Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Josiah Royce (November 20, 1855 – September 14, 1916), objective idealist philosopher.

"The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest."
- Josiah Royce

"A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see the self, or its shadow, now moving with the stream, now eddying in the currents from bank to bank of its channel, and now strenuously straining onwards in the pursuit of its chosen good."
- Josiah Royce

"Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real."
- Josiah Royce

"Thinking is like loving and dying - each of us must do it for himself."
- Josiah Royce

"Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning."
- Josiah Royce

"Interfere with the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very life and heart out of my will."
- Josiah Royce

Royce image source (1)