ABSTRACT
In more than one sense Josiah Royce’s thought may be said in the last period of his philosophical activity to have come full circle. His first book was dominated by his interest in ethics and religion. In his last period, to which The Philosophy of Loyalty and The Problem of Christianity belong, he became more and more preoccupied with this interest, though never without an eye to the metaphysical basis or without reactions upon his metaphysical conceptions. Royce himself believed that there was no other work in which he had “told his tale more fully or with more approach to the far-off goal of saying something, sometime that might prove helpful to students of idealism”. Royce’s religion of “the Beloved Community”, if thus interpreted, is bound to appear to be Christianity without either God or Christ. Royce himself has taught us that the principle is one that carries us beyond the distinctions of past, present, and future.
