The Foundation in Royce’s Philosophy for Christian Theism.[1]
Theism is a philosophy, a system of thought about the ultimate nature of reality. Christianity is a religion, the relation of person to person—in Royce’s words, a “form of communion with the master of life”[2] Christian theism is the form of philosophy reached by the reasoning which starts from the experience of the Christian life. In this brief paper which, from the limits of time imposed, must be mainly expository, only secondarily critical, and not in any degree constructive—I wish to set forth the teachings of Professor Royce which seem to me in essential harmony with those of Christian theism. My exposition is based largely, though not entirely, upon two works of what might be called his middle period, The Conception of God and The World and the Individual; and I have a two-fold justification for this restriction. In the first place, Royce says explicitly in the preface of The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) that he has no change to report in his “fundamental metaphysical theses”; and he characterizes the teachings of The Problem of Christianity (1914) as in “essential harmony with the bases of the philosophical idealism set forth in earlier volumes.”[3] My second reason for treating only incidentally the later books in which Dr. Royce concerns himself specifically with problems of religion is that these books avowedly or implicitly discuss religion in its non-theistic aspect. In The Problem of Christianity this limitation of the subject is avowed over and over again. Consideration of the relation between God and man is dismissed as a ‘metaphysical issue’; and the discussion is restricted to ‘human objects’ in order ‘deliberately [to] avoid theology.’[4] Of necessity, therefore, if we seek the foundations of theism we must seek
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