rity to post me publicly--to
act as policeman in the republic of letters and to collar me on that
account. A college professor who thus mistakes his academic gown for
the policeman's uniform, and dares to use his private walking-stick
for the policeman's bludgeon, is likely to find himself suddenly
prostrated by a return blow, arrested for assault and battery, and
unceremoniously hustled off into a cell, by the officer whose function
he has injudiciously aped without waiting for the tiresome but quite
indispensable little preliminary of first securing a regular
commission.

IV. Most of all, I deny Dr. Royce's self-assumed right to club every
philosopher whose reasoning he can neither refute nor understand. I
deny, in general, that any Harvard professor has the right to
fulminate a "professional warning" _against anybody_; and, in
particular, that you, gentlemen, ever voted or intended to invest Dr.
Royce with that right. He himself now publicly puts forth a worse than
"extravagant pretension" when he arrogates to himself this right of
literary outrage. He was not appointed professor by you for any such
unseemly purpose. To arrogate to himself a senseless "professional"
superiority over all non-"professional" authors, to the insufferable
extent of publicly posting and placarding them for a mere difference
of opinion, is, from a moral point of view, scandalously to abuse his
academical position, to compromise the dignity of Harvard University,
to draw down universal contempt upon the "profession" which he
prostitutes to the uses of mere professional jealousy or literary
rivalry, and to degrade the honorable office of professor in the eyes
of all who understand that a weak argument is not strengthened, and a
false accusation is not justified, by throwing "professional warnings"
as a make-weight into the scales of reason. I affirm emphatically that
no professor has a moral right to treat anybody with this undisguised
"insolence of office," or to use any weapon but reason in order to put
down what he conceives to be errors in philosophy. In the present
case, I deny that Dr. Royce has any better or stronger claim than
myself to speak "professionally" on philosophical questions. The very
book against which he presumes to warn the public "professionally" is
founded upon lectures which I myself "professionally" delivered, not
only from Dr. Royce's own desk and to Dr. Royce's own college class,
but as a substitute for Dr. Royce