Josiah Royce was born on November 20, 1855 in Grass Valley, California. In 1866 the Royces moved to San Francisco where Josiah developed an interest in math that ultimately led to a B.A. at California (Berkeley) in 1875. Following a year of study at Gottingen and Leipzig, he joined the first goup of twenty Fellows at Johns Hopkins, receiving his PhD. in 1878. Upon his graduation Royce reluctantly returned to teach English at California, where he married Katherine (Kitty) Head in 1880.

In 1882 William James arranged for Royce to teach his courses at Harvard during his sabbatical, and Royce never left Harvard thereafter, becoming Professor of Philosophy in 1892. In 1885 he published The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, a statement of his post-Kantian idealism which emphasized some kind of metaphysical Absolute and reality as an act or experience of the mind. Other works followed including the popular Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), The Conception of God (1897) and his most systematic statement delivered in the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, The World and the Individual (1900 - 1901). Late in life Royce returned to the subject of his early work in lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, published as The Problem of Christianity (1913). In this work the Absolute assumes the form of the "Beloved Community" to which the individual man was bound by patriotic fervor, loyalty and self- sacrifice. Royce died in Boston on September 14, 1916.