lf-defence, or, indeed, to take any public notice whatever of an
attack otherwise unworthy of it. But under the circumstances I am
confident that you will at once recognize the inevitableness and
unquestionable propriety of my appeal from the employee to the
employer, from the agent to the principal; and it would be
disrespectful to you to doubt for a moment that, disapproving of an
attack made impliedly and yet unwarrantably in your name, you will
express your disapprobation in some just and appropriate manner. My
action in thus laying the matter publicly before you can inflict no
possible injury upon our honored and revered Alma Mater: injury to
her is not even conceivable, except on the wildly improbable
supposition of your being indifferent to a scandalous abuse of his
position by one of your assistant professors, who, with no imaginable
motive other than mere professional jealousy or rivalry of authorship,
has gone to the unheard-of length of "professionally warning the
public" against a peaceable and inoffensive private scholar, whose
published arguments he has twice tried, but twice signally failed, to
meet in an intellectual way. If the public at large should have reason
to believe that conduct so scandalous as this in a Harvard professor
will not be condemned by you, as incompatible with the dignity and the
decencies of his office and with the rights of private citizens in
general, Harvard University would indeed suffer, and ought to suffer;
but it is wholly within your power to prevent the growth of so
injurious a belief. I beg leave, therefore, to submit to you the
following statement, and to solicit for it the patient and impartial
consideration which the gravity of the case requires.

I.

The first number of a new quarterly periodical, the "International
Journal of Ethics," published at Philadelphia in October, 1890,
contained an ostensible review by Dr. Royce of my last book, "The Way
out of Agnosticism." I advisedly use the word "ostensible," because
the main purport and intention of the article were not at all to
criticise a philosophy, but to sully the reputation of the
philosopher, deprive him of public confidence, ridicule and
misrepresent his labors, hold him up by name to public obloquy and
contempt, destroy or lessen the circulation of his books, and, in
general, to blacken and break down his literary reputation by any and
every means, even to the extent of aspersing his personal reputation,
a