Royce was born to immigrant parents in Grass Valley, California, just as the Cal-ifornia gold rush was coming to an end. In fact, his parents had been among the wave of “forty-niners” who had made the westward trek some six years earlier.57 During his early years, Royce was educated primarily by his mother, who opened a small school in Grass Valley a few months before he was born.58 The gold rush having largely dried up, in the spring of 1866 the family moved to San Francisco.
In the rapidly expanding city, Royce attended local schools before entering the recently established University of California at Berkeley in the early 1870s.
Upon graduation from Berkeley, Royce received a grant from a group of local businessmen, which enabled him to spend a little over a year studying in Germany. Royce studied philosophy first at the University of Leipzig and then at Göttingen. While living east of the Rhine, Royce spent much of his time reading Kant, Schopenhauer, and other German idealists. He also sat under the teaching of a number of influential philosophers in the university lecture halls. Among these, Hermann Lotze had the greatest impact on his thinking.59 By the time Royce left Germany, he was a committed philosophical idealist. As one of Royce’s biographers put it, “This year of 1875–76 was the decisive one of Royce’s intellectual life. It made him a German romanticist in literature, a German idealist in philosophy.”60 Upon returning to the United States, Royce attended John Hopkins University, where in 1878 he became among the first to complete a Ph.D. at the school.61 He then taught for a few years at the University of California before accepting a lectureship at Harvard in 1882.62 In 1885, Royce became an assistant professor at Harvard, and in 1892, full professor. Nearly all of his published writings were produced during his years at Harvard.
Although primarily remembered as an idealist philosopher—Cornelius Van Til called him “the first great American idealist”—Royce wrote in a number of different genres, including religious prose, historical narrative, and even fic-tion.63 However, it was in the field of philosophy that Royce left his mark.
Royce was deeply interested in religion and ethics. As he wrote in his first book, “The religious problems have been chosen for the present study because they first drove the author to philosophy, and because they of all human interests deserve our best efforts and our utmost loyalty.”64 In this book and others that followed, Royce grappled with the thorny questions of epistemology, individual personality, and the problem of evil.
Most of Royce’s major works appeared after the first edition of Strong’s Sys-tematic Theology was published in 1886. Yet even in that very first edition, Strong
indicated that he was familiar with Royce’s recently published Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885). At this early point Strong noted that, while Royce’s system
“seems, in one view, to save God’s personality, it practically identifies man’s per-sonality with God’s, which is subjective pantheism.”65 Having briefly encountered Royce’s philosophy, Strong thought that Royce’s scheme essentially amounted to pantheism. Interestingly, as was the case with Bowne, this accusation of panthe-ism later disappeared from Strong’s theology text. This time the change came not in the mid-1890s but in the early 1900s. The seventh edition of Strong’s System-atic Theology (1902) still included the statement suggesting that Royce’s philos-ophy led to “subjective pantheism.” However, in the final edition Strong at last removed this statement and instead simply questioned whether or not Royce’s view “equally guarantees man’s personality or leaves room for man’s freedom, sin and guilt.”66 Royce himself never believed that his system was pantheistic or in any way led to pantheism.67 Apparently Strong finally came to agree with Royce’s self-assessment, but why did Strong change his opinion? It is possible that as Strong read Royce’s later writings he concluded either that Royce had changed his view or that he had previously misunderstood Royce, but it is also possible that, after proposing the idea of ethical monism, Strong was less willing to ac-cuse others of pantheism unless the evidence was overwhelming. Thus, although Strong changed his evaluation of Bowne simultaneously with his embrace of eth-ical monism, it may have taken Strong a number of years to reevaluate various philosophers in light of his own changing perspective. Another plausible expla-nation is that, in a predigital age, Strong’s own earlier statement about Royce’s philosophy may have escaped his notice when he was revising his theology book in the late 1890s. Regardless of the exact reasons for Strong’s changed opinion about Royce and the timing of his revised comments, Strong clearly read and appreciated Royce’s works. By the time the eighth edition of his Systematic Theol-ogy appeared, it contained substantive references to at least five of Royce’s books.
However, Royce almost certainly was not a philosophical source that pushed Strong in the direction of ethical monism. After all, most of Royce’s books ap-peared after Strong had already formulated his distinctive philosophical con-tribution. Still, it seems likely that Strong found in Royce a philosopher who understood and grappled with some of the same issues that led him to the dis-covery of ethical monism.
Although Royce and Strong traveled in very different circles, the two men shared a number of ideas and experiences. Both men were intrigued by the con-cept of philosophical idealism. Both were accused of teaching pantheism, and both vigorously denied the accuracy of such charges. Both Royce and Strong were
very concerned about preserving the integrity of individual personalities within a monistic scheme—in fact, at times Strong appealed to Royce to argue for such a distinction. For example, on the one hand Strong criticized Spinoza and Hegel because he felt that they “deny self-consciousness when they make man a phenom-enon of the infinite,” but on the other hand, he noted favorably that “Royce likens the denier of personality to the man who goes outside his own house and declares that no one lives there because, when he looks in at the window, he sees no one in-side.”68 Both Royce and Strong saw the futility of such attempts, and both wanted to preserve the idea of real personalities who exist in a monistic universe but are still responsible for their actions. One of Royce’s contemporaries once described him as the philosopher who “has gone further in his study of human selfhood, in the attempt to reconcile personality and monism, than any other writer.”69
In the final analysis, Strong was not and should not be characterized as an open follower of Royce, but he read Royce’s books as they appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. In many ways Strong found in Royce a like-minded philos-opher who wrestled with many of the same issues that Strong found intriguing.
Conclusion
Strong never cited any particular philosopher or theologian as directly influenc-ing his development of ethical monism. However, various forms of philosophical idealism were in the air that Strong was breathing during the years leading up to his philosophical breakthrough. Strong left behind clear indications that he was reading and thinking about the philosophical systems of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Lotze, Bowne, Royce, and others during the years before and, especially in the case of Royce, immediately after he announced his discovery of ethical monism. The references to these men that appear in increasing numbers through the successive editions of Strong’s Systematic Theology suggest that he viewed them as philosophical sparring partners who sharpened his thinking about is-sues related to human responsibility, personal existence, and ultimate reality—
in short, about what he called ethical monism.
Strong’s ethical monism developed not in an ideological vacuum but, rather, in the mind of a thoughtful theologian who was reading philosophical idealists of many stripes during the late nineteenth century. Although ethical monism was Strong’s distinctive contribution to theology, it was in some ways also a new shade that Strong added to the philosophical idealist’s palette.
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