Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/265

 Josiah Royce 247 particular selves, is effected by means of illustrations from the field of modern mathematics, especially by the use of the modern mathematical concept of the infinite as a collection of which a part may be similar to the whole. Peirce had done this before him in a remarkable article entitled The Law of Mind, in the second volume of The Monist. In generously acknowledg- ing his obligation to Peirce, Royce rightly felt his fundamental idealistic position to be independent of that of Peirce; but it is noticeable that all Royce' s references to the logic of mathe- matics are in full agreement with Peirce' s view of the reality of abstract logical and mathematical universals, and it may well be questioned whether this can be harmonized with the nomi- nalist or Berkeleian elements of Royce's idealism. His subsequent work falls into two distinct groups, the mathematical-logical and the ethical-religious. Of the former group, his essay on logic in The Encyclopcsdia of the Philosophi- cal Sciences is philosophically the most important. Logic is there presented not as primarily concerned with the laws of thought or even with methodology but after the manner of Peirce as the most general science of objective order. In this as in other of his mathematical-logical papers Royce still pro- fesses adherence to his idealism, but this adherence in no way affects any of the arguments which proceed on a perfectly realistic basis. In his religio-ethical works he follows Peirce even more, and the Mind or Spirit of the Community replaces the Absolute. In his last important book. The Problem of Christianity (1913), all the concepts of Pauline Christianity are interpreted in terms of a social psychology, the personality of Christ being entirely left out except as an embodiment of the spirit of the beloved community. The World and the Individual is still, as regards sustained || mastery of technical metaphysics, the nearest approach to a , philosophic classic that America has as yet produced. Its pub- " lication was the high- water mark of the idealistic tide. Royce's previous monism had aroused the opposition of pluralistic ideal- ists like Howison and Thomas Davidson. ' But with the begin- " Howison and Davidson both owed much of their impulse to philosophy to W. T. Harris. Howison proved one of the most successful and inspiring teachers of philosophy that America has as yet produced. Within a short period three of his pupils, Bakewell.McGilvary, and Lovejoy were elected to the presidency of the American Philosophical Association. Davidson did not write much on