Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 18 Fall 2000

              American and German Tendencies
in the Thought of Josiah Royce
What calm could there be in the double assurance that it was really right that things should
be wrong, but that it was really wrong not to strive to right thenrt1
In Character and Opinion in the United States [1921], George Santayana gives a
trenchant philosophical assessment of his former teacher and dissertation advisor
at Harvard, Josiah Royce.    The assessment is crucial for those seeking to
understand the evident tensions between German and American thought in
Royce. In Royce's philosophy Santayana traces two fundamental tensions: one In his
moral philosophy between Calvinism and voluntarism, and the other between his
theories of universal mind and of social realism. Santayana attributes each of these
tensions to a conflict between Royce's transcendental metaphysics, and a certain
latent naturalism. In what follows, I shall first examine Santayana's understanding of
this latter metaphysical conflict, before turning later to the tensions in Royce's
moi alism and theory of mind.
Santayana distinguishes a naturalistic strain in Royce's thought; a strain which if
developed, might have helped him overcome the moral struggles characteristic of the
mature stages of his philosophy. Santayana describes this potential naturalism as
follows:
Sometimes a philosopher... becomes so devoted a naturalist that he is ashamed to remain a
moralist... and where all is one vast cataract of events, he feels it would be impertinent of him to
divide them censoriously into things that ought to be and things that ought not to be. He may
even go one step farther. Awestruck and humbled before the universe, he may insensibly
transform his understanding and admiration of it into the assertion that the existence of evil is no
e/il at all, but that the order of the universe is in every detail necessary and perfect.... (COUS
110)
The "moralist" practice of evaluating the world may become philosophically odious to
a thoroughgoing naturalist. Having criticized the world into a "vast cataract of
events,*' the naturalistic philosopher no longer sees the necessity of applying to it the
proverbial "ought5* or "ought-not." Things simply are in their natural event-fulness;
that is, in a naturally conceived order. When carried a step further, a certain rational
pantheism may develop which relativizes good and evil to a necessarily perfect order
within which such designations have a natural place.2
1 Santayana, George, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1921), p. 126. All Santayana quotations taken from this edition will be cited parenthetically as
COUS, followed by a page number.
2 Readers of Santayana will recognize this as the moral view he consistently attributes to Spinoza,
and which he himself modifies (I feel successfully) to fit his own thinking. See especially Persons
and Places: Fragments of Autobiography* edited by William B. Holzberger and Herman J.
Saatkamp Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1986) 233-5. There, Santayana gives one of the most
revealing tributes to Spinoza and his influence on him. Interestingly it is with respect to Royce's
(mis)treatment of Spinoza that Santayana seems to have appropriated his own moral naturalism. He
writes: "Royce himself seemed to suffer less from the plague of idealistic aiticism'* [obliquely
referring once again to his latent naturalism] ... for instance, about the saying of Spinoza's that the
mind of God resembled the mind of man as the Dog Star resembles the barking animal. Royce said
only that this was too materialistic, without caring or daring to broach the question as to the diffusion
or concentration of that cosmic "mind."