ABSTRACT
In the Californian Address and Essay Josiah Royce had tried, under the inspiration of criticism, to restate the argument for Idealism with special reference to the problem of Individuality, and had begun the transformation of it into terms of Will. By the time Royce went to Harvard in 1882 the Transcendentalism of the Concord group had become little more than a tradition. Accordingly, after a further development of the distinction between “World of Description” and the “World of Appreciation”, he goes on in the text to give what he calls “a logical deduction of the primal contrast”. While Royce has thus come to find in mysticism the first solvent of crude realism, Royce holds that the historic precursor of modern idealism was the modified form which realism took when it was perceived that reality could only be defined in terms of possible experience.
