'tasks' and 'deeds' and 'offices' such as mark off my contrast with my fellows. Later he is inclined to refer to them as 'causes' such as at once set me off and unite me in common undertakings with others. To discover one's cause and be loyal to it; this is the essentially ethical problem. And the recognition of the cause which identifies one as a person is so far a critical event in the history of the will that it puts a check upon the freedom of experimentation. "The choice of a special personal cause is a sort of ethical marriage to this cause."[1] Yet all such choices are made in a degree of ignorance; they are fallible, and when it becomes "unquestionably evident that the continuance of this marriage involves positive unfaithfulness to the cause of universal loyalty," it must be dissolved, and the definition revised.
The justice of bringing this process of choosing a cause by successive revisions into comparison with the dialectic above described lies in the assumption that the finding of a cause is a judgment of recognition, and so depends upon some kind of prior possession of the connotation of the cause.
It must be admitted that Royce does not expressly argue that any such prior knowledge is implied in the choosing process. Still less does he apply to it the term 'subconscious.' This term Royce for the most part avoids.[2] But such seems to me to be the implication of his teaching. If I know at all that I exist, it must be, according to Royce, as entertaining a distinctive purpose; and if ever I am able to judge that "This is what I seek," the 'what' of my search must already be known to me
- ↑ The Philosophy of Loyalty, p. 191.
- ↑ In Outlines of Psychology, the contrast between unanalyzed and analyzed mental states covers part of the ground of the contrast between the 'allied' subconsciousness and consciousness (pp. 105-116); and my own belief is that here Royce's terminology is less likely to be misleading.
But in speaking of "that mysterious and personal aspect of conscience upon which common sense insists," he says that "Such a loyal choice as I have described ... calls out all of one's personal and more or less unconsciously present instincts, interests, affections, one's socially formed habits, and whatever else is woven into the unity of each individual self ... it involves all the mystery of finding out that some cause awakens us, fascinates us, reverberates through our whole being ... (and thus) involves more than mere conscious choice. It involves that response of our entire nature conscious and unconscious, which makes loyalty so precious." Philosophy of Loyalty, pp. 194f.
