Abstract

Toward the end of his late magnum opus on The Problem of Christianity, Josiah Royce identified loyalty with a “third attitude of the will,” contrasting it with two other attitudes that he had previously described based on his reading of Schopenhauer. Neither a simple affirmation nor a denial of the will to live, loyalty, as portrayed by Royce, is a “positive devotion of the Self to its cause.” Anyone who properly understands the “meaning of this third way,” Royce announced, “will therefore be better prepared to grasp the foundations upon which the metaphysics of interpretation rests.”1 This discussion of loyalty occurs within the much broader context of a detailed and extended treatment of Charles S. Peirce’s...