_Büchner._ “These philosophers are a singular people. They talk of the creation of the world as if they had been present on the occasion; they define the Absolute as if they had sat at its table for years; they babble about the nothing and the something, the ego and non‐ego, the _per se_ and _in se_, universals and particulars, perishability and absolute existence, the unknown _x_, etc., etc., with a confidence as if a celestial codex had given them exact information about all these ideas and things, and they plaster up the simplest notions with such a confused mass of high‐sounding and learned but incomprehensible words and phrases as to turn the head of a rational man. But, in spite of all this, upon their metaphysical eminence they are not unfrequently so far off from any positive knowledge that they commit the most amusing blunders, especially in those cases in which philosophy and science meet, and when the latter threatens to destroy the results of metaphysical speculation. Thus almost all philosophical psychologists have struggled with rare energy against the theory of the seat of the soul in the brain, and continue in their opposition without taking the least notice of the progress of experimental science” (pp. 142, 143). _Reader._ I am surprised, doctor, at your declamation against philosophers. You have no right to denounce them either in general or in particular. I admit that rationalistic philosophers richly deserve all the contempt you can heap upon them, but it is not fair in you to attack them; for they are better than you. To lay your own faults on the shoulders of your opponents is an old trick. The burglar calls his victim a thief; designing Freemasons always prate about Jesuitical machinations; and writers whose philosophical baggage is as light as their pretensions are high inveigh against those by whom they dread to be exposed, refuted, and supplanted. Such is the case with you. While pretending to describe others, you have made the portrait of yourself. It is certainly difficult to find another man in the world who babbles with as much confidence as you do about, or rather against, creation, the Absolute, and the unknown x, etc., etc. Yet your opponents are not infallible, nor do they pretend to be; but if they “commit the most amusing blunders,” it is not owing to their “metaphysical eminence,” as you suppose, but rather to their metaphysical incapacity. Science, you say, sometimes “threatens to destroy the results of metaphysical speculation”; but you should have added that metaphysical speculation oftentimes saves science from shipwreck; for empiricism without philosophy is a ship without a rudder.