Fugitive Essays

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

THE essays which comprise the present volume are the occasional and, with the exception of the last three, the early fruits of Professor Royce's philo sophic genius. The title "Fugitive Essays" was chosen not to emphasize the editor's judgment of them. How ever excellent in themselves, in the total body of Pro fessor Royce's works these early achievements of his must needs occupy a subordinate place. This is said not to detract from their intrinsic and enduring worth but rather to testify to the greatness of their author. For such was his philosophic fecundity that products of a high order must, when one considers the wealth of his other contributions, be characterized as fugitive. There is also a more obvious reason for so designating them. They are fugitive in a literal sense. Most of them are now virtually inaccessible, buried as they are in the pages of local periodicals which have long since ceased to appear. Some were never published and others found their way to journals more or less ephemeral. Pub lished here for the first time are the following: "The Practical Significance of Pessimism" (1879), "Tests of Right and Wrong" (1880), "On Purpose in Thought" (1880), and "Natural Rights and Spinoza's Essay on Liberty" (1880). The rest of the essays appeared in the following publications: "Schiller's Ethical Studies" in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (i 878); " Shelley and the Revolution," "George Eliot as a Religious Teacher," "The Decay of Earnestness," "Doubting and Working," "How Beliefs are Made" in The Californian (1880-1882); "The Nature of Voluntary Progress," "Pessimism and Modern Thought" in The Berkeley

Quarterly (1880-1881); "A Neglected Study" in The Harvard Monthly (1890); "The Problem of Paracelsus" in the publications of the Boston Browning Society (1893); and "Pope Leo's Philosophical Movement and its Relation to Modern Thought" in The Boston Evening Transcript (July 29, 1903).

To appreciate the biographical value of the early es says it must be borne in mind that an account of Pro fessor Royce's life will probably never be written. Mrs. Royce has declared that it was her husband's wish that his personal history should not be published. He ap peared to have had no taste for those biographies in which private fortunes and external circumstances form the chief theme. Did he not, as a young author, say of the poet Shelley that " the reality and the color ing of ... [his] character we must seek in his works. And in his works, too, we must find the inspiring ideas con cerning which he was permitted to speak, and speak grandly to his fellowmen"? Royce's distaste for con ventional biographies was not strange. It had its roots in his philosophical conception of the self. The life of a man was for him the life not of his external fortune but of his moral achievement. The self he identified, for reasons at once practical and metaphysical, with loyal endeavor and choice and with active purposes and ideals. Thus man is reflected in his works. It behooves us, therefore, to seek Josiah Royce's own personality in his works, to an understanding of which his early essays may contribute not a little. For in them are mirrored his in terests and his problems, his temperament and his char acter. The careful reader of the "Fugitive Essays" will soon recognize in the young author Royce's distinctive personality. His was a personality that exhibited con tinual growth and development without radical change

or deviation from certain well-marked traits.