royce, james and intentionality

Royce, James and IntentionalityAuthor(s): Rickard J. DonovanSource: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1975), pp. 195-211Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40319741 .

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Royce, James and Intentionality

Richard ]. Donovan

Josiah Royce's agreements and disagreements with his former teacher, colleague and dear friend, William James, forms an important and by now familiar episode in the history of American philosophy. The classic "Battle of the Absolute" has always been of interest to those concerned with un- derstanding how James, along with Dewey and Mead, struggled to liberate themselves from the dominance of European thought, ie. Absolute Ideal- ism, and develop a philosophical perspective more congenial to the emerg- ing view of scientific inquiry and the growing complexity of American experience at the turn of the century. It now seems that recent develop- ments in scholarship provide ample justification for a fresh look at the mutual influences in the thought of Royce and James.

James continues to receive attention from students of contemporary phenomenology, and his relationship to Husserl offers a focus for con- tinued study. Prominant in this connection is James's theory of intentionality, developed in the monumental Principles of Psychology, a work that Husserl admitted helped to free him from the trappings of psychologism. On the other hand, it appears that James knew nothing of Husserl's thought, much less his theory of intentionality.1 The question has recently been posed: Why was James in the Principles, a, work purporting to be a purely psychological account, so taken up with the intentional structure of thought ? One answer has been to show how James was forced during the course of his psychological investigations to confront the more basic epis- temological problem of thought's objective reference.2 But what influences up to the time of the writing of the Principles had served to focus James's attention on the problem? It is our contention that the influence of Royce, at least up to the writing of the essay on pragmatism, was a decisive factor in leading James to take seriously a teleological as well as a psychological analysis of thought. Indeed, it seems that the overall development of James's thought can be seen in a much clearer light in terms of his relationship to Royce. Royce was one of the few in America acquainted with Husserl's early work and was insisting on the intentional character of our ideas before either Brentano or Husserl. In fact, at least a plausible claim can be made in support of Royce's direct influence on the formation of Husserl's phenomenology.3 If this is the case, then it would seem worth



196 RiCKARD J. Donovan

while to take another look at the fundamental inspiration and direction of

Royce's theory of knowledge and James's early reaction to it. This hope- fully will serve to widen the focus of current interest in the relation of

phenomenology and the pragmatic tradition. Royce is clearly a thinker for whom the problem of temporality is cen-

tral. This emphasis places him in the long tradition of Neo-Platonism as much as it puts him in touch with the temporal and evolutionary focus of

pragmatism. Royce finds in the Platonic tradition, as it developed at the hands of Kant and the German Romantic tradition, both the seeds of his own doctrine of time and the key to the relation of thought and ex-

perience in terms of subjectivity. In other words, the question of time for Royce will be resolved in terms of analysis of the temporal expansion of self -consciousness.

"The New Phenomenology;" Would this title be sacriligious ? And this for an opening: "Every man lives in a present, and con-

templates a past and a future. In this consists his whole life. The future and the past are shadows both, the present is the only real. Yet in the contemplation of the shadows is the real wholly occupied; and without the shadows the real has for us neither life nor value. No more universal fact of consciousness can be men- tioned than this fact, which therefore deserves a more honorable

place in philosophy than has been accorded to it. For it is in view of this that all men may be said to be in some sense Idealists."4

Althought Kant had sought to make clear the relation of consciousness to its object in terms of the deduction of the categories, Royce will formulate the problem of knowledge in terms of the relation of one conscious moment of experience to other conscious moments.

I see Kant as I never saw him before. But we must put our problem differently. Thus says Kant: What is the relation of knowl-

edge to its object? Thus say we: What is the relation of every conscious moment to every other? Our question may be more fundamental, and can be made so only through a study of him.5

Holding to a "sense-data*' theory of perception, Royce distinguishes "within** the momentary act of consciousness, the presence of an immediate sense content and an act of judgment. Although in every knowing activity



Roy ce, James and Intentionality 197

there is the irreducible appearance of a "given," there is also in the activity of judgment a reference to something beyond the present sensation. The "given" sends us to the not-given for its very meaning.

Take up the thread of knowing consciousness where you will, and you will find in every moment when there is knowledge, a reference, more or less definite and significant, of the content here given to something beyond the content.6

Royce next takes up a discussion of the fundamental forms of reference which constitute the structure of self -consciousness : acknowledgement of the past and the future, acknowledgement of the existence of "other minds," acknowledgment of the present moment of consciousness to "external reality," and to other experiences besides our own as possible.7 For our purposes it will be sufficient to limit our discussion to the temporal expansion of consciousness embodied in the first two forms of reference. We will presuppose the other forms of reference as they relate to the development of Royce's theory of intentionality.

The past as past is simply not given in any form of direct knowledge. What might be called an awareness of an "immediately given succession" is not our awareness that the past has ceased to be, the present is, and the future has yet to come. Royce insists that even though these judgments are shifting and arbitrary they are the necessary conditions for a coherent experience of time. Acknowledgments of the past and anticipations of the future are ideal constructions in terms of which we build a coherent experience in the "here and now."8 Therefore, Royce cannot be charged witft "cutting up" the time-stream when there is, in terms of his presuppositions, simply nothing "given" to cut up. As early as 1880 he writes to James:

The stream is continuous. Don't cut it, and then you will not be troubled about past and future .... Whoever was responsible for the cutting, the question is who shall now weave up the rope again? Nay, who shall create once more all the rope that has slipped away into nothing, leaving me this little present moment? .... Past and future are constructions of a present which becomes a present and not a mere content of consciousness in that it constructs them.?



198 RicKARD J. Donovan

It is evident at this point that Royce has passed well beyond Kant and is offering a "new conception of experience"10 in the spirit of German Idealism. For Royce, time is not merely a formal condition of experience. Rather experience beyond the present moment is fully constituted in terms of the present act of temporal reference.

These early efforts to formulate a theory of knowledge in terms of the present moment of experience had led Royce to consider a certain brand of skepticism as the only honest position. If the content of the present moment of experience alone is ' 'given," and if we persist in acknowledging the past and the future, what grounds do we have for these assumptions? Do these acts of reference represent anything more than our resolve to treat experience in certain constructive ways which can be justified on "pragmatic" grounds in that they exhibit to an as- tonishing degree the power of ideas to inaugurate a future and reconstruct the past? Royce contends that to the extent that we are prepared to act on these resolves as if they were to be fulfilled in experience at large, we have the wisdom to live by postulates. "From moment to moment one can be sure of each moment. All else is postulate."11 At this point Royce' s theory of knowledge is thoroughly ethical in character. Yet we find him in this his first major work, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, struggling to complete this ethical perspective in terms of an idealistic interpretation of experience. We will now look briefly at the key moves in this development.

Royce finds in the relation of the present moment of experience to the conditions of error the strongest possible evidence for a thoroughly idealistic view of experience. In a manner very like Descartes, Royce reflects on the relation between doubt and error. Only an active faith can sus- tain an ethical perspective against the corrosive effects of doubt. Here is the familiar pragmatic emphasis on the relation of doubt, belief and action so prominent in the work of Peirce. However, with Royce the argument takes a more decisively Kantian form. The question is put as to how doubt is possible in a world constructed in terms of the present moment of experience. "If everything beyond the present is doubtful, then how can even that doubt be possible?"12 If we can doubt all but the present moment of experience, we can be in error about it. But what is the precise meaning of error in a world of pure construction? It is then to the question of just how error is possible that Royce turns his attention.



Roy ce, James and lntentionality 199

Roy ce' s starting point rules out any serious consideration of the problem of error on the basis of traditional realism. It is futile to discuss the agreement or disagreement of judgments with objects which are held to be "external" or "independent" of the judgments in question. How can we make intelligible the claim that a particular judgment corresponds to its own object, if all judgments, as well as all objects of judgment, are independent facts of experience? Here, Royce begins to develop his theory of intentionality. "A judgment has as object only what it intends to have as object. It has to conform only to that to which it wants to conform. "^ But if it is through the intention of a judgment that its object is selected, and if intention implies knowledge of what one intends, then how can the judgment possibly be false? If we cannot find a standard for truth in the "independent" object of realism, where do we find it? Royce's answer will be in terms of a contextualism that insures the internal connectedness of judgments both to one another and to their objects.14 Nothing less than a coherence theory of truth, involving a unification of form and content, can supply sufficient conditions for the fact of error. If we turn to a consideration of our statements about the past and the future we can see the full force of this position and also the source of many of Royce's disagreements with other pragmatists. If experiences beyond the present moment are not actual, how can we be in error about them? To say that events in the future will "make" our ideas come true is to neglect the temporal implications of

Royce's contention that Judgments select the experiences that fulfill them. But if judgments are intentional in this way, then they must be true or false in the moment in which they are made, although due to our limited vision we have to wait for the actual verification. Royce holds that unless the past, present and future are somehow radically contained within the

present moment of experience, all our former difficulties with the problem of error return. My expectations of the future can be verified only when the future comes to pass. But when the events predicted are

"actually present to me, then the expectation no longer exists. If I

appeal to memory, I am appealing to a present memory of a past ex-

perience, but the past is no longer actual. In other words, if one takes the passage of time with utmost seriousness, judgments of the past and future remain self -enclosed events which select their own objects and can make no pretense of corresponding to anything "external" to the moment of their existence. As judgments of the moment, they can make no claim to hold true of other moments. It is clear that a purely temporalized




version of experience is inadequate to meet certain structural necessities of a universe of meaning demanded by Royce's theory of intentionality. What is required is a "larger experience" which contains and completes our momentary judgments concerning past and future. This ultimate perspective would both recognize and overcome the limitations inherent in any partial view of the whole temporal process. Royce is quite serious in attempting to join a coherence theory of truth with a supra-temporal vision of experience. Thoroughly in the Platonic tradition he is attempting to unite a mathematical and theological conception of reality. The

present moment of experience can only be fully comprehended in the light of its eternal meaning.

Royce is now in a position to draw the full implications of his theory of intentionality. No intentional act can be viewed in isolation from its total context. Truth is a matter of the degree to which we approach total systematization of knowledge. But is this limit of knowledge more than a logical possibility, or intellectual hope, suggested by the partiality of our present knowledge? As other pragmatists would admit, there are

always more questions to be asked as our experience grows in definiteness and organization. But this suggests only an ideal limit or horizon which would contain the answers to all questions, // it existed. However, Royce's theory of time and intentionality rule out this alternative. If a

judgment is true or false at the very moment when it is made, and truth and falsity make sense only in relation to consciousness, then it must be true or false in relation to an actual consciousness. This actual experience constitutes the necessary ground for the very possibility of error. "The conditions of error must be actual, bare possibility is blank nothing- ness."15 Here, then, we have the existential expression of Royce's Abso- lute as a thought which includes all thoughts or intentions and their

fulfillment, an organic unity of spiritual life, reflecting the organization appropriate to a complete system of ideas. "Experience must constitute, in its entirety, one self-determined and consequently absolute and or-

ganized whole."16 Having sketched the major emphasis of Royce's theory of knowledge, let us now turn to a consideration of the general line of

James's philosophical orientation. More than any other leading American pragmatist, James's thought

leans heavily on the tradition of classic British empiricism. Despite the Kantian emphasis he absorbed from the philosophy of Renovier, it was with Locke, Berkeley and Hume that he felt the deepest kinship.17 However in his many years of studying and teaching British philosophy,



Roy ce, ]ames and Intentionality 201

James's attitude was always critical. Influenced by T. H. Green's reading of Locke and Hume, James saw that the failure of classical empiricism, culminating in Hume's skepticism, involved two interrelated errors: its tendency to atomize immediate experience and its view of the knowing subject as passive and detached. As a result, traditional empiricism was unable to recognize the highly selective character of what it took to be the primordial experience, ie. Hume's impressions, and ignored the relational character that James insisted was to be found in even our pre-re- flective experience. In order to correct these deficiencies, Kant and the idealists had introduced what James saw as artificial correctives designed to bring our fragmentary experience to some kind of coherent expression. There is enough evidence to show that James recognized, to some extent, the profound development of experience to be found in the idealist tradition. Early, he acknowledged that the effort to reach a larger order of experience beyond the immediate had been the chief merit of Transcen- dentalism.18 But through all his battles with German philosophy, it seems that James never fully appreciated the transcendental or a-priori method of Kant, much less the development of subjectivity on the part of the German Romantic tradition. In the dialectical and developmental perspective common to the period from Kant to Hegel James saw only a guise for determinism and moral complacency at the expense of freedom, moral initiative and creativity.19 In short, the empirical temper of James was never at home with the kind of "system building" demanded by a

thoroughgoing idealism; and like Dewey and Mead, sought to formulate an interpretation of experience more in keeping with a strickly temporal and evolutionary perspective. James maintained, strenuously, that "the line of philosophical progress" lay "not so much through Kant as round him." Now, this alone would sooner or later bring him into conflict with

Royce. Yet in the early years of their association, we find more agreement than disagreement.

Royce heard James's lectures in Baltimore in 1878. He listened to

James's attack on automatism. After much study in both areas, James shows his disenchantment with attempts to argue psychology from phys- iology. He vindicates the subjective method and claims that we know "mind" better than we do the nervous system.20 In 1879 James published an article in Mind clarifying his position and insisting that consciousness is marked by discrimination and choice. The latter cannot be explained in terms of causal stimuli.21 The "Sentiment of Rationality" appeared in the same year. Here James is concerned with the motives for philoso-




phizing, and he and Royce find themselves on common ground. By 1880 Royce was in the process of working out his own philosophical starting point, and as we have already noted, in close correspondence with James. We find Royce attempting to bring together the psychological orientation of James expressed in the * 'Sentiment of Rationality" and his theory of the postulates. Referring to forms of activity through which experience is created out of the present moment, Royce tells James that "all these forms of activity appear as expressions of certain fundamental interests that we take in the world."22 However, Royce makes clear in the same letter that his starting point is thoroughly Kantian, and his deepest concern is with the "structure of thought." As for James's psychological insight into the business of philosophizing, he has this to say:

Your method of discussing psychological problems would make them a sort of propaedeutic to this deepest philosophical study. I say "deepest"; for to solve the problem of the structure of knowledge would be to gain insight into everything in the range of philosophy .... The deepest question is Kant's "How is experience possible?"23

James replies that he is not quite clear as to Royce' s views on the structure of thought, but sees him as an ally in vindicating through the postulates the element of spontaneity in the construction of truth. "No philosophy can be anything else than an attempt to make a certain construction work."24

Royce first set down the elements of his idealistic position in an article, "Mind and Reality," in 1882. "The theme will be to express some of those motives in the formation of our idea of reality"25 and

explicit mention is made of James's "Sentiment of Rationality." Royce offers his analysis in basically the same terms as The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. He lists "a whole army of idealists" who support in one

way or another the view that the external world is the construction of

thought. In line with this position Royce develops a devastating critique of the principle of causality. Berkley's claim that the external world is the cause of our impressions is dismissed as sheer dogmatism. What we need is a critical analysis of this very assumption. If this is under- taken it will become evident that the principle of causality is only a subordinate principle of explanation within a larger framework of

meaning.



Royce, James and Intentionality 203

When the notion of external reality is based solely upon the application of the principle of causality all degrees of likeness or unlikeness between thought and things are assumed, accord- ing to the tastes of individual thinkers. External reality is once for all absolved from the conditions of being intelligible, and becomes capable of being anything you please, a dead atom, an electric flued, a ghost, a devil, an unknowable. But if the subordinate character of this postulate of causality is once understood, the conception of reality is altered.26

What Royce will, of course, do is to work out the "likeness of thought and things" in terms of his theory of intentionality, later expressed as the fulfillment of purpose. The "tastes of individual thinkers" will be subordinated to a theory of meaning and ultimately resolved in terms of a systematic unity of all purposes. The external world becomes the external meaning of an idea, or the "counter-part" of thought. "All our thinking is based on the postulate that the external world is a counter-

part and not merely a cause."27 James's response to this article is most enthusiastic. He writes to Royce: "I think the point that interested me most was your treatment of Cause vs. Counterpart, which formulated the issue and solved it in a way quite new to me."28 Eight years before the publication of the Principles James was exposed to and impressed by Royce' s theory of intentionality.

Just before the publication of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy James wrote "The Function of Cognition." He had been in discussion with Royce concerning more details of Royce's theory and refers to "his

( Royce' s) more fundamental criticism of the function of cognition."29 For his part, James prefers not to get involved with metaphysical con- siderations, but rather to stick to a "practical and psychological point of view." He does not want to walk in the footsteps of Kant and Hegel, but to travel along in "the ancestral English paths."

Our task is again limited here. We are not to ask, "How is self-transcendence possible?" We are only to ask, "How comes it that common sense has assigned a number of cases in which it is assumed to be possible and to be actual? And what are the marks used by common sense to distinguish those cases from the rest?" In short, our inquiry is a chapter in descriptive psychology, - hardly anything more.30




What develops is an anticipation of doctrines later to be worked out in pragmatism. We find the insistence on the priority of perceptual over conceptual knowledge. This is maintained through a defense of feeling as cognitive and relational. The problem of solipsism and the problem of error (Roycean themes) are to be resolved in terms of practical conse- quences, later to be elaborated as the workability of an idea. Consistent with the "Common sense" point of view, James holds that reality is external to ideas.31 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy appeared in 1885 and James remained for some time caught up not only with Royce's treatment of the relation of thought and object but even by his arguments for the Absolute. In 1888 he writes to Renouvier and gives a very clear synopsis of Royce's position. "He (Royce) means that a superior consciousness to the one on trial is needed to constitute as well as to verify the truth or error of the latter's judgments."32 Although James is re-

pelled by Royce's monistic system, he is deeply impressed by the thoroughgoing way in which Royce holds fast to the implications of intentionality. "To me the argument seems irresistible, so long as we take the relation of really intending an object, au serieux."33

It wasn't until around 1893 that James was able to develop his own

empirical principle of verification latent in "The Function of Cognition." Largely under the influence of D. S. Miller "I came to see that any definitely experienceable workings would serve as intermediaries quite as well as the absolute mind's intentions."34 James was now out from under the spell of Royce's metaphysics and in a position to offer a ra-

dically temporalized and personalized account of the process of cognition, emphasizing in vivid imagery how an idea works by leading us to have the experiences which the idea has anticipated. But in what sense, if

any, are "experienceable workings" to be equated with the idea's ob-

jective reference or intention? It was primarily around this question that the many attacks an James's pragmatism centered. It is interesting that James felt the criticism of realists as well as idealists. By stressing the active role of the subject and the experienceable character of verification, he was accused by the realists of ignoring the independent object of thought.35 In holding to the common sense point of view compatible with realism, he was accused by the idealists of being uncritical and dog- matic.36 James thought that by endorsing the processive and future di- rected character of experience, and the independence of idea and object, he had moved to a naturalistic perspective and had simply by-passed the neo-Kantian criticism.37 The reply from his critics was that James had not




taken the trouble to analyze the assumptions involved in his own position. We find him struggling to clarify to himself as well as to his critics, just what he means by claiming that an idea leads to its object.

In Pragmatism James had described his position as basically nominal- istic.38 Ideas lead in time to particular experiences. But this priority of perceptual over conceptual knowledge is hardly consistent with the demands of a theory of intentionality. How can particular experiences make an idea "come true" if the idea's meaning determines what par- ticulars can be said to qualify as items of verification? Under criticism, James came to acknowledge the contextual and conceptual elements of experience. He talks about an idea leading into the "neighborhood" of an object and into the "universe" of an object.39 "Leading" is not to be taken in a narrow spatial or temporal sense, but should be understood to indicate a logical reference as well.

.... that approach meant "generic" approach, and nextness meant logical nextness, as well as neighborhood in space. These are essential to the acquaintance with, or "portrayal" by thought of the that to which it refers.40

But in what sense can a radically temporal perspective, or in the language of the Principles, a "stream of consciousness," characterized by immediacy and uniqueness square with a world of common meaning? How can even our knowledge of the past be interpreted in terms of "future satisfactions."41

Turning to Royce's criticism of James, we find in his reply to James's attack on the Absolute, the charge that James has not been clear as to his own assumptions. In taking facts within the time stream as separate occurences, he has supposed a continuity of time and a sameness of the thinking process. In addition, memory must be assumed if we are to know that one event really follows another. These are necessary conditions of the "structure of thought" which imply a unified view of the temporal experience.

On the contrary, the three sorts of fact that I have just pointed out are all of them facts about the relations of the contents of and consciousness and events of your two moments only in so far as these two moments are together equally real and are to be viewed as parts of one whole fact.42




What is in conflict here is Royce's synthetic view of temporal experience in terms of the unification of self-consciousness, and James's empirical and introspective analysis of real duration. The latter emphasis, if

pushed far enough, would tend to demolish the common world of objects as well as selves. Royce feels that as long as James held to a metaphysical dualism, thus preserving a common world of stable objects, the psychological analysis of the "stream of consciousness" was acceptable as a merely descriptive account. But already James was beginning to move in the direction of his later thought in which the "stream of consciousness" was to be worked into a new metaphysics of experience. As of 1899 Royce cannot understand what James is doing:

If you reply that you long ago disposed of sameness, ego etc., in your Psychology .... I shall answer that you did so there only provisionally, upon an explicitly realistic hypothesis .... But here you are for the time playing quite another game (I can't see it!) . . . ,43

Royce's criticism of The Meaning of Truth in 1908 adds nothing more to the final break with James. He tries to accept all that James has to say about "workings," but as James describes them in terms of his naturalistic perspective, they do not constitute for Royce "sufficient conditions"44

Royce's dissatisfaction with James's pragmatism only served to reveal long-standing differences which became more pronounced as their careers drew to a close. Although Royce's concerns were always metaphysical, it was only in the last ten years of his life that James devoted himself to an elaboration of his own metaphysics of experience. Both in Essays of Radi- cal Empiricism and The Pluralistic Universe, James sought to suggest a "world view" at least compatible with the methodological demands of his pragmatism. The flow and continuity of ordinary experience is stressed as against the derivative character of all bifurcations and dualisms. Spe- cifically, the dualism of subject and object is to be viewed as a function of a a more primordial, unreconstructed or "pure experience."45 Fields of consciousness replace the transcendental Ego of the idealists, and the horizon of experience is emphasized rather than the transempirical conditions of experience. By 1905 James was committed to the view that the field of consciousness and reality were one and the same.46 It was in terms of this heightened sensitivity to the "thickness" and varied texture of our

ordinary "lived" experience that James was able to enrich the empirical



Royce, James and Intentionality 207

tradition and open up so many fruitful areas for phenomenological in- vestigation.47 In James's repeated insistence that feelings are both relational and experienceable, He joins Dewey and Whitehead in broadening our appreciation of the varied texture of our cognitive life beyond the rather ridgid limitations imposed by Royce' s almost exclusive concern with the volitional aspect of thought.48 This has proved to be particularly suggestive for contemporary aesthetic theory, a field in which Royce claimed absolutely no competence.4?

Yet, James's metaphysics of experience remains at best, suggestive. What precise meaning can one give to James's claim that reality must be sensed or felt in order to be? Is the doctrine of "pure" or unreconstructed experience to be interpreted as James's version of monism designed to supply the element of continuity? If it is, then it appears to be of the mystical variety, and as such beyond the reach of systematic analysis. Royce wrote the following, summing up his attitude toward mysticism as a metaphysical position:

How else shall we attempt to discover this desired fulfillment of our purpose? The ordinary answer is by external experience. Now this so-called external experience is never what you might call "Pure Experience." For only the mystic looks for Pure Experience wholly apart from ideas.50

Royce concludes that the mystic is indeed the only thoroughgoing em- piricist in the history of philosophy.51 However, in attempting to get "beyond" or "beneath" the contamination of ideas to a "pure experience" characterized in terms of immediate feeling, the mystic cuts himself off from a full participation in the intentional constitution of experience. An empiricism which fails to do justice to the conceptual elements of experience is simply not being faithful to the structural necessities of a universe of meaning. It seems that James's later metaphysics is particularly vulnerable here. Are relations as the idealist interprets them really external to experience as James so often claimed? This seems a rather curious criticism of a philosophy inspired by the ideal of organici ty.

On the other hand, although Royce's starting point is thoroughly existential, grounded in the present moment of experience, it must be acknowledged that his perspective is thoroughly dominated by the demands of total system. Royce is never completely convincing in his claim that a "time-inclusive consciousness" is compatible with genuine




novelty and freedom.52 Even if we look to the later Royce, where me- diation becomes the more dominant theme, and his interests began to center more around the logic of Peirce and the theme of the cocimunitv^ it is not at all clear that he thereby completely escapes James's label of a "block universe." The World as a progressively realized community of interpretation is presently constituted in terms of the Final Interpreter and the Absolute Interpretation.

And if in ideal, we aim to conceive the divine nature, how better can we conceive it than in the form of the Community of Interpretation, and above all in the form of the Interpreter, who interprets all to all, and each individual to the world, and the world of spirits to each individual,53

In the last analysis, we can say that although Royce was faithful at all costs to the structural demands of systematic analysis, his empiricism suffered from his insistence that only the idea as will or sign can certify as the ultimately real. Where James's characteristically receptive posture made for an attitude congenial to the many "shadings" of "lived experience," Royce's voluntarism seems to have prevented him from developing a many-sided empiricism. Contemporary phenomenologkal analysis of both the existential and transcendental variety are presently engaged in developing possibilities that reflect this most fundamental tension.

lona College

NOTES 1. Herbert Spiegelberg,- "What William james knew about Edmond Husserl,"

Life World and Consciousness, Essays for Aron Gurvitsch, Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 407-422.

2. This is the point of the very brilliant study by Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology, A Study of the Principles of Psychology, (Indiana University Press, 1968)

3. It is established that Husserl was acquainted with Royce's work when Hus- serl's idealism was taking shape. H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenologkal Movement, Nijhoff, I960, Vol. 1, pp; 142-146. Royce refers to HusserFs logic in a presidential address delivered to the American Psychological Association, Jan. 1902. Later printed as "Recent logical Inquiries and their psychological Bearings," Royce's logical Essays, ed, by Daniel Robinson (Dubuque, Iowa, W. C Brown Company, 1951) pp. 3-34.



Royce? ¡ames and Intenftondity 209

4. Royce's Diary (1879-1880). Entry dated April 35 1879. Quoted by J, Loe- wenberg, Fugitive Essays (Harvard University Press, 1920), Introduction, p. 31.

5. Ibid., Entry dated Sept. 4, 1880. pp. 33, 4. 6. Ibid., pp. 376, 7. 7. "Kant's Relation to Modern Philosophic Progress," The Journal of Speculative

Philosophy, vol. XV, No. 4 (1881), p. 377. 8. Royce rejects Bergson's claim that we have a metaphysical intuition into real

duration. "It is not what a man merely feels that gets him into genuine touch with deeper reality. It is what a man wills to do. Now the temporal form of experience is to my mind primarily the form of the will." "Reality of the Temporal," International Journal of Ethics, April 1910, p. 269.

9. Letter to William James, June 7, 1880. The Letters of Josiah Royce, (Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 81, 2. Edited by J. Clendenning.

10. "Kant's Relation to Modern Philosophic Progress,'* p. 378. 11. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, (Boston Houghton Miffln, 1885),

Harper Torchbook Edition, 1958, p. 389. 12. Ibid., p. 389. 13. Ibid., p, 397. It must be kept in mind that for Royce an idea is essentially

a will and so the language of passion is appropriate in terms of his highly personalized and admittedly Romanticized vision of experience.

14. Unlike the idealism of Bradley, Royce's brand is closer to Hegel in holding to a doctrine of internal relations.

15. Religious Aspect, pp. 429, 30. 16. The Conception of God, (MacMillan Co., 1909), p. 45. 17. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, (Boston,

Little Brown & Co., 1935), Vol. 1, pp. 543-572. 18. Ibid., p. 564. 19. James's acquaintance with Hegel was largely through the Logic and the

Encyclopedia, He never distinguished sharply between German idealism and the British version represented by T. H. Green and the Caird Brothers. It is not certain that he had read Hegel's Phenomenology until just before his Hibbert lectures of 1909, later published as The Pluralistic Universe, his most sympathetic treatment of Hegel. On the other band, Royce always considered the Phenomenology to be Hegel's most significant work. Royce was perfectly at home in German Idealism. Cf, Lectures in Modern Idealism, Yale Univ. Press, 1909. Yale Paperback 1963.

20. William James, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York, 1920), pp. 436, 7. Quoted by Perry, op. cit., vol. 11, pp. 27, 8.

21. Ibid., p. 31. '

22. Letter to Tames, Sept. 10, 1880. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 788. 23. Ibid. 24. Letter to Royce, Dec. 25, 1880. Ibid.f p. 789. 25; "Mind md Reality," Mind VII, 1882, p. 54. 26o Ibid., p. 48. As Perry notes (op. cit, Vol. 1, p. 792, note 17) a key to

the relationship of James and Royce can be seen in their respective attitudes toward Fichte. While Royce was critical of the subjectivism of Fichte, he respected his approach to the problem of the external world: Cf. Spirit of Mod. Phil, Boston:




Houghton Mifflin Co., 1892. New York: G. Braziller, 1955. Lecture V. James cared little for Fichte. Cf. Wm. James and other Essays where Royce writes: "He never loved Fichte; but there is much of the best of the ethical idealism of Fichte in "The Will to Believe," p. 42. There is also nothing of the Transcendental method in the "Will to Believe" and much of the capriciousness that Royce dis- liked in Fichte. James's "Will to Believe" is like Royce's postulates only in spirit.

27. Ibid. 28. Letter to Royce, Jan. 15, 1882. Perry, Vol. 1, p. 793. 29. "The Function of Cognition," Mind, XX, 1885. Reprinted in The Meaning

of Truth, (Ann Arbor Paperback, 1970) p. 22, note 1. 30. Ibid., pp. 2, 3. 31. Ibid., pp. 41, 2. 32. Letter to Renouvier, March 29, 1888. Perry op. cit., vol. 1, p. 703. 33. Ibid., p. 705. 34. "The Function of Cognition," op. cit., p. 22. note 1. 35. Cf. Correspondence with Charles A. Strong, Perry Vol. 11, pp. 534-552. 36. Cf. Correspondence with Bradley, Ibid., pp. 488-493. 37. James, again, is most explicit about this in a letter to Munsterberg, March

16, 1905. "As Schiller, Dewey and I mean pragmatism, it is toto coelo opposed to either the original or the revived K&núsm." Ibid., p. 469.

38. Pragmatism and Other Essays (Washington Square Press, 1963) p. 26. 39. Letter to Strong, Aug. 4, 1907, Perry, p. 540. 40. Letter to Strong, Aug. 21, 1907, Ibid., p. 546. 41. James claims that he holds that the past is unalterable, but he does so on

realistic assumptions. "Truths involving the past's relations to later things can't come into being till the later things exist, so much truths may grow and alter, but the past itself is beyond the reach of modification." Letter to Alfred C. Lane, Oct. 28, 1907. Ibid., p. 478.

42. Letter to James, March 1899, Appendix V, Ibid., p. 730. 43. Ibid., p. 731. 44. From comments written by Royce on a copy of James's leaflet, "The Meaning

of the Word Truth" (1907), Ibid., p. 736. 45. James's long struggles with idealism had left a lasting deposit. As early

as 1895, James was ready to adopt the hypothesis of phenomenism in order to overcome dualism. This later was to become the pure "datum" or the "pure experience." Ibid., pp. 365, 67.

46. Ibid., p. 589. 47. James's emphasis on the primacy of perceptual knowledge leads naturally

into a phenomenology of the body. Cf. Wilshire, chapter Six. For other phenomenological themes in James, cf. New Essays in Phenomenology, ed. by James Edie (Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1969), and of course John Wild's The Radical Empiricism of William James, Anchor Books, 1970.

48. In his early studies of Romanticism, (Religious Aspect, pp. 107-130) Royce considered the possibility of looking at experience as the fulfillment of feeling. The Romantic irony reveals that fickelness and selfishness are the result. From that point Royce never seems to have taken seriously the claim that feelings might be




in themselves cognitive and intentional. It might be more correct to say that in the growth of self-consciousness, feelings must become will in order to be intentional. In other words will is constitutive of feeling. It is this total stress on the will as the principle of integration that tends to constrict Royce's empiricism. Cf. William E. Hocking, "On Royce's Empiricism," The journal of Philosophy, Feb. 2, 1956, pp. 57-63.

49. For a development of aesthetic theory along Jamesian lines cf. John J. McDermott, "Deprivation and Celebration: Suggestions for an Aesthetic Ecology," New Essays in Phenomenology, pp. 116-130. Royce felt that his background simply did not equip him for developing any sophistication in the field of aesthetics. "I never was in my youth a person "cultivated" in any aesthetic sense; and I remain more barbarous in such matters than you can easily suspect." Letter to Richard Clarke, June 15, 1912; Letters of Josiah Royce, p. 578. Royce is, of course, selling himself short. His lifelong dedication to literature and music are well known. This however was never subordinated to his dedication to logic, order and system. In one of the few places where he ventures an opinion on aesthetics he remarks that the aesthetic object "must possess a structure closely, if not precisely, equivalent to the ideal structure of what the mathematicians call a group." "The Science of the Ideal," Science, Vol. XX, No. 510, Oct. 7, 1904, p. 462.

50. World and the Individual, Vol. 1, p. 285. Dover Edition, 1959. 51. Ibid., p. 81. 52. Cf. Milic Capek, "Time and Eternity in Royce and Bergson," Revue Inter-

nationale de Philosophic, 1967, No. 79, pp. 22-45. It is not surprising that James during his later period would find himself rediscovering Bergson. Perry, vol. 11, pp. 599-617.

53. The Problem of Christianity (New York, MacMillan, 1913), vol. 11, p. 219. Royce's final statement still seems consistent with his early Absolute Idealism. "Only in terms of a theory of the threefold process of knowledge can we hope fully to express what is meant by that form of idealism which views the world as the "process of the spirit," and as containing its own interpretation and its own interpreter." Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 8, 1916, p. 657.



royce, james and intentionality

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