Josiah Royce Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.

Josiah Royce
By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists.

Josiah Royce
Loyalty is a good for the loyal man; but it may be mischievous for those whom his cause assails.

Josiah Royce
The control of natural phenomena, which through the sciences, men have attained, grows daily vaster and more detailed, and in its details more assured.

Josiah Royce
A crowd, whether it be a dangerous mob, or an amiably joyous gathering at a picnic is not a community. It has a mind, but no institutions, no organizations, no coherent unity, no history, no traditions.

Josiah Royce
That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed.

Josiah Royce
Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.

Josiah Royce
For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning.

Josiah Royce