2. The equal status mentioned in Thesis 2 need not mean, "equally concrete" or "inclusive," but only, "equally real," where "real" means having a character of its own with reference to which opinions can be true or false. But becoming or process is alone fully concrete or inclusive, since if A is without becoming, and B becomes, then the togetherness of AB also becomes. A new constituent means a new totality. In this sense, becoming is the ultimate principle.

The private self, however, cannot stand alone. "We cannot think of the self except in contrast to that which is other than the self". Royce finds the source of physical nature in this need of the self for a not-self. The whole difference between inner and outer is social in origin, for only social confirmation can sustain our belief that a fact is an outer fact rather than an inner fact which no one else can observe.

The rule of law in our society is responsible for preserving personal freedoms in spite of a regulated economy. Thinking about law, Historically, Has moved from personal or authoritarian law to natural law to a theory of consent or contract. Contract depersonalizes human relations, In being regulated by impersonal agencies, Opening the way for government regulation. But this regulation is only of those areas of life which are impersonal and leaves people free with regard to the ends of life. One (...) danger to freedom in a controlled economy is the growth of administrative law. (staff). (shrink)

The primary purpose of the system of linear notation is to make the logic of the syllogism more convenient to use by eliminating many of the operations required by its traditional forms. Except for its employment of the distinction between symmetric and nonsymmetric relations and the distinction between transitive and nontransitive relations, linear notation introduces no new principles into syllogistic logic. It is new only as a system of notation. As a system of notation it radically simplifies the application of (...) the principles of syllogistic logic to the analysis of arguments.The use of linear notation enables us to state subject-predicate propositions in such a way that their formal relations with each other are revealed directly without the necessity of performing any of the separate operations required by the traditional methods of syllogistic logic. Very complex arguments, involving any number of related premises, can be stated in such form that all possible conclusions that are obtainable by any combination of syllogistic operations may be read directly from the premises. (shrink)

The problem of faith and knowledge is one form of this basic problem which has been especially congenial and troublesome to the Western mind since the beginning of the Christian era. For Western civilization is a marriage of two very different outlooks on life, Hebrew fideism and Greek rationalism. Neither has absorbed the other and neither has been able to dispense with the other. Like an unstable chemical bond, our society is a synthesis which is constantly threatened by unpredictable imbalances. (...) Instability is intensified by the fact that both Hebrew and Greek components of Western culture were themselves arenas of conflict between the stable and the dynamic. When Palestine and Greece came together in Philo and Augustine the old problem arose in new forms, the most distinctive intellectual form of which is the problem of faith and knowledge. (shrink)