RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is at the heart of Josiah Royce's philosophy. His early religious of 1883 was a conviction about the reality of the AU-Knower. It persisted throughout his life. In his final fifteen years (1902-16) he entered more and more into the philosophy of movement. This led him to focus even more oft divine life. In 1912, after his breakthrough to a maximal insight into C. S. Peirce's method and theory of signs, Royce expressed his mature thought most notably in his The Problem of Christianity (1913). From then until his death he found the ideas of Spirit and community becoming increasingly life-giving and much more significant. They enabled him to practice his new method—which I call musement—better than ever before. It consisted in a free, playful, yet communally disciplined process 1 J. Royce, The Problem of Christianity (2 vols.; New York: Macmillan, 1913); hereafter Problem in text, PC in notes; also available in reprints, esp. the one-volume edition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968). Except for Scripture citations, references within parentheses in the present article are to the 1913 edition: e.g., (l:xi-xii) = PC, Vol. 1, pp. xi-xii.— Already in 1918 Gabriel Marcel detected that only in Royce's later interpretative method of philosophizing had he finally (after having used less than effective instruments for so many years) succeeded in finding the fitting medium not only for communicating his message well but even for having it essentially understood; see Marcel, Royce's Metaphysics (Chicago: Regnery, 1956) 147. 2 See Royce to Prof. Mary Whiton Calkins, March 20,1916, The Letters of Josiah Royce, ed. John Clendenning (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970) 644-648, esp. 645; hereafter Letters. In general, the mature Royce's idea of Spirit is as profound, pervasive, and analogical as is his idea of community. In 1915 Royce stated that his sense of spirit was not only indeed Pauline but also perfectly capable of exact and logical statement and thus Peircean; see J. Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (New York: Macmillan, 1916) 131; hereafter HGC. As Pauline, Royce's idea of Spirit was biblical and carried its mystical, superindividual, and romantic senses along with many others. It was difficult to understand; especially so, perhaps, if one tried to reduce to a fixed concept the perfectly real, concrete, and literal life of what we idealists call the 'spirit' (ibid.). As Peircean, this idea expressed itself in the logic of communities of interpretation and of their spirit. Royce indicated to Prof. Warner Fite that the epsilon relation (whereby an individual entity belongs to a set) is the logical foundation for his theory of community. Lying behind this indication is the whole of Royce's distinctive logical System Sigma; see Letters 604-9, esp. 609, and Royce's Logical Essays, ed. D. S. Robinson (Dubuque: Wm. C. Brown, 1951) 350,357, 377-78; hereafter RLE. 3 For a description of interpretive musement, see further on in the text. For Royce's description of interpretation, as a third and irreducible mode of human knowing, see PC 2:109-221, esp. 158-63. Unlike perception and conception, interpretive knowing has for its object minds and signs of minds. For example, a person tries to read his friend's unspoken
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