Josiah Royce

“For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.”

“Interfere with the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very life and heart out of my will.”

“The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.”

“So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.”

“That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed.”