The Two-Fold Nature of Knowledge: Imitative and Reflective, an Unpublished Manuscript of Josiah Royce

326 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY THE Two-FOLD NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE: IMITATIVE AND REFLECTIVE, AN UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT OF JOSIAH ROYCE* The following is a manuscript version of an address delivered by Josiah Royce before the Philosophical Congress at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. It is written in longhand and is included in folio 02 of Royce's unpublished writings, preserved in the Archives of Widener Library at Harvard. I have omitted what appear to be the two concluding sections of the manuscript, principally because both have a substantial number of missing pages. The first of these sections discusses the role of imitation in the process of obtaining knowledge and self-awareness--a topic on which Royce wrote and published in subsequent years.1 The final section attempts to relate Royce's findings to certain cardinal principles of idealist metaphysics--a subject handled more fully and more clearly in his magnum opus, The World and the Individual (1899). The problem of selfhood occupied Royce's attention virtually throughout his philosophical career. Two strategies of analysis may be distinguished in Royce's writings on the subject. The first and more familiar one takes as its starting point the metaphysical presuppositions of absolute idealism. In this perspective Royce exhibits the human self as a fragment or "moment " of an Absolute Self. In its quest for a life of coherent knowledge and meaningful purpose, the finite human self "intends" what only an infinite Self can warrant and fulfill. This line of approach is most fully developed in The Religious Aspect el Philosophy (1885) and The World and the Individual. The other strategy of analysis, exemplified in the manuscript following, takes as its starting point a more phenomenological, experiential orientation, specifically the pioneer work done in social psychology by Royce's contemporaries Tarde, Baldwin, Durkheim, Wundt, and James, among others. Although Royce made occasional efforts to integrate these strategies of analysis, hoping thereby to gain concrete plausibility for his absolutist metaphysics, it is not unlikely that they are incompatible. Be that as it may, Royce found himself equally dissatisfied with the dogmatic pretensions of the rationalist metaphysicians to knowledge of the self as an abiding "soul-substance," and with the skeptical outcome of empiricist analyses of self as typified by Hume. Royce was eventually led to conceive selfhood in what are essentially moral or "existential" terms, namely, as an achievement resulting from the attempt to formulate and live by an integrating life plan or purpose, rather than as a metaphysical or epistemological given.' The manuscript that follows belongs to a substantial body of writing, undertaken by Royce roughly between 1890and 1910,whose primary purpose is to lay the epistemological and psychological groundwork for his later ethical doctrines of loyalty and of the community of interpretation . It is because that groundwork is not fully presented in Royce's last published writings that the manuscript following, as well as certain other unpublished material dating from this twenty-year period, deserves the attention of Royce scholars. PETEa Fuss University el Cali/ornia, Riverside If you wish to understand your relation to the world, first understand the nature of your own thinking-process;--such is the principle of all critical * Gratitude is due Royce's grandson, Mr. Stephen Royce, for permission to publish this manuscript and also Royce's Urbana Lectures (which will appear in subsequent issues of this Journal) ; to the University of California for research and travel funds in support of this project ; and to the staff of the Widener Library Archives, Harvard University, for their courteous assistanco . 1See in particular "The Imitative Functions, and Their Place in Human Nature," Century Magazine, IIL: 138 (May 1894), and "Preliminary Report on Imitation," Psychological Review , II: 221 (May 1895). For a discussion of Royce's theory of imitation, see my The Moral Philosophy el Josiah Royce (Harvard University Press: 1965), chapter three. For a fuller discussion of this development in Royce's thought, see my The Moral Philosophy o/Josiah Royce, chapter four. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 327 philosophy, as it has existed in the world ever since the time of Socrates. The present paper is an effort to contribute towards this general end of our self-comprehension of...