Reading Notes: August 22nd, 2024

“This is the true spirit of transcendental Idealism. All Being is Knowledge. The foundation of the universe is not anti-spirit, un-spirit, the relation and connection of which with spirit we should never be able to understand, but is itself spirit. No death, no lifeless matter; but everywhere life, spirit, intelligence: a spiritual empire, absolutely nothing else.” (Fichte, New Exposition of the Science of Knowledge, §3)

“In truth, as we shall come to see, regarded in itself, my mind can be concerned only with its own ideas….But if my mind can be concerned only with its own ideas, then sincerity and truth are identical….What I talk about will be my ideas; their objects will be themselves other ideas of mine; and meaning only these ideas when I make assertions, I cannot fail to make correct assertions about these, the objects that I mean.” (Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 378)

“We can only find or commit an error, not create it. When we commit an error, we say what was an error already.” (Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 394)

“As common sense conceives the matter…the object of any judgment is just that portion of the then conceived world, just that fragment, that aspect, of a supposed reality, which is sieved upon for the purpose of just this judgment. Only such a momentarily grasped fragment of the truth can possibly be present in any one moment of thought as the object of a single assertion. Now it is hard to say how within this arbitrarily chosen fragment itself there can still be room for the partial knowledge that is sufficient to give to the judgment its object, but insufficient to secure the judgment its accuracy….[In] the judgment, the choosing and knowing the object seem inseparable….Since the judgment chooses its own object, and has it only so far as it chooses it, how can it be in that partial relation to its object which is implied in the supposition of an erroneous assertion?....Is not the object of a judgment, in so far as it is unknown to that judgment, like the Unknowable for that judgment? To be in error about the application of a symbol, you must have a symbol that symbolizes something. But in so far as the thing symbolized is not known through the symbol, how is it symbolized by that symbol? Is it not, like the Unknowable, once for all out of the thought, so that one cannot just then be thinking about it at all, and so cannot, in this thought at least, be making blunders about it? But in so far as the thing symbolized is, through the symbol, in one’s thought, why is it not known, and so correctly judged?” (Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 399-402)

“Let us attempt a sort of provisional psychological description of a judgment as a state of mind. So regarded, a judgment is simply a fact that occurs in somebody’s thought. If we try to describe it an occurrence…we shall perhaps find in it three elements….The elements are: The Subject, with the accompanying shade of curiosity about it; the Predicate, with the accompanying sense of its worth in satisfying a part of our curiosity about the subject; and the Sense of Dependence, whereby we feel the value of this act to lie, not in itself, but in its agreement with a vaguely felt Beyond, that stands out there as Object. [For] the one judgment, the object, whether full and clear or not, exists as object only in so far forth as the sense of dependence has defined it. And the judgment is true or false only with reference to this undefined object….In its typical form then, the judgment as a mental state seems to us to begin with a relatively incomplete or unstable or disconnected mass of consciousness, which we have called the Subject, as it first begins to be present to us. This subject-idea is attended by some degree of effort, namely, of attention, whose tendency is to complete this incomplete subject by bringing it into closer connection with more familiar mental life. This more familiar life is represented by the predicate-idea. If the effort is successful, the subject has new elements united to it, assumes in consciousness a definiteness, a coherency with other states, a familiarity, which it lacked at the outset of the judgment; and this coherency it gets through its union with the predicate. All this is accompanied further by what one for short may call a sense of dependence. The judgment feels itself not alone, but looks to a somewhat indefinite object as the model after which the present union of ideas is to be fashioned….[As] true or as false the judgment must be viewed in respect to the indefinite object of what we have called the sense of dependence, whereby the judgment is accompanied….[For] the one judgment, the object, whether full and clear or not, exists as object only in so far forth as the sense of dependence has defined it. And the judgment is true or false only with reference to this undefined object. The intention to agree with the object is contained in the sense of dependence upon the object, and remains for this judgment incomplete, like the object itself. Somewhat vaguely this single act intends to agree with this vague object. Such being the case, how can the judgment, as thus described, fairly be called false? As mere psychological combination of ideas it is neither true nor false. As accompanied by the sense of dependence upon an object, it would be false if it disagreed with its imperfectly defined object. But, as described, the only object that the judgment has is this imperfectly defined one. With this, in so far as it is for the moment defined, the judgment must needs agree. In so far as it is not defined, it is however not object for this judgment at all, but for some other one….The object of a single judgment, being what it is, namely, a vaguely defined object, present to this judgment, is just what it is for this judgment, and the judgment seems once for all to be true, in case it is sincere.” (Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 402-405)

“Thought…is an organic unity. Separated from all else but its own incompletely defined object, a single judgment cannot be erroneous. Only in the organic unity of a series of judgments, having a common object, is the error of one of them possible….We cannot see how a single sincere judgment should possibly fail to agree with its own chosen object….[Mere] disagreement of a thought with any random object does not make the thought erroneous….The judgment must agree with its chosen object.” (Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 405-409)

“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)

“Thus, then, for a judgment to have an object, there must be something about the judgment that shows what one of the external objects that are beyond itself this judgment does pick out as its own. But this something that gives the judgment its object can only be the intention wherewith the judgment is accompanied. A judgment has as object only what it intends to have as object. It has to conform only to that which it wants to conform. But the essence of an intention is the knowledge of what one intends....Unless a man is thinking of the object of which I suppose him to be thinking, he makes no real error by merely failing to agree with the object that I have in mind.” (Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 396-397)