an apprehension of it in some measure. If one doubts one’s power to transcend
the moment, one has already transcended the moment; indeed, “this moment”
has meaning only in opposition to other moments, and implies a universal
within which one is enmeshed. This pre-cognitive apprehension can be achieved
only by a self; for error to exist, there must be a disjunction between this deeper
self and our momentary consciousness. So far, then, there must be a plurality
of selves which make up the universe. But if there are many, there must be
relations among them, and these relations in turn can be objects for true or
false thoughts; and these again point to an all-inclusive Self which constitutes
their meaning.
Once the university reform had produced Idealism as a halfway house
between religion and secularism, further mixtures with surrounding intellectual
movements became possible. As in Germany and England, it was these mix-
tures that made the next generation a creative one as well. Royce’s Idealism
influenced his Harvard colleagues for several decades. Chief among them was
William James. In 1870, at the beginning of his career as a medical scientist,
James had a personal breakdown, connected to the strains between his religious
faith—his father, Henry James, Sr., was a prominent Swedenborgian spiritual-
ist—and the enthusiasm for Darwinian naturalism among his young scientific
friends. The conjunction of spiritual and scientific issues led him from physi-
ological to psychological research in 1875, and thence to a junior position
housed in the philosophy department. Soon thereafter James encountered
Royce, whose Idealism came as a resolution to his own religious difficulties. It
particularly meshed with James’s activist psychology in the doctrine that judg-
ments are intentional, picking out and actively meaning their objects (Kuklick,
1972: 37–40). James became a Roycean pantheist until the 1890s; when Royce
stressed the Absolute aspect of his philosophy, James began to criticize what
he called the “block universe” philosophies.
To make a place for free will, James developed his pragmatist doctrine:
truth, lacking any objective referent, can only mean the consequences of beliefs
as forms of action. The truth he wished to defend, as he made clear in The
Will to Believe (1897), was that of religion, which is justified by its socially
beneficial consequences. This was followed up in 1902 by Varieties of Religious
Experience, which musters empirical evidence on mysticism, bolstering the
reality of religion from yet another angle. These were James’s first major
publications outside of experimental psychology (where he had made his
reputation with his synthesizing Principles of Psychology in 1890). Now that
James had his own epistemology, he switched his chair back from psychology
to philosophy,^51 and met Royce on his own turf with Pragmatism in 1907.
Royce and James developed their positions in friendly controversy over the
years, Royce moving closer to Christian theism, partially incorporating James’s674 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths