with which Davidson contradicted, corrected and reprehended
other people. A longer acquaintance invariably diminished the
impression. But it must be confessed that T. D. never was exactly
humble-minded, and that the solidity of his self-consciousness
withstood strains under which that of weaker men would have crumbled.
The malady which finally killed him was one of the most exhausting to
the nervous tone to which our flesh is subject, and it wore him out
before it ended him. He told me of the paroxysms of motiveless nervous
dread which used to beset him in the night-watches. Yet these never
subdued his stalwartness, nor made him a "sick-soul" in the theological
sense of that appelation. "God is afraid of me," was the phrase by
which he described his well-being to me one morning when his night had
been a good one, and he was feeling so cannibalistic that he thought he
might get well.

There are men whose attitude is always that of seeking for truth, and
men who on the contrary always believe that they have the root of it
already in them. Davidson was of the latter class. Like his
countrymen, Carlyle and Ruskin, he felt himself to be in the possession
of something, whether articulate or as yet articulated by himself, that
authorized him (and authorized him with uncommon openness and
frequency) to condemn the errors of others. I think that to the last
he never fully extricated this philosophy. It was a tendency, a faith
in a direction, which gave him an active persuasion that other
directions were false, but of which the central insight never got fully
formulated, but remained in a state which Frederic Myers would have
called subliminal. He varied to a certain extent his watchwords and
his heroes. When I first knew him all was Aristotle. Later all was
Rosmini. Later still Rosmini seemed forgotten. He knew so many
writers that he grew fond of very various ones and had a strange
tolerance for systematizers and dogmatizers whom, as the consistent
individualist that he was, he should have disliked. Hegel, it is true,
he detested; but he always spoke with reverence of Kant. Of Mill and
Spencer he had a low opinion; and when I lent him Paulsen's
Introduction to Philosophy (then just out), as an example of a kind of
eclectic thought that seemed to be growing, and with which I largely
sympathized, he returned it with richer expressions of disdain than
often fell even from his lips: "It's the shabbiest, seediest pr