Courtesy of the Josiah Royce Collection, Ms 29, Special Collections of the Sheridan Libraries of The Johns Hopkins University
The California philosopher: Royce both loved and despised his provincial California upbringing.

William James, Royce’s friend and mentor, called him to Harvard in 1882. When Royce shook the California dust from his feet, he was tired of being, as James described him, "the solitary philosopher between Bering’s Strait and Tierra del Fuego." Weary of teaching composition and logic to undergraduates, he lamented that there was "no philosophy in California," and not "brains enough [to] accomplish the formation of a single respectable idea that was not a manifest plagiarism."

Yet he also claimed, in a formal address given on his 60th birthday in Philadelphia, that although the town of Grass Valley was only five or six years older than he was, he had grown up as a child believing himself to be in a historically rich and resonant place. When he was an assistant professor, sitting atop a Berkeley hill with a clear view of the Golden Gate, he’d also seen in his California circumstances an opportunity to deal with the great issues of mind and nature. He noted that as a Californian, he was not bound by mere tradition, and wrote, "I am thinking and writing face to face with a mighty and lovely nature, by the side of whose greatness I am but as a worm."

"Odi et amo," I hate and I love, the Roman poet Catullus laments, and such ambivalence led Royce to return again and again to California —as place, as history, as philosophical occasion and subject —long after he had ensconced himself at Harvard. Whatever the isolations of frontier California might have been, Royce came to realize he had experienced there—more preciously, and more intensely, because they came in fragments—the great themes that would preoccupy him for the rest of his career: the relationship between mind and nature, the majesty of the community, and the role of loyalty in personal and social formation.

Roaming as a boy through the foothills around Grass Valley, coming upon abandoned mines and shacks, he established the psychological framework for his adult meditations on time, history, and social effort. He also experienced at Grass Valley, as he would later claim—in his mother’s care for her family, in the way that the church ladies of the town had taken the Royces in at the completion of their transcontinental trek by prairie schooner—the rudimentary elements of what he would later formulate as the hope of the great community. Young Royce might have sneaked out of church on sundays and lingered outside in the sunlight listening to the droning of the preacher within, but even this experience would lead to his distinctive philosophical blend of personal skepticism and regard for religion as a moral and social force.

In the playground of the Lincoln Grammar School in San Francisco, where his family had moved in the 1860s, Royce encountered his first impressions of social authority, in the form of a bully at recess. At Boys’ High School (the present day Lowell) and the newly established University of California, he encountered ideas—big, bold ideas, conveyed to him by professors Joseph LeConte and Edward Rowland Sill. These were ideas about the compatibility or incompatibility of evolution and theism (LeConte’s major concern), and the philosophical and literary foundations of Western culture in ancient Greece—ideas that would lead him to that larger concept of Idea, as in philosophical Idealism, that would constitute his life’s work as a philosopher. He also explored ideas on race, community, loyalty, the Higher Provincialism, and even the psychological effects of landscape, all of which marked his historical and social writings.

Royce may have considered California a wilderness, but it was a wilderness in which he had first encountered civilization. It was a wilderness in which UC’s second president, Daniel Coit Gilman, recognizing the genius of the awkward, illdressed, diminutive boy with an oversized head topped by a mop of unruly red hair, raised $1,000 from a congenial group of Bay Area businessmen to send Royce to Germany for a year of philosophical study.

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