual Second Series: Nature Man, and the Moral Order

Abstract

IN the first series of these remarkable Gifford lectures, Prof. Royce gives us the broad outlines of an ontology which serves as the philosophical basis for the special discussion of cosmological and ethical problems contained in his second volume. As a contribution to the investigation of ultimate metaphysical issues, Prof. Royce's first volume, like previous works by the same writer, deserves high commendation for the frequent grace of its style and the freshness and freedom from unnecessary technicalities with which the problems are presented to the reader. Metaphysics has a bad name with the cultivated public in general on the score of aridity and unintelligibility, but there is nothing in Prof. Royce's lectures that a thoughtful man of ordinary education should find unduly difficult or repellent, and there is much that every such man must find of the highest importance. Writing from a standpoint which may roughly be described as that of Hegelian idealism, but in entire freedom from mechanical adhesion to a master, and often with marked individual originality, Prof. Royce gives us a most instructive discussion of the different senses which have, in the history of human thought, been put upon the concept of Being. We are led by consideration of the complementary errors of realism and mysticism to the definition of real existence in Kantian terms as the valid, that which accords with the conditions of a “possible experience.” But Validity or genuine possibility must, agfain, rest on a basis of actual existence as part of a real experience; hence Prof. Royce conducts us from the third, or Kantian, to his own, the fourth, definition of real existence as the completed purpose or meaning of an idea. Space forbids detailed examination of his line of argument, but there are perhaps two main positions of the writer which seem hardly satisfactory as stated. It is not made sufficiently clear how it can be an “idea,” in any recognised sense of the word, which ultimately sets all selective attention to work, and generally the relation between thought and will is left in some obscurity. Thus, both in the first and second series of lectures. Prof. Royce often seems to imply the very doubtful view that voluntary attention is the same thing as a volition to attend, but he nowhere explicitly states his position on the question. A minor peculiarity in the first series, which is perhaps open to attack, is the use made of certain logical theories in criticising the Kantian conception of reality. Prof. Royce might reconsider, in the light of objections with which he is no1 doubt familiar, but which he nowhere meets, the view, adopted by him from the writers on symbolic logic, of the universal proposition as a negative existential judgment.

The World and the Individual. First Series: The Four Historical Conceptions of Being.

By Josiah Royce Pp. xvi + 588. (New York: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1900.) Price 12s. 6d. net.

The World and the Individual. Second Series: Nature Man, and the Moral Order.

By Josiah Royce Pp. xvii + 480. (New York: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1901.) Price 12s. 6d. net.