etence
at a philosophy I ever dreamed of as possible. It's like a man dressed
in a black coat so threadbare as to be all shiny. The most
poverty-stricken, out-at-elbows thing I ever read. A perfect monument
of seediness and shabbiness," etc.

The truth is that Davidson, brought up on the older classical
traditions, never outgrew those habits of judging the world by purely
aesthetic criteria which men fed on the sciences of nature are so
willing to abandon. Even if a philosophy were true, he could easily
fail to relish it unless it showed a certain formal nobility and
dogmatic pretension to finality. But I must not describe him so much
from my own professional point of view--it is as a vessel of life at
large that one ought to keep him in remembrance.

He came to Boston from St. Louis, where he had been teaching, about the
year 1873. He was ruddy and radiant, and I soon saw much of him,
though at first it was without the thoroughness of sympathy which we
afterwards acquired and which made us overflow, on meeting after long
absences, into such laughing greetings as: "Ha! you old thief! Ha! you
old blackguard!"--pure "contrast-effects" of affection and familiarity
passing beyond their bounds. At that time I saw most of him at a
little philosophical club which used to meet every fortnight at his
rooms in Temple Street in Boston. Of the other members, J. Elliot
Cabot and C. C. Everett, are now dead--I will not name the survivors.
We never worked out harmonious conclusions. Davidson used to crack the
whip of Aristotle over us; and I remember that, whatever topic was
formally appointed for the day, we invariably wound up with a quarrel
about Space and Space-perception. The Club had existed before
Davidson's advent. The previous year we had gone over a good part of
Hegel's larger Logic, under the self-constituted leadership of two
young business men from Illinois, who had become enthusiastic Hegelians
and, knowing almost no German, had actually possessed themselves of a
manuscript translation of the entire three volumes of Logic, made by an
extraordinary Pomeranian immigrant, named Brockmeyer. These disciples
were leaving business for the law and studying at the Harvard
law-school; but they saw the whole universe through Hegelian
spectacles, and a more admirable _homo unius libri_ than one of them,
with his three big folios of Hegelian manuscript, I have never had the
good fortune to know.

I forget how Davidso