Royce's "A Word for the Times" (1914) was quoted in the 1936 State of the Union Address by Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "The human race now passes through one of its great crises.

While at the university, he studied with Joseph LeConte, Professor of Geology and Natural History and a prominent spokesperson for the compatibility between evolution and religion.

[8] After four years at the University of California, Berkeley, he went to Harvard in 1882 as a sabbatical replacement for William James,[9] who was Royce's friend and philosophical antagonist.

[citation needed] “As one of the four giants in American philosophy of his time […] Royce overshadowed himself as historian, in both reputation and output” (Pomeroy, 2).

During his first three years at Harvard, Royce taught many different subjects such as English composition, forensics, psychology and philosophy for other professors.

Although he eventually settled into writing philosophy, his early adulthood was characterized by wide-ranging interests, during which he wrote a novel, investigated paranormal phenomena (as a skeptic), and published a significant body of literary criticism.

Having made it clear that idealism depends upon postulates and proceeds hypothetically, Royce defends the necessity of objective reference of our ideas to a universal whole within which they belong, for without these postulates, "both practical life and the commonest results of theory, from the simplest impressions to the most valuable beliefs, would be for most if not all of us utterly impossible".

This stance is called fallibilism by the philosophers of his generation, and Royce's embrace of it may be attributed to the influence of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.

The principal difference between Royce's Absolute and the similar idea held by other thinkers is its temporal and personal character, and its interpretive activity.

This divine activity Royce increasingly came to see in terms of the notion suggested by Charles Sanders Peirce of “agapism”, or “evolutionary love”.

The philosophical idea of the Absolute is an inevitable hypothesis for a coherent system of thought, Royce argued, but for practical purposes and a meaningful ethical life, all human beings need is an ongoing "will to interpret".

A benchmark in Royce's career and thought occurred when he returned to California to speak to the Philosophical Union at Berkeley, ostensibly to defend his concept of God from the criticisms of George Holmes Howison, Joseph Le Conte, and Sidney Mezes, a meeting the New York Times called “a battle of the giants”.

In the Second Series of Gifford Lectures Royce temporalizes these relations, showing that we learn to think about ideas like succession and space by noting differences and directionality within unified and variable “timespans”, or qualitative, durational episodes of the “specious present”.

(The World and the Individual, Second Series, p. 124) Hence, for Royce, the will is the inner dynamism that reaches beyond itself into a possible future and acts upon an acknowledged past.

The book of this title published in 1908 derived from lectures given at the Lowell Institute, at Yale, Harvard, and at the University of Illinois in 1906–07.

Broadly speaking, Royce's is a virtue ethic in which our loyalty to increasingly less immediate ideals becomes the formative moral influence in our personal development.

The beloved community as an ideal experienced in our acts of loyal service integrates into Royce's moral philosophy a Kingdom of Ends, but construed as immanent and operative instead of transcendental and regulative.

While the philosophical status of this ideal remains hypothetical, the living of it in the fulfillment of our finite purposes concretizes it for each and every individual.

Some recent scholarship on Royce has framed his philosophy of loyalty as being based on racist theories of assimilation and conquest.

Other American philosophers such as John Moffatt Mecklin, a pragmatist and a segregationist, openly challenged Josiah Royce's views of race and the Negro.

Royce's hypothetical ontology, temporalism, personalism, his social metaphysics based on the fourth conception of being remain, along with the operation of agapic loyalty, and the unity of finite purposes in the ideal of the beloved community.

Having provided throughout his career an idealistic way of grasping the Will, in contrast to Schopenhauer's pessimistic treatment, it remained for Royce to rescue Pauline Christianity, in its universalized and modernized form, from the critique of Nietzsche and others who tended to understand will in terms of power and who had claimed that the historic doctrine was no longer believable to the modern mind.

Royce kept these and other personal tragedies far from the text of his published work, but the grieving certainly affected and deepened his insight and perhaps exaggerated the quality of his hope.

In fact, it can be argued that a major way Peirce's ideas entered the American academy is through Royce's teaching and writing, and eventually that of his students.

Royce's philosophy of man as the product of the interrelationship of individual ego and social other laid the foundations for the writings of George Herbert Mead.

[23] Erving Goffman considered that his pioneering work of 1895 on the distortions in the subjective sense of self which take place in the grandiosity of mania was unsurpassed three quarters of a century later.