sense in which the Christian’s God is a person, and neither an aggregate nor an Unknown Reality. A similar conclusion must be drawn from Royce’s trenchant criticism of Bradley’s conception of an Absolute Experience which is not to be regarded as an Absolute Self. ‘The Absolute,” Royce concludes “ escapes from selfhood and all that selfhood implies, or even transcends selfhood, only, by remaining to the end a Self.”[1]
This conclusion can not, however, fairly be stated without consideration of the question whether it rightly represents the outcome of Professor Royce’s most recent thinking. In his later books The Philosophy of Loyalty, Sources of Religious Insight and The Problem of Christianity the expression ‘Absolute Self’ occurs incidentally or not at all; and the experience, referred to in all these books, which transcends and completes that of the human self is variously known as the ‘wider’ or ‘superhuman’ or ‘super-individual insight,’[2] ‘the conscious and superhuman unity of life’[3] or ‘conspectus of the totality of life’;[4] and, finally, as the ‘Beloved Community.[5] We may profitably neglect the vaguer and less closely analyzed terms ‘superhuman insight’ and ‘unity of life’ and confine our attention to the problem presented to us by Dr. Royce’s explicit statement of ”the thesis … that the essence of Christianity, as the Apostle Paul stated the essence, depends upon regarding the being [called] … the ‘Beloved Community’ as the true source, through loyalty, of the salvation of man”[6] and by his further delaration that he holds “this doctrine … to be both empirically verifiable within the limits of our experience and metaphysically defensible as an expression of the life and spiritual significance of the whole universe.” Our problem of interpretation is precisely formulated in the question: does Royce intend either to supplant or to reinterpret his earlier conception of the Absolute Self by the doctrine of the Beloved Community? An affirmative answer
