The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

Josiah Royce (1920)

Josiah Royce Character and Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London : Constable and Co. Ltd.; Toronto: McLeod, 1920, 97–138. Volume eleven of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. This selection appeared as Chapter IV in Character and Opinion in the United States but originally was part of a lecture on both William James and Josiah Royce (1855–1916). Santayana explained to a correspondent that “in filling out the paper on James and Royce I got into a terrible mess; and that one lecture has now expanded into four chapters” ( LGS, 2:342). Commenting later on the published chapter Santayana wrote, “I did enjoy writing it, not only “maliciously” but also imaginatively, in trying to call up the complete figure and tragedy of such a man, a patient voluminous straggling mind, with a sort of childish insistence and stubbornness in fundamental matters—puzzled and muddled, and yet good and wise. . . . Of course, his friends and disciples were angry: it was so unlike an obituary notice” ( LGS, 3:213–14). Royce, the leading idealist philosopher in America, had been Santayana’s teacher, dissertation director, and then colleague at Harvard. Meantime the mantle of philosophical authority had fallen at Harvard upon other shoulders. A young Californian, Josiah Royce, had come back from Germany with a reputation for wisdom; and even without knowing that he had already produced a new proof of the existence of God, merely to look at him you would have felt that he was a philosopher; his great head seemed too heavy for his small body, and his portentous brow, crowned with thick red hair, seemed to crush the lower part of his face. “Royce,” said William James of him, “has an indecent exposure of forehead.” There was a suggestion about him of the benevolent ogre or the old child, in whom a preternatural sharpness of insight lurked beneath a grotesque mask. If you gave him any cue, or even without one, he could discourse broadly on any subject; you never caught him napping. Whatever the text-books and encyclopædias could tell him, he knew; and if the impression he left on your mind was vague, that was partly because, in spite of his comprehensiveness, he seemed to view everything in relation to something else that remained untold. His approach to anything was oblique; he began a long way off, perhaps with the American preface of a funny story; and when the point came in sight, it was at once enveloped again in a cloud of qualifications, in the parliamentary jargon of philosophy. The tap once turned on, out flowed the stream of systematic disquisition , one hour, two hours, three hours of it, according to demand or opportunity. The voice, too, was merciless and harsh. You felt the overworked, standardised, academic engine, creaking and thumping on at the call of duty or of habit, with no thought of sparing itself or any one else. Yet a sprightlier soul behind this performing soul seemed to watch and laugh at the process. Sometimes a merry light would twinkle in the little eyes, and a bashful smile would creep over the The Essential Santayana 596 uncompromising mouth. A sense of the paradox, the irony, the inconclusiveness of the whole argument would pierce to the surface, like a white-cap bursting here and there on the heavy swell of the sea. His procedure was first to gather and digest whatever the sciences or the devil might have to say. He had an evident sly pleasure in the degustation and savour of difficulties; biblical criticism, the struggle for life, the latest German theory of sexual insanity, had no terrors for him; it was all grist for the mill, and woe to any tender thing, any beauty or any illusion, that should get between that upper and that nether millstone! He seemed to say: If I were not Alexander how gladly would I be Diogenes, and if I had not a system to defend, how easily I might tell you the truth. But after the sceptic had ambled quizzically over the ground, the prophet would mount the pulpit to survey it. He would then prove that in spite of all those horrors and contradictions, or rather because of them, the universe was absolutely perfect. For behind that mocking soul in him there was yet another, a devout and heroic soul. Royce was heir...