Time & Perspective Quote by Josiah Royce

Royce is drawing a sharp line between two kinds of “idealism,” and quietly telling you which one matters. The first kind-the familiar claim that mind shapes experience, that what we know is structured by thought-is, in his view, merely warm-up. The real action is the second aspect: idealism as a theory of the Self so deep it starts to look “absolute,” not just a psychological subject but a metaphysical anchor that could make knowledge, truth, and meaning hang together.

The phrasing “only preparatory” is doing rhetorical work. Royce isn’t dismissing Kant’s critical turn; he’s demoting it. Kant becomes the gateway drug: useful for showing that experience is not a raw given, but insufficient unless it leads to the bigger question of what sort of subject could unify experience at all. “Absolute Self” signals the post-Kantian temptation Royce is both inheriting and revising: Fichte’s I that posits the world, Schelling’s identity of mind and nature, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. Royce, writing from late-19th-century America, is importing that German debate into an intellectual climate increasingly pressed by empiricism, Darwinian naturalism, and a rising scientific self-confidence.

The subtext is a defense of philosophy’s jurisdiction. If idealism stops at epistemology, it can be treated as a technical dispute about conditions of knowledge. If it reaches the “absolute Self,” it becomes a claim about reality’s ultimate structure-and about why finite, fallible individuals can still talk about truth as something more than consensus or convenience. “Deeper problem of thought” is Royce staking out the prestige terrain: not how we know, but what must be true about the knower for knowing to be possible at all.