Historical Introduction

John Clendenning Historical Introduction1 In many ways 1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, was for Josiah Royce an annus mirabilis. In January he presented the second series of his Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, at the University of Aberdeen and was honored with a doctor of laws degree. In Scotland on side trips he gave lectures at Edinburgh, St. Andrews, and Glasgow where he was named honorary president of the University Philosophical Society. On the way home, he stopped at Manchester College, Oxford, where he repeated his Ingersoll Lecture, The Conception of Immortality. All the while he carried copies of Macmillan's newly printed The World and the Individual, First Series, metaphysically a major achievement. Without doubt, in 1900 Royce, only forty-four years old, had achieved international status. He was the doyen of American philosophers. On Commencement Day at Harvard he wore the bright colors of his Aberdonian doctorate to celebrate the graduation of his precocious first son, Christopher, who was barely eighteen years old. And yet even as he enjoyed success, Royce admitted that his personal and professional achievements had left him "morally tired" and "mildly aboulie." Ahead, he faced emotional and theoretical challenges that he could not, then, have anticipated. In October the Royce household and their social commitments were further complicated with the arrival from California of his invalid mother-in-law, Elisa Head. A native of Boston, Mrs. Head enjoyed her childhood memories and old acquaintances, but her afflictions proved fatal. She died, much to the family's anguish, after a severe kidney failure on May 6,1901.2 And then, a few months later, Royce became briefly embroiled in a dispute over academic freedom. A distinguished economist and pioneering sociologist, Edward Alsworth Ross, at Stanford University was forced out of his professorship because he publicly supported the free silver policies of William Jennings Bryan. Mrs. Leland Stanford, the widow of the university's founder, and David Starr Jordan, its president, teamed up against Ross. In two letters to John Maxon Stillman, an old friend and a Stanford professor of chemistry, Royce defended Ross in principle. The issue, Royce explained, was not about the soundness of Ross's arguments, but about his inherent right — indeed, his duty — as a Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Winter, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 1 John Clendenning university professor to state his opinions in the fields of his expertise, however unpopular these opinions might be. Royce further noted that the huge endowments, then pouring into universities, might compromise their capacity to function as independent centers of learning. Universities need leaders who remain loyal and willing to defend the principle of academic independence. Jordan had failed to provide this leadership. He had vacillated, equivocated, and thus proved to be morally untrustworthy. The Ross affair was clearly a harbinger of Royce's philosophy of loyalty.3 At the same time Royce became even more deeply involved, as a confidant and counselor, in a domestic crisis — a crisis that tested the loyalty of a number of individuals, including Royce himself. A young man, twenty-seven years old and Royce's former student, had fallen in love with his sister-in-law. Daniel Gregory Mason — like his brothers, a Harvard graduate — gifted in both music and letters, was the youngest of four sons in the distinguished family of Henry Lowell Mason, the co-founder of the Mason & Hamlin Co., manufacturers of organs and pianos. The whole family was musically talented. Daniel's grandfather, Lowell Mason, had been a prominent church musician and educator in Boston who composed about 1,700 hymns, including his best known, "Nearer, My God, to Thee." The eldest brother, Edward Palmer Mason, fourteen years older than Daniel, had married Mary Lord Taintor in 1886, and they had four children. She was ten years older than Daniel. Alan and Henry Mason worked for the family firm, as did Edward, who served as president of Mason & Hamlin for fifteen years. Under his direction the company shifted its emphasis from organs to pianos. At Harvard, class of '95, Daniel Mason excelled in music.4 There also he came under the influence of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (geology), Louis...