Yet, gross and studied and systematic as this misrepresentation is, I should have passed it over in silence, precisely as I did pass over a similar attack by Dr. Royce on my earlier book in "Science" for April 9, 1886, were it not that, perhaps emboldened by former impunity, he now makes his misrepresentations culminate in the perpetration of a literary outrage, to which, I am persuaded, no parallel can be found in the history of polite literature. It is clear that forbearance must have somewhere its limit. The commands of self-respect and of civic conscience, the duty which every citizen owes to his fellow-citizens not to permit the fundamental rights of all to be unlimitedly violated in his own person, must at last set a bound to forbearance itself, and compel to self-defence. These 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,