This volume contains revised versions of the second series of lectures delivered during January 1900. The volume is entitled Nature, Man, and the Moral Order, and it contains an extensive analytical index covering both this and the previous volume.
This volume begins where the previous one left off, but it does not include any summary of the first set of lectures. Instead it begins by asking what the relation between the Theory of Being advocated in the first volume is to the practical question of “man's place in the world and the meaning of the world in which he is to find this place.”
One problem confronting Idealism of the sort advocated in the first volume, a problem which contemporary commentators widely acknowledged, is the danger that it excludes human existence as we normally think of it, that Absolute Being cannot account for human freedom, personality, individuality, or moral and other values. Accordingly a large part of this second set of lectures is devoted to demonstrating that Royce's Theory of Being is not “a barren Absolute, which devours individuals,” but a place in which the aspirations of ethically free individuals can find their fulfilment and completion.
The opening Lecture is concerned with knowledge of fact and with undermining the common sense appeal of immediate experience as its basis. Royce concedes that present experience is both the starting point of knowledge and our only guide to understanding the world about us, but he thinks that it guides us by pointing us beyond itself to the “metaempirical.” What we end up knowing, therefore is not the content of immediate or present experience, but the ideas that make sense of it. This lecture also stresses the fact that acquiring knowledge is an activity, and that will or volition is thus as indispensible as cognition.
Reality is thus a product both of experience and will. It is the will to make our experience meaningful that is productive of knowledge and understanding. It is this dual character that makes Being humane and the world our home, not immediateky but ultimately.
It is against this concept of the world as our home that certain fundamental categories are to be understood. The remaining lectures consider some of these categories, though Royce emphasises that his treatment is neither complete nor systematic. The first of these categories is Nature, and this then allows him to consider the contrasting character of physical and social reality (Lectures IV and V). In turn this leads to an examination of the nature of self, freedom and the moral order (Lectures VI-VIII). Any idea of a morally ordered world must confront the problem of evil. Royce addresses evil in Lecture IX in which he reworks some of his previous writings. The final Lecture deals directly with God and the relation between the human and the divine. On the strength of the argument adduced, Royce concludes that despite God's absolute unity, individual human beings are nonetheless preserved within the life of God that sustains them, and the God needs union with human beings for his reality.
