The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, Volume II by McDermott John J.;

Author:McDermott, John J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

VI. Training for Loyalty

Two objections which have been expressed to me by hearers of the foregoing lectures of this course deserve a word of mention here, as I begin the present discussion of the work of training individuals for a loyal life.

I

The first of these objections concerns my use of the term “loyalty.” “Why,” so the objection runs, “why can you not avoid the endless repetition of your one chosen term, ‘loyalty’? Why would not other words, such as fidelity, devotion, absorption, trustworthiness, faithfulness, express just as well the moral quality to which you give the one name that you have employed?”

The second objection concerns my definition of the term “loyalty,” and is closely connected with the first objection. It runs as follows: “Why do you insist that the cause which the loyal man serves must be a social cause? Why might one not show the same essential moral quality that you define, when the cause that he serves is something quite unearthly, or something earthly but quite unsocial? Saint Simeon on his pillar, Buddha seeking enlightenment under his lonely tree, the Greek geometer attempting to square the circle,—were they not as faithful as your loyal man is? And were their causes social causes?”

I reply to these objections together. I have defined my present usage of the popular term “loyalty” in my own distinctly technical way. Loyalty so far means for us, in these lectures, the willing, the thoroughgoing, and the practical devotion of a self to a cause. And a cause means, in these lectures, something that is conceived by its loyal servant as unifying the lives of various human beings into one life. Now, I know of no other word whose popular usage comes closer than does that of the good old word “loyalty” to embodying the meaning that I have given to the term. I think, then, that I have a right to my technical definition. It is based upon popular usage, and goes beyond that usage only in a very natural way. I intend soon to show you that we are now ready to substitute for this first technical definition another and a still more significant definition which will reveal to us, for the first time, the true spirit of the enterprise in which all the loyal are actually engaged. But I can reach this higher definition only through the simpler definition. To that, inadequate as it is, my discussion must cling until we are ready for something better.

Granting, however, my own definition of my term, I cannot easily use any other popular or philosophical term in the same way. I cannot substitute the word “devotion” for the term “loyalty,” since loyalty is to my mind a very special kind of devotion. A man might be devoted to the pursuit of pleasure; but that would not make him loyal. Fidelity, again, is, in my own account, but one aspect of loyalty. Loyalty includes fidelity, but means more, since, besides fidelity, decisiveness and the acceptance of a

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