Royce

Relational Plenitude

"His predilection for relatedness as the fundamental clue to the nature of things led him to disavow a pluralistic as well as a monistic universe. His writings both published and unpublished reveal Royce's unremitting search for a synthesis of the one and the many, and this synthesis he ultimately found in the notion of the community which became the ruling category of his thought" -- Jacob Loewenberg (1955, J. of Phil. 53.3: 67)

See the "Fourth Conception of Being" in The World and the Individual where Royce constructs a Fourth from analysis of three (Realism, Mysticism, Critical Rationalism) inadequate conceptions.


 * p. 19: "the present experience itself, or even the verification of the facts of this present experience, has more Being than I am now able to observe"


 * pp. 161-162: "while our finitude always shows us that we have not won the whole of Being, it is the fulfillment,--but still the fulfillment of our internal meanings, and not the opaque resistance which the world offers to these meanings, which both defines our warrant for finding that the universe has Being, and gives us, in the form of the internal meaning of our ideas, our only and our valid means for defining wherein that Being consists."


 * p. 172: Our fellows furnish us the constantly needed supplement to our own fragmentary meanings.


 * P. 286: "It is precisely the restoration of individuality to the Self which constitutes the essential deed of our Idealism."


 * p. 288: "The Self can be defined in terms of an Ideal."


 * cf Atman is Brahman (Emerson, Thoreau, Royce: American Hindoos)