A unique and honored figure in American intellectual history, Josiah Royce stands out as a master of many disciplines who made significant contributions to mathematical logic, psychology, social ethics, literary criticism, and history as well as metaphysics. These thirteen lectures elucidate his early philosophical idealism and explore the historical framework of his doctrine. Spanning three centuries of the speculative concerns of philosophy, Royce discusses the theories of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and other important thinkers. A lucid and readable text, this volume provides students and other readers with scholarly views of the important developments in modern philosophy from the 1600s to the dawn of the twentieth century.