Studies of Good and Evil — Selections
Royce taught philosophy at Harvard for three decades and was the leading American exponent of Absolute Idealism — the view that ultimate reality is a single all-encompassing divine Mind. This position put evil at the center of his philosophical problem: if everything real is part of one divine whole, what is evil doing there? Royce’s answer is that evil is not an embarrassment to his system but necessary to it — suffering and opposition are not external to goodness but integral to its full self-realization. The Absolute cannot be what it is without the struggle against what opposes it. Whether this is a solution to the problem or a restatement of it is a question the essay invites the reader to decide.