OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT, LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY, PALO ALTO, CAL. POST OFFICE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY. DEAR DR. YOUMANS: The inclosed, from an anonymous but appreciative source, may interest you. It is doubtless true that the philosophy of Neminism goes back to India, through Hegel and Plato, but the high priestess does not know this. She made it all out of her own head. Truly yours, DAVID S. JORDAN. THE UNIVERSITY OF MENTIPHYSICS, LYNN, MASS., _December 6, 1899_. _President David Starr Jordan, Leland Stanford University, California._ SIR: I have before me the last issue of one of our two or three great scientific magazines, in which Mr. Giddings lays down the exact method we are to follow in sociology, thereby creating the pleasing impression that hereafter he intends to stick to it himself. But, sir, I wish to say, as a student of “Neminism,” as you call it, that my emotions were far less agreeable on perusing your brilliant plagiarism, the doctrine of _Nihil nemini nocet_, an aphorism which apparently you wish to make rival the _Cogito ergo sum_ of the Cartesian philosophy. I will concede to you (I being, as it is perhaps necessary for me to remark, a literary person) the undoubted right all real literary persons have of appropriating everything of a literary nature that they can lay their hands upon; but, while we are in perfect harmony upon this occasion, in regard to that point, I regret to insist that the thing must be done judiciously--_that_ is the art. Any mere plebeian can accumulate facts--_that_ is the _raison d’être_ of the plebeian; his duty is to work--but the real ethereal literary man, such as the monthly magazines nourish, must disdain facts and theories and the truth, and must float in the pure, soft twilight of his own imagination while he writes about people who never existed, in a language which nobody can understand. Yet, sir, in your unblushing appropriation of the late Professor Hegel’s dictum of _Sein und nicht Sein sind dieselbe_ (which I presume you, sir, to exculpate yourself, will swear you do not understand), and in your changing that immortal antithesis to your _Nihil nemini nocet_--in doing all this I declare that you have violated one of the most sacred principles, in fact, the very essence of Neminism; for to say, as you have said, that nothing hurts nobody, is to say a very dull, prosaic, vulgar fact which any fool can understand; but to say that “to be and not to be are the same” is to say something that is not only very beautiful, but, what is far more to the point, is likewise utterly incomprehensible; yet to do this _is_ the essence of Neminism, as you yourself have shown.