are the reasons which, after patient
exhaustion of every milder means of redress, have moved me to this
public appeal.

Dr. Royce's misstatements of fact, so elaborately fashioned and so
ingeniously mortised together, were merely his foundation for a
deliberate and formal "professional warning to the liberal-minded
public" against my alleged "philosophical pretensions." The device of
attributing to me extravagant but groundless "pretensions" to
"originality" and "profundity"--since he is unable to cite a single
passage in which I ever used such expressions of myself--was probably
suggested to him by the "Press Notices of 'Scientific Theism,'"
printed as a publishers' advertisement of my former book at the end of
the book which lay before him. These "Press Notices," as usual,
contain numerous extracts from eulogistic reviews, in which, curiously
enough, these very words, "original" and "profound," or their
equivalents, occur with sufficient frequency to explain Dr. Royce's
choleric unhappiness. For instance, Dr. James Freeman Clarke wrote in
the "Unitarian Review": "If every position taken by Dr. Abbot cannot
be maintained, his book remains an original contribution to philosophy
of a high order and of great value"; M. Renouvier, in "La Critique
Philosophique," classed the book among "de remarquables efforts de
construction metaphysique et morale dus a des penseurs independants et
profonds"; and M. Carrau, in explaining why he added to his critical
history of "Religious Philosophy in England" a chapter of twenty pages
on my own system, actually introduced both of the words which, when
thus applied, jar so painfully on Dr. Royce's nerves: "La pensee de M.
Abbot m'a paru assez profonde et assez originale pour meriter d'etre
reproduite litteralement." (La Philosophie Religieuse en Angleterre.
Par Ludovic Carrau, Directeur des Conferences de philosophie a la
Faculte des lettres de Paris. Paris, 1888.) These extracts, be it
remembered, were all printed at the end of the book which Dr. Royce
was reviewing. Now he had an undoubted right to think and to say that
such encomiums as these on my work were silly, extravagant,
preposterous, and totally undeserved; but _to take them out of the
mouth of others and put them into mine was wilful and deliberate
calumny_. Systematic and calumnious misrepresentation is the sole
foundation of the "professional warning" in which Dr. Royce's
ostensible review culminates, and which is too extrao