The Spirit of Modern Philosophy.

First edition. 8vo. xv, [3], 519, [1] pp. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, top edge in gilt, fore and bottom edges untrimmed (two neat early ownership inscriptions to front free endpaper, ownership stamp to bottom edge of text block, some lightly wear to extremities, notwithstanding a very good copy). Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company.

Royce's fourth major book "was, of all his works, the most complete stylistic success, and therefore it also remains the most accessible of his books for the general reader. The Spirit of Modern Philosophy is history with a thesis: 'You philosophise when you reflect critically upon what you are actually doing in your world. What you are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage. The critical inquiry into what all these things mean and imply is philosophy.' Thus, philosophy was for Royce what literature was for Matthew Arnold: a criticism of life" (Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, p. 192). 

'Josiah Royce (1855–1916) was the leading American proponent of absolute idealism, the metaphysical view (also maintained by Hegel and F.H. Bradley) that all aspects of reality, including those we experience as disconnected or contradictory, are ultimately unified in the thought of a single all-encompassing consciousness. Royce also made original contributions in ethics, philosophy of community, philosophy of religion and logic' (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Stock Code: 247086