 Royce did not seek to explain away or lessen the reality of evil: it is in his view a brute fact of being, an inevitable result of the world’s existence in time. Given the fact of evil, the most important question concerns how we finite beings ought to respond to it. His answer was that we should adopt the attitude of loyalty to goodness and truth, which as real forces in the world are the metaphysical opposite of evil. The loyal member of a genuine community confronts evil and wills to overcome it through the very fact of loyalty to its opposite. Evil can never be eradicated — this is another way of saying that loyalty to loyalty is a lost cause. Though the success of this high cause lies in the unreachable future, the meaning of our response is manifest in our present lives.