Two Royces, Early and Late: A Critique of Oppenheim’s Concept of the “Mature Royce”

For the past fifty years, the linkage between Josiah Royce and Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., has been both apt and irresistible. The mere mention of Oppenheim will immediately suggest Royce, and in any bibliography of Royce studies, Oppenheim’s contributions will stand out. He has published four books—each one a model of excellence in scholarship and critical insight.¹ He has also published countless articles, reviews, introductions, and chapters in books. Beyond this record of his published work, he has exerted—as a priest, professor, mentor, and colleague—a powerful, unequaled influence on his contemporaries and a generation of younger scholars. The number of people who have been drawn to Royce by him and who have been guided by him to an understanding of Royce is enormous.

A dominant theme in Oppenheim’s interpretation of Royce’s philosophy is the concept of the “Mature Royce.” This theme was first articulated in Oppenheim’s 1962 doctoral dissertation. In “A Roycean Road to Community,” a paper presented to a Jesuit convention in 1969, Oppenheim repeatedly described Royce’s late thought as “mature.” The word is sprinkled throughout Oppenheim’s publications, so that “late” generally also means “mature.” By this “mature” period of Royce’s thought, Oppenheim refers to the last four and a half years of his life (1912–1916). The Problem of Christianity is the principal “mature” work. Oppenheim also includes Royce’s articles on “Mind,” “Negation,” and “Order” in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1916–1917), the last—1915–1916—lectures in Philosophy 9 (published in 1998 as Metaphysics: His Philosophy 9 Course of 1915–1916), which Oppenheim edited with the help of William Ernest Hocking and Richard Hocking (see endnote 3), the Extension Course in Ethics (six lectures entitled “Introduction to Ethics” delivered at Boston University in the fall of 1915 through February of 1916), and the final posthumous essay, “The Hope of the Great Community” in the Yale Review (1916; reprinted in The Hope of the Great Community). These, Oppenheim argues, constitute the “zenith of [Royce’s] intellectual and moral growth” (Oppenheim, Royce’s Mature Ethics x). Slighted, if not ignored, are Royce’s other works that belong to the same period: contributions to the diverse fields of logic and international politics. “An Extension of the Algebra of Logic,” published in the Journal of Philosophy, was the first of seven planned, though unwritten, articles culminating in a projected, but incomplete book on the relationship of logic to geometry. Royce filled his notebooks with a vast amount of this material, which is still largely unassessed. The curious book War and Insurance belongs to this period as well as the eleven-page “Memorandum on International Insurance” and letters to the New Republic and the New York Times on the same subject. With the sinking of the Lusitania, the previously apolitical Royce dropped his neutrality and proclaimed repeatedly and passionately his support for the allies against Imperial Germany. How these concerns jibe with Oppenheim’s “Mature Royce” remains unclear. Perhaps these and other works are subordinated because Oppenheim is interested primarily in Royce’s philosophy of religion.

Scholars have persistently traced the continuity—or the lack of it—in Royce’s thought. While some have noted a seamless progression in his philosophy, others have identified periods in which dramatic theoretical shifts entailed the abandonment of earlier positions in favor of new insights. Often these so-called shifts are lexical: an older vocabulary is replaced in favor of a language more compatible with newer strains of thought—notably pragmatism. Thus Universal Thought and Beloved Community are the same and yet different; the sameness and the difference is left to the historian to determine.

In any event, Oppenheim did offer several original explanations of the development of Royce’s thought. He suggested that three critical phases of Royce’s philosophy are analogous to the three stages of “an H₂O molecule when under heat it passes from ice, through water, to steam.” The same three phases are analogous “to the three growth stages of a butterfly which develop as...