n him my unpublished manuscript, and
beyond those published allusions to it he possesses absolutely no
means whatever of knowing anything about its contents. Nothing,
surely, except full and exact knowledge, derived from careful and
patient personal examination of that manuscript, could possibly be a
ground of just judgment of its character. How, then, in absolute
ignorance of its character and contents, could any fair man hazard any
public verdict upon it? Yet Dr. Royce not only accuses me of making
"pretensions" about it which I never made, but dares to characterize
them as "extravagant," when, _for all he knows_, they might (if made)
fall far short of the truth. Whether in this case the evidence
supports the accusation, and whether the conscience which permits the
making of such an accusation on such evidence is itself such a
conscience as you expect to find in your appointees,--these,
gentlemen, are questions for you yourselves to decide.

III.

These three connected and logically affiliated _misstatements of
fact_--namely, (1) that my philosophy is "essentially idealistic," (2)
that it has been "appropriated" and "unconsciously borrowed" from the
idealist Hegel, and (3) that I have frequently made "extravagant
pretensions as to the originality and profundity" of this merely
"borrowed" and "appropriated" philosophy--constitute in their totality
a regular system of gross and studied misrepresentation, as methodical
and coherent as it is unscrupulous. It is not "fair criticism"; it is
not "criticism" at all; and I do not hesitate to characterize it
deliberately as a disgrace both to Harvard University and to American
scholarship.

Yet, gross and studied and systematic as this misrepresentation is, I
should have passed it over in silence, precisely as I did pass over a
similar attack by Dr. Royce on my earlier book in "Science" for April
9, 1886, were it not that, perhaps emboldened by former impunity, he
now makes his misrepresentations culminate in the perpetration of a
literary outrage, to which, I am persuaded, no parallel can be found
in the history of polite literature. It is clear that forbearance must
have somewhere its limit. The commands of self-respect and of civic
conscience, the duty which every citizen owes to his fellow-citizens
not to permit the fundamental rights of all to be unlimitedly violated
in his own person, must at last set a bound to forbearance itself, and
compel to self-defence. These