Reading Notes: April 27th, 2022

“The modern idealist, and Professor Royce is my representative modern idealist, views, and must view, his life work as nothing less than an attempt to find and describe the itinerarium mentis in Deum.  And yet no one, at least in his role as idealist, ever supposes that in doing so he is giving to the world the only reliable Baedeker to the kingdom of heaven. The very magnitude of his aim insures his modesty. His philosophy itself compels him to regard every serious student as a collaborator in his undertaking, and to view the task which he has set himself as one which the ages alone can carry to completion. Nevertheless, he believes that he does possess even now a sure compass to guide him in his quest, certain fixed principles of thought and action, call them categories or imperatives if you will, which are such as are implied in the very effort to deny them, and are, therefore, the pre-conditions of all our interpretations. He believes, moreover, and for reasons that do not here concern us, that this complete vision, which is the goal of his endeavor, is no mere distant ideal but rather an ever-living force, the life and the light of the world today.” (Bakewell, Novum Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, 259) 

“Amongst the many contributions which Professor Royce has made to philosophy, there are three or four that stand out in special relief….Professor Royce has done excellent service in making it plain that idealism not only permits, but compels, respect for the facts precisely as experience reveals them; counsels docility in interpreting nature, and adopts the experimental attitude toward all specific plans and institutions. The absolute is not to be found all at once, and the philosopher, not taking to the klepsydra, as Plato would say, but having his eye on all time and all existence, can afford to be patient, and will surely be suspicious of all Utopias. He has also succeeded in cutting under the old Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, a dualism which has haunted all modern philosophy, and is still the fertile source of many of our misunderstandings. Mind is not all here within, objects yonder without; the unity of consciousness comes into being pari passu with the knowledge of the unity of experience; the interpreter is at once on the object as well as on the subject side of the subject-object relation. The object that one seeks is defined and selected in the idea that reaches out after it, and is indeed simply its more complete and individual embodiment. Again, by showing the universal presence of the practical in the theoretical, he has helped to bridge the Kantian gulf between these two realms, and to establish the thoroughgoing primacy of the practical—a pragmatism raised to the nth power.” (Bakewell, Novum Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, 259-260) 

“But I find a new note appearing in the Philosophy of Loyalty, and prominent in all his subsequent writings….In these works Professor Royce has bridged the gap which, in our fondness for abstractions, we are apt to set up between individuals. He has shown that the isolated individual does not exist; that we do not take our point of departure, as it were, in the prison of the inner life, and then argue ourselves into the belief in other minds on the basis of analogy, finding the behavior of their bodies like that of our own, and inferring the presence of a corresponding consciousness. The notion of a self-contained mind coming to believe in the existence of other minds in such a fashion is a pure abstraction. We cannot even state the argument from analogy without pre-supposing as its own terms a consciousness that takes us beyond the limits of our private personality. Our consciousness is, in truth, from the first, social, and one rounds to a separate mind only by defining his own interests and purposes within the unity of the mind of the community. The pursuit of truth is always a social enterprise where at least three minds are involved, one mind interpreting a second to another, or to other, minds. And the real world we seek is no other than the community of interpretation which can be found by no one except the spirit of the community dwell within him….The difference between individual human beings as we ordinarily regard them in social intercourse, and communities, is properly characterized by describing them as two grades or levels of human life.” (Bakewell, Novum Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, 260-261) 

“It is in the light of considerations like the foregoing that we must interpret such phrases as Esse is Percipi, which taken by themselves are susceptible of very different and conflicting constructions. If these considerations are true, when we say, or think, Esse is Percipi, our meaning can only be that the term percipi is the meaning of the term esse, or that esse (in its utmost generality or abstraction, including all its particulars, i.e., all cases of existere, under it) is the object of percipere, or of consciousness (in its utmost generality) in its character of knowing, not in its character of an existent; and percipere the evidence of esse, which is the object as a knowing. Our meaning cannot be (what it is often supposed to be) that the secret, or essence, or inner nature, in virtue of which Esse is Esse, or Being is Being, consists in Percipi, or is identical with the percipere of a percipient. The logical fallacy of this latter interpretation is, that it supposes us to have some knowledge both of esse and of percipere, before we have any perception, consciousness, or knowledge at all, that we know them as different from each other, and that (so knowing them a priori) we proceed to ask of one of them, viz., esse, not what it is, but upon what it depends, or in virtue of what it is esse. The phrase Esse is Percipi is then interpreted as if it was the answer to this illogically put question, and was an assertion that the inner nature or essence of Being was Knowing, instead of asserting that Being could only be thought of as the object of a Knowing.” (Hodgson, Reality, 59) 

“Briefly stated the truth is this. Esse is Percipi expresses neither (1) that perception gives us a knowledge of the whole nature of being, or of any being, nor (2) that being, or any being, depends upon perception, either for its nature or for its existence, but (3) that we must think of being, and of every being, as at least the object of perception, independently of the question as to the existence of such a perception. For, in saying esse is percipi, nothing depends upon the mere existence of the perception, but all depends upon its nature as a reflective or self-objectifying process, i.e., upon the fact that, as it proceeds, it differentiates its content, perceiving part after part as past, that is, as object, different in point of time from the then present moment of perceiving, which will in its turn be perceived as having been a present moment of perceiving, or content of perception not yet objectified as past. The fact that a perception, when it exists, is perception and objectification of a content, not the fact that the perception itself exists, is that which determines the meaning of Esse.” (Hodgson, Reality, 60) 

“If I had to do with somebody to whom I were compelled to prove the necessity of the idealistic view by one example, I should ask him: How can you ever attain a line except by keeping the points asunder, for else they fall together; and at the same time taking them together and annulling their being asunder, for else they never join each other? But you comprehend, undoubtedly, that this unity of the manifoldness, this positing and annulling of a discretion, can be only in knowledge; and we have just shown that it is the ground-form of knowledge. Now you ought at the same time to comprehend that space and matter consist, in exactly the same way, in such a keeping asunder of the points, but in a unity; and that they are, hence, possible only in knowledge and as knowledge, and that they are, indeed, the real form of knowledge itself. This is now, in truth, as clear and evident as anything possibly can be; it lies right before everyone who opens his eyes, and ought not first to be proved and acquired, but should be known so well that one ought to feel ashamed to have to say it.—Why, then, was it not seen? Because everything lies nearer to us than the seeing itself, in which we rest; and because we have been stubbornly clinging to that objectivating which seeks outside of itself what lies only in us.” (Fichte, New Exposition of the Science of Knowledge, 215-216)