orms of Ethical Idealism. The
scientific theory of the universe, as the absolute union of Being,
Knowing, and Doing in the One and All, results from comprehension of
these three theories in complete organic unity, and constitutes
organic philosophy, scientific theology, or Religious Realism, as
opposed to all forms of Religious Idealism."

I submit this long extract to you, gentlemen, not to bore you with
metaphysical speculations, but simply to enable you, as educated men
who understand the meaning of plain and straightforward English on any
subject, to follow the twistings and turnings of an extraordinarily
sinuous and disingenuous intellect, and intelligently to decide a
question which needs here to be settled clearly in your own minds:
could any competent professor of philosophy, undertaking to give, as a
fair critic, a truthful account to the public of the contents of my
book, read that passage, and then, omitting all reference to the
contrast there and everywhere made between realism and idealism,
honestly tell that public, without any further information at all on
the subject, that the "conclusion" of my philosophy is "essentially
idealistic"?

Yet that is the conscienceless misrepresentation with which Dr. Royce
prepares the way for all that is to follow, deceives the reader at the
very outset, predisposes him to believe the preposterous charge that I
"appropriated" my main theory from the great idealist Hegel, arouses
his indignation or mirth, as the case may be, at my alleged strutting
about in borrowed plumes, and so leads him at last to applaud the
righteous castigation of the "professional warning," by which the
peacock-feathers are made to fly in all directions and I myself am
scourged back among my brother-jackdaws, the impostors, charlatans,
and quacks of myriad kinds. This is the purport and the spirit of Dr.
Royce's ostensible review, "_as a whole_." Is it the "fair criticism"
which the law allows? Or is it the "libel" which the law condemns? Is
it the fair and critical judgment which your silence shall sanction,
as Harvard's official verdict on my work? Or is it the libellous and
vulgar abuse which your speech shall rebuke, as shaming Harvard more
than me by bringing the ethics and manners of the literary Bedouin
into the professor's chair?

V.

But, gentlemen, the gravest aspect of Dr. Royce's ostensible review
remains still to be considered. Is libel--vulgar, violent, and brutal
libel--the m