Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Josiah Royce

American Idealist Philosopher, Professor

"A liar is a man who willfully misplaces his ontological predicates."

"Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself."

"Because God is One, all our lives have various and unique places in the harmony of the divine life. And because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win in our union with him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning."

"So far as we live and strive at all, our lives are various, are needed for the whole, and are unique. No one of our lives can be substituted for another; no one of us finite beings can take another’s place. And all of this is true just because the Universe is one significant whole."

"[Religion] in its highest historical forms is the interpretation both of the eternal and of the spirit of loyalty through emotion, and through a fitting activity of the imagination."

"Not through imitating nor yet through loving any mere individual human being can we be saved, but ony through loyalty to the “Beloved Community.”"

"And just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win in our union with him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning."

"For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning."

"Ideas any one can mould as he wishes."

"Interfere with the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very life and heart out of my will."

"I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas."

"That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed."

"The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all. "

"We seek true individuality and the true individuals. But we find them not. For lo, we mortals see what our poor eyes can see; and they, the true individuals, - they belong not to this world of our merely human sense and thought. "

"It is not those innocent of evil who are fullest of the life of God, but those who in their own case have experienced the triumph over evil."

"No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement."