Reading Notes: June 3rd, 2022

“Truth cannot mean mere conformity of [judgment] to external object; first, because nobody can [determine the truth or falsity of a judgment] merely by asking whether it agrees with this or with that indifferent fact, but only by asking whether it agrees with that with which the knowing subject meant or intended it to agree; secondly, because nobody can look down, as from without, upon a world of wholly external objects on the one hand, and of his [judgments] upon the other, and estimate, as an indifferent spectator, their agreement; and thirdly, because the cognitive process, as itself a part of life, is essentially an effort to give to life unity, self-possession, insight into its own affairs, control of its own enterprises—in a word, wholeness. Cognition does not intend merely to represent its object, but to attain, to possess, and to come into a living unity with it.” (Royce, Logical Essays, 111) [Underlining is mine] 

“How is error itself possible? The great merit of Dr. Royce’s book is to have put this question in this definite form. His answer seems to us perfectly true: that error is possible only in virtue of an actual consciousness to which both the truth and the error are present (p. 377). This result follows from a very careful statement of the nature of judgment and the difficulties contained in different kinds of error. Take the error that one person makes about another: A is in error about B, means that if B could know A’s idea of him, and compare it with his own idea of himself, he would know it to be error. Again, if I make a mistake about fact, it is because what is true and my apprehension of it are present together and compared in one consciousness. Thus error is possible only to a single all-seeing consciousness which contains all truth and knows too all judgments which, by comparison with the truth, it sees to be errors. Or, to quote Dr. Royce’s words, “an error is an incomplete thought, that to a higher thought, which includes it and its intended object, is known as having failed in the purpose that it more or less clearly had, and that is fully realised in this higher thought” (p. 425). The preceding chapter on Idealism had sketched by way of anticipation the relation of such an infinite consciousness to the individual, and we may give Dr. Royce’s hypothesis as he gives it himself “in a nut-shell.” “Take as a final case Professor Clifford’s well-known example of the man looking at the candle. In the world-consciousness there is the group of states, c, c1, c2…That is the real candle. In the world-consciousness there is also the group of states, h, h1, h2…That is the “cerebral image” of the candle, a physiological fact. Finally, according to the laws of reality, the existence in the world-consciousness of the facts h, h1, h2…grouped as they are, has co-existent with it, the group of ideas C in the man’s mind. This group C corresponds more or less completely to the group c, c1, c2…as that group exists beyond the man’s mind in the world-consciousness. The group C is the man’s idea of the candle” (p. 353).” (Alexander, Review of Royce’s “The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 603) 

In 1885, Samuel Alexander—who would later go on to deliver his Space, Time, and Deity (a groundbreaking, anti-Idealist text that championed the Realistic tendencies emerging in the Anglophone Philosophy) for the 1916-1918 Gifford Lectures—must have held to a form of Idealism (akin to that of Royce).