ROYCE, JOSIAH (1855-1916), American philosopher and teacher, was born at Grass Valley, a California mining town, on Nov. 20, i855. At 16 he entered the newly-opened University of California, inclined to the study of engineering. But the teach ing of Joseph LeConte, the geologist, and of Edward Rowland Sill, the poet, roused his extraordinary speculative power; and on receiving his baccalaureate degree, 1875, he gave himself to the study of philosophy, first in Leipzig and Gottingen (under Lotze) and then, as one of the first fellows of Johns Hopkins university, with William James and Charles Peirce. Here he received the degree of Ph.D., 1878. After teaching English for four years in the University of California he was called to Harvard university as lecturer in philosophy, becoming assistant professor in 1885, professor in 1892 and succeeding George Herbert Palmer as Alford professor in 1914. He received various honorary degrees and was made in 1916 Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. He died at Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 14, 1916.
His effect as teacher and writer was profound: no previous American thinker had so united moral energy with wide historical learning, command of scientific method and intense interest in logical technique. His versatile mind concerned itself effectively with a wide range of subjects; he contributed to mathematical logic, psychology, social ethics, literary criticism and history as well as to metaphysics. His thought was massive and intimately human; yet it was sustained with a dialectical skill of such evident virtuosity as, on the one hand, to excite the critical opposition first of pragmatic and then of realistic schools, and, on the other hand, to set a new standard in the systematic treatment of phil osophy. In this latter respect, Royce did for American philosophy what his older contemporary, F. H. Bradley, did for British phil
osophy : in many ways the views of these thinkers are akin. Like Bradley, Royce teaches a monistic idealism. Scientific laws he describes—anticipating certain developments of recent physics— as statistical formulae of average behaviour. His absolute ideal ism is supplemented, not corrected, by the ethical and social teachings of his later years and, in particular, by the conception of the world of human selves as the Great Community, the literally personal object of moral loyalty.