The Conception of God. Josiah Royce

by the confession, but by the emphatic proclamation of its philosophical sponsor and its chief heralds, is based on the doctrine of hereditary necessitation, and from which personal freedom and moral opportunity equal for all minds are cancelled entirely and finally.

      Our question, then, urgent for religion and for philosophy alike, is the one that must surely give character to the immediate future of both. As shown already, it is really the main question of the present book. If the discussion here printed has any significance for current thought, the significance lies in the fact that its centre of conflict is upon just this question. The problem of Freedom, the search into the ​meaning and the fact of Individual Reality and Real Individuality, has in the pressure of the unavoidable course of philosophy long been left in abeyance. One might almost say, with truth, that no effective argumentation upon it has appeared since the memorable reasonings of Jonathan Edwards carried, apparently, such disaster upon the cause of human free-will—disaster that the wide-spread theory of the total explanation of man by cosmic evolution seems to deepen beyond reprieve. At any rate, one can securely say that nothing of crucial import has come forward in the interest of human freedom since Kant started the inspiring but hitherto little fruitful conception of moral autonomy. Instead, as we have seen, the world’s thinking has been absorbed in questions that thus far have ended in a persuasion of the immanence of the Eternal in all things—at best, the all-pervasive presence of an Immanent Spirit. Is it possible, now, for Kant’s kindling suggestion of our moral autonomy, so pregnant to the conscience disciplined in the higher traditional religion—is it possible for this to be met by this monistic conception of the Absolute, even when this takes on its highest and most coherent, its most intelligible and most intellectual form in a monistic Idealism?

      Professor Royce, in the pages ensuing, answers Yes—with the proviso, however, that in answering there must be a critically discriminating knowledge of what moral autonomy in truth can mean; and he devotes his Supplementary Essay to a searching analysis of (1) the conception of an absolute Unity of Self-Consciousness, which he argues is required for the ​reality of knowledge, and is essential to the knowledge of reality, (2) the conception of Individuality, and the Principle of Individuation, and (3) the conception of Moral Freedom—all with the object of furnishing the philosophical proof that the answer Yes is the truth. Professor Howison, on the other hand, maintains that the answer is unqualifiedly No; and after considering everything advanced in the Supplementary Essay, he still holds to the answer.

The significance, then, of the present discussion is that it enters the historical conflict in religious philosophy at just the crisis which has above been described. Professor Royce represents, in a fresh and subtly reasoned way, the Idealistic Monism which has now been explained as one of the main sides in that conflict, and which he, in the pages that follow, himself explains with greater fulness and force. The Pluralistic Idealism which Professor Howison in opposition contends for, receives in the book no correspondingly detailed defence, analytic and affirmatively theoretical. Professor Howison’s contribution to the discussion is by the exigencies of the case chiefly critical and consequently negative. Its office must be regarded as fulfilled, for the time being, if it has served the important purpose of challenging the Monism—especially the idealistic form of this—which so long has filled the philosophic and religious imagination, and which has received at the hands of Professor Royce a defence so detailed, so carefully organised, and so expressive. If it help, as its author ventures to hope it may, to serve the further object of directing philosophical discussion upon the field where the next ​signal conflict in advancing thought is to occur, its success will be all that could be expected, with the present statement of its case. Its author would not have the reader suppose, however, that the complete Idealism which maintains the mutually transcendent and still thoroughly knowable reality of God and souls is not, to his mind, supplied with a defence at least as organic as that which Idealistic Monism has here received. Nor would he have it assumed—as from the silence imposed on him by the limits of the volume it might perhaps be assumed—that he considers the account given by such Monism of the nature and the source of Personal Individuality, either conclusive, or sufficient, or correct, even when this account is expounded with the brilliant force given to it by Professor Royce. In his judgment, this intensely interesting problem requires an altogether different analysis, and has a profoundly different explanation, issuing directly in an idealistic Pluralism, He admits, of course, the pertinence of the claim that this analysis and explanation should be given. To be sure, the principles upon which he would found the defence of Personal Idealism, with its genuine Personal God, with its human Persons genuinely real because really free, have been plainly indicated in his article following; even the course of reasoning has there been outlined (sufficiently, he thinks, for its steps to be caught by those versed in philosophy),^[3] by which he would expose and rectify that error of Kant’s which he believes to be responsible for the Monistic Idealism that has indeed claimed, and with good credentials, ​legitimate descent from Kant, but which, it is useful to remember, Kant himself expressly repudiated. But the matter in controversy, especially now that Professor Royce, with the aim of adjusting Idealistic Monism to the demands of our moral reason, has supplemented his philosophy by this new and striking inquiry into the Principle of Individuation and the nature of Individuality, undoubtedly requires, somewhere, a systematic presentation of the proofs for the opposing Pluralistic Idealism; especially is the solution which this affords of the riddle of Individuality demanded. Professor Howison therefore hopes to offer, in a separate writing, and at a date not too remote, a thorough affirmative treatment of the theory here only suggested. In this the questions here started will appear in their proper setting, in the system of philosophy to which they belong.

One misapprehension of his position he feels it necessary to guard agains; particularly since Professor Royce himself, alert and exact thinker as he is, appears to have fallen into it. Professor Howison’s point is not at all to set the moral consciousness, simply as a “categorical imperative,” at odds with the theoretical, and merely have the “heart” breathe defiance to the “intellect”; not that the spirit cannot do this, as Carlyle does in Sartor Resartus, but that doing it doesn’t amount to philosophy. His position is by no means correctly apprehended as one side of “an antinomy between the claims of theory and the presuppositions of ethics.” Ethics, for him as for Professor Royce, can have no valid presuppositions except such as find their place in ​physical relations of Omniscience and Will that are curiously premonitory of the views set forth in Parts II, III, and IV of the Supplementary Essay. He adds, in substance, that if in Professor Royce’s original argument the question were simply of proving real the conception of an Absolute, the objections he made would indeed fail of pertinence, but that they seem to hold unyieldingly when the conception is offered as the conception of God. He wishes it known, however, that with respect to this charge of deficiency in divine fulness he writes only in view of Professor Royce’s original argument, his earlier books, and his direct reply to the objections, and without acquaintance with the remainder of the Supplementary Essay—that is to say, with the body of it—which he has not seen.^[4]

      University of California, Berkeley,

      July 26, 1897.

      Footnotes

       Table of Contents

      1 ↑ Professor Royce designates this view Ethical Realism. Professor Howison has no particular objection to this title, as it names, quite appropriately, an actual aspect of the doctrine. He would himself willingly call it Absolute Idealism (as in his opinion the only system expressing completely the Ideal of the Reason, and reaching an ideal that per se turns real), were not that name already associated—illegitimately, as he holds—with the theory of Hegel, and so with Professor Royce’s own. Absolute Idealism, of course, however interpreted, must also be called