states, “a mere collection of individuals.”[1] It is, on the contrary “a sort of live unit that has organs”;[2] it “grows and decays”[3]; it “has a mind” whose “intelligent mental products,” namely, languages, customs, and religions, “follow psychological laws.”[4] “A community behaves like an entity, with a mind of its own,”[5] it “can love” and act;[6] and, conversely, it can be loved and served.[7] The Beloved Community, or Church, which now becomes for Royce at once the ‘human founder’[6] of Christianity, the source of salvation, and the object of the characteristically Christian consciousness—the Beloved Community is distinguished from the ordinary community by its comprehensiveness, and by its ‘uniting many selves into one’: it is, in a word, the ‘Universal Community.’[8] To discuss, in any detail, the implications of this conception would far overflow the boundaries of time allotted to this paper. But a final comment must be made on the inadequacy of the doctrine of the Beloved Community if it must be regarded, as apparently its author regards it, as an account of the historic Christian Church. The cardinal defect in Royce’s conception is—psychologically stated—his undue subordination of the rôle of the leader to that of the group, or—historically stated—his underestimation of the fact that passionate loyalty to the person of Christ was the bond of unity in the early Christian church. On the other hand, Christianity truly is, as Royce insists, an inherently social religion; and loyalty to the universal community is indeed the essential moral factor of the Christian religion.Mary Whiton Calkins.
Wellesly College.
Comment by Professor Royce. Extracts from a Letter to Miss Calkins, March 20, 1916.
“The account which you kindly give of the position taken in my earlier books,—that is, in all the books that precede The
