December 1, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



773 



to appear with other writings of his upon the 

 war, under the title " The Hope of the Great 

 Community." It is the last memorial of him- 

 self which his own hands fashioned and his 

 own heart quickened. 



Both the teaching and the writing of Eoyce 

 testify to the extraordinary range of his at- 

 tainments. Philosophy is wide, but Eoyce was 

 wider. His prodigious memory, his powers of 

 observation, and his linguistic versatility gave 

 him a general equipment that few men of his 

 day have possessed. In his earlier years he 

 was a historian and a novelist. He was a wide 

 reader and an acute critic of literature. He 

 made permanent contributions to psychology. 

 He was renowned as a moralist, and as a 

 philosopher of religion. But during the later 

 part of his life, logic and methodology became 

 his favorite field of research. His eminence in 

 this field, both as teacher and as writer, was 

 not a little due to his remarkable grasp of 

 mathematics and the physical sciences. Per- 

 haps no man of his time knew so much about 

 so many things and knew it so well. His 

 knowledge of the special sciences was respected 

 even by specialists. His most notable con- 

 tribution to the teaching of the university was 

 made through his seminary in logic, which be- 

 came a veritable clearing-house of science. Men 

 of widely different training and technique — 

 chemists, physiologists, statisticians, pathol- 

 ogists, mathematicians — who could not under- 

 stand one another, were here interpreted to 

 one another by Eoyce, who understood them 

 all. But he could do even more than that. 

 He could interpret each man to himself, divine 

 nis half -thoughts and render them articulate. 



Here is enough to make a great man. But 

 to most persons, his peculiar metaphysics, 

 known to many Harvard men as " Philos- 

 ophy 9," and to thinking people everywhere 

 through his volume entitled " The "World and 

 the Individual," will remain bis principal 

 monument. Eoyce's metaphysical thought was 

 audaciously speculative; but to him specula- 

 tion was the opposite of guesswork — it was a 

 severe analysis of the certainties that lie at 

 the basis of knowledge. When he asserted the 

 existence of an all-comprehending mind, it 



was not as a probable hypothesis, but as a ne- 

 cessity of thought, implied in every act of 

 judgment, even in our errors. Much of the 

 fascination of his early work is due to his 

 willingness to accept the weakest link in hu- 

 man intelligence as the support of the weighti- 

 est conclusions. His doctrine of reality as an 

 absolute mind numbers him among the ideal- 

 ists in metaphysics. In the works which fol- 

 lowed " The Conception of God," he was 

 more inclined to express the nature of reality 

 in terms of purpose than in terms of thought, 

 and thus he came so far into agreement with 

 the school of pragmatism. But since he re- 

 garded truth as dependent not on changing 

 human interests, but on a single and eternal 

 will, he distinguished his own doctrine 'as 

 " absolute pragmatism." Eoyce was not one 

 of those thinkers whose concern for the unity 

 of existence obscures the sense of its pluralism 

 and variety. " The World and the Individ- 

 ual " undertakes to determine the place of 

 human personality in the life of the whole ; and 

 his solution finally embodied itself in his con- 

 ception of the community. It is through 

 loyalty to common causes that men must win 

 both selfhood and freedom; and the goal of 

 human endeavor is membership, through such 

 loyalty, in the Great Community, which is 

 the " city of God." 



An estimate of Eoyce as an eminent man of 

 science would be futile indeed unless coupled 

 with some judgment as to the practical influ- 

 ence which his deep and subtile thinking had 

 upon his own life and the life of his fellows. 

 To him the great ultimate questions were not 

 simply interesting scientific problems that 

 challenged his intellect ; they were also matters 

 of intensely practical import for the spiritual 

 quickening of his fellow-men. His personal- 

 ity, as it developed from that of the shy youth 

 to that of the grave and gentle sexagenarian, 

 was informed by a wideness of moral vision 

 and a loftiness of moral standards that set 

 him apart from the common. He could see 

 the true values of things. This inspired and 

 inspiring vision of the eternal realities enabled 

 him not only to bear the severest blows of 

 personal affliction with courage and serenity, 



