Reading Notes: July 25th, 2022

“We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature.” (Royce, The World and the Individual, 219) 

“All life, everywhere, in so far as it is life, has conscious meaning, and accomplishes a rational end. This is the necessary consequence of our Idealism.” (Royce, The World and the Individual, 220) 

“Schopenhauer’s principle work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, is the most artistic philosophical treatise in existence, if one excepts Plato’s Republic.” (Royce, Two Philosophers of the Paradoxical: Schopenhauer, 166) 

“The world of our daily life, Kant had said, has good order and connection in it not because the absolute order of external things in themselves is known to us, but (as I have reworded Kant) because we are sane; because our understanding, then, has its own coherence, and must see its experience in the light of this coherence. Idealism has already drawn the obvious conclusion from all this. If this be so, if it is our understanding that actually creates the order of nature for us, then the problem, “How shall I comprehend my world?” becomes no more or less than the problem, “How shall I understand myself?” We have already suggested into what romantic extravagances the effort to know exhaustively the inner life had by this time led. Some profound but still vague relation was felt to exist between my own self and an Infinite Self….My Real Self is deeper than my conscious self, and this real self is boundless, far spreading, romantic, divine….My conscious and present self isn’t the whole of me. I am constantly appealing to my own past, to my own future self, and to my deeper self, also, as it now is. Whatever I affirm, or doubt, or deny, I am always searching my own mind for proof, for support, for guidance. Such searching constitutes in one sense all my active mental life. All philosophy, then, turns, as Kant had shown, upon understanding who and what I am, and who my deeper self is. Hegel recognizes this; but he will not dream about it. He undertakes an analysis, therefore, which we must here reword in our own fashion, and for the most part with our own illustrations.” (Royce, Two Philosophers of the Paradoxical: Hegel, 53-54)