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.
From Josiah Royce
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.
We seek true individuality and the true individuals. But we find them not. For lo, we mortals see what our poor eyes can see; and they, the true individuals, - they belong not to this world of our merely human sense and thought.
This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.
The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.
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.
So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.
So far as we live and strive at all, our lives are various, are needed for the whole, and are unique.
Our will makes constantly a sort of agreement with the world, whereby, if the world will continually show some respect to the will, the will shall consent to be strenuous in its industry.
Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.
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