The first volume is entitled The Four Historical Conceptions of Being and consists in the revised texts of the first series of ten lectures delivered by Royce between January 11th and February 1st 1899. The text of Lecture VII, the most central, is considerably longer than the original version. This volume also includes a supplementary essay entitled “The One, the Many and the Infinite.” The text of this essay does not correspond to any of the original lecture material. Its purpose is to address some specific issues arising from F H Bradley's Appearance and Reality, an influential work of considerable relevance and widely discussed at the time, but not considered in detail in the lectures themselves.

Royce distinguishes between three approaches to natural theology. The first attempts to arrive at theological conclusions on the strength of inferences form the current state of scientific knowledge. The most familiar attempt being the traditional “Argument from Design”. The second focuses upon the phenomena of “natural” religion and tries to both ascertain and validate something of the divine nature on the basis of the common religious consciousness of human beings. The third, which Royce describes as “the philosophy of religion,” concerns itself with the metaphysics of Being, and hence with the ultimate ground of Being, or God. These lectures consist in an investigation of the third type, which Royce defends as natural theology because, like the other two it does not depend in any way upon a the special revelation provided by Holy Writ.

In the first set of lectures, Royce expounds and defends a version of Absolute Idealism against its three rivals in the history of Western thought — Realism, Mysticism and Critical Rationalism (or Kantianism). The heart of his argument is a re-working of the central theme of his first book — The Religious Aspect of Philosophy —– and it is Lecture VII (expanded in the printed version) and Lecture VIII that address the issue most directly. Royce contends that any attempt to study Being as first and foremost “fact” must founder in confusion and/or leave both its fundamental nature and it relation to the thinking mind obscure. The alternative is to being with “ideas.” These are not to be thought of as metal representations or images impressed upon the mind, but acts of consciousness that seek and partially secure their own fulfilment; composing a tune in one's head or thinking of a friend's welfare are examples he gives. Each such act has an “internal” meaning, bestowed upon it by the purpose it intends. Many, of course, also have an “external” meaning — the object event etc to which they refer. At the heart of realism is the supposition that the meaning of an act of consciousness is given externally — by the object to which it refers. Royce argues that this is a fundamental error. It is the internal meaning that is primary.

The question arises as to how, if this is true, the mind successfully escapes solipsistic subjectivism, forever enclosed within its own thoughts. Royce argues that in seeking the better to secure internal meaning and resolve the indetermination of its ideas, the mind becomes conscious of its limitations. Finite ignorance of Reality is to be identified with “finite vagueness of meaning” so that the internally generated search for more precise meaning is the motor that leads to apprehension of a totality or Absolute. “The universe you always have with you as your internal meaning” and “fragmentary passing ideas” of the finite mind find their satisfaction in objective truths.

It is this internal impulse for fuller meaning and not passive reception of empirical fact that drives individuals on to discover truths about their own individuality and the physical world around them, and from this to “the whole individual Being called the World,” and thus to “the Absolute or God himself.”