 Royce was one of the first American philosophers to recognize the important challenge of Nietzsche’s moral vision, which celebrates those individuals who seek to exercise their autonomous will to a “socially idealized” power. Such heroic individualism, also associated with Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James, proves unsatisfactory in Royce’s view (Royce 1908 [1995, 41]). Their inspiring ethical visions are doomed to ineffectiveness precisely because of their extreme individualism. “There is only one way to be an ethical individual. That is to choose your cause, and then to serve it, as the Samurai his feudal chief, as the ideal knight of romantic story his lady, — in the spirit of all the loyal” (Royce 1908 [1995, 47]). These particular examples are meant to illustrate the essentially social character of loyalty in general: “My life means nothing, either theoretically or practically, unless I am a member of a community” (Royce 1913 [2001, 357]).