, I submit, demonstration of the malice which originally prompted
them, and now moves him to maintain them; nothing further is needed to
make their malicious character perfectly plain, and to prove the
insincerity of his disclaimers of malice. But Dr. Royce seriously
mistakes the nature of the effect produced by his "attack," when he
affects to consider it as the quite needless excitation of excessive
sensitiveness. If a gentleman in a crowd discovers his nearest
neighbor engaged in filching his pocket-book, and at once hands the
culprit over to the police, it would hardly be graphic to describe his
frame of mind as needless "personal offence" or "unnecessary pain";
and the expressions are no more graphic as to my own frame of mind,
when I discover Dr. Royce endeavoring to filch from me my reputation
in the name of Harvard University. It is not always safe to reckon on
the absence, in parties confessedly "attacked," of all capacity for
_moral indignation_, or all capacity for moral self-defence.

In reply to Mr. Warner, August 4, I wrote as follows: "Permit me
further to say, with regard to Dr. Royce's letter, that I can only
interpret it as a distinct refusal to retract his accusation that I
have made 'extravagant pretensions as to the originality and
profundity of my still unpublished system of philosophy'--a distinct
refusal to retract his accusation that I have 'borrowed my theory of
universals from Hegel'--a distinct refusal to retract his
'professional warning' based upon these accusations. These were the
chief points of my Card, and I note the refusal implied by Dr. Royce's
evasive letter. But I decline to accept his plea of
'conscientiousness' in maintaining the accusation as to Hegel. I might
as well plead 'conscientiousness' in maintaining an accusation that
Dr. Royce assassinated Abraham Lincoln, in face of the evidence that
John Wilkes Booth was the assassin."

Here the correspondence closed. My apology for inflicting it upon you,
gentlemen, must be the necessity of showing to you that, as I was
plainly bound to do, I first exhausted every means of private redress
before laying the matter before you publicly. Not till I had failed to
obtain a fair hearing in the same periodical which published Dr.
Royce's libel, and not till I had failed to obtain from Dr. Royce
himself a retraction of this libel, did I find myself reduced to the
alternatives of either acquiescing in your own unwarrantably
insinuated conde