The Religious Aspect of Philosophy

A re-evaluation of Royce’s place in the history of American thought is now in progress. The present publication should help to recall a fact which is in danger of being forgotten by fellow philosophers who are currently concentrating on his previously-neglected logical essays: Royce’s entire life (1855-1916) was an unremitting pursuit of “an ultimate reality of infinite worth.” The following pages are a record of his first steps in this pilgrimage. Later years were to see Royce venture in new directions. Books which succeeded the present volume — The World and the Individual, The Sources of Religious Insight, The Problem of Christianity — developed his “philoso¬ phy of loyalty” and his “hope for the great community.” But there is nothing which flowered in these writings that did not have its germination in the present essay. The seminal nature of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy has recently been attested by several noted thinkers. William Ernest Hocking reports that William James acclaimed it for providing a proof of the existence of God that could not be found in the previous his¬ tory of philosophy. Continental scholars have long recognized the fact that Royce belongs in the company of those for whom philosophy was a journey through the abyss of meaninglessness. To the contemporary reader, one of the most extraordinary features of this book is that in it Royce writes and thinks like a twentieth-century existentialist. Perplexity and doubt had driven him into philosophy. His entire undertaking was to discover a new ground of assurance on which men could eternally count. Whatever edifying moral philosophers and religious apologists might say, reason and nature were not in harmony. Is and ought were separated by a vast chasm, not capable of being bridged by appeals to man’s conscience and his reputed capacity for altruism, to the alleged course of history, or to the imagined purposes or outcomes of nature.…