A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University | Page 6

is the office of philosophy to undertake a
serious scrutiny of the presuppositions of human belief. Hence the
importance of the careful way of thinking in philosophy. But Dr.
Abbot's way is not careful, is not novel, and, when thus set forth to the
people as new and bold and American, it is likely to do precisely as
much harm to careful inquiry as it gets influence over immature or
imperfectly trained minds. I venture, therefore, to speak plainly, by way
of a professional warning to the liberal-minded public concerning Dr.
Abbot's philosophical pretensions. And my warning takes the form of
saying that, if people are to think in this confused way, unconsciously
borrowing from a great speculator like Hegel, and then depriving the
borrowed conception of the peculiar subtlety of statement that made it
useful in its place,--and if we readers are for our part to accept such
scholasticism as is found in Dr. Abbot's concluding sections as at all
resembling philosophy,--then it were far better for the world that no
reflective thinking whatever should be done. If we can't improve on
what God has already put into the mouth of the babes and sucklings, let
us at all events make some other use of our wisdom and prudence than
in setting forth the American theory of what has been in large part
hidden from us."
Gentlemen, I deny sweepingly the whole groundwork of cunning and
amazing misrepresentation on which this unparalleled tirade is
founded.
I. I deny that my philosophy is "essentially idealistic," or that any
"careful" or conscientious scholar could possibly affirm it to be such.
II. I deny that I "borrowed" my realistic theory of universals from the
idealist, Hegel, whether consciously or unconsciously. The charge is
unspeakably silly. Realism and idealism contradict each other more
absolutely than protectionism and free-trade.
III. I deny that I ever made the "philosophical pretensions" which Dr.
Royce calumniously imputes to me. But, if I had made pretensions as
high as the Himalayas, I deny his authority 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
himself, at the request and by the appointment of his own superiors, the
Corporation and Overseers of his own University; and the singular

impropriety (to use no stronger word) of his "professional warning"
will be apparent to every one in the light of that fact.
IV.
So far I have treated Dr. Royce's attack solely from the literary and
ethical points of view. The legal point of view must now