Dear K----, ...[I have] read your thesis once through. I only finished it yesterday. It is a big effort, hard to grasp at a single reading, and I'm too lazy to go over it a second time in its present physically inconvenient shape. It is obvious that parts of it have been written rapidly and not boiled down; and my impression is that you have left over in it too much of the complication of form in which our ideas, our critical ideas especially, first come to us, and which has, with much rewriting, to be straightened out. You were dealing with dialecticians and logic-choppers, and you have met them on their own ground with a logic-chopping even more diseased than theirs. So far as I can see, you _have_ met them, though your own expressions are often far from lucid (--result of haste?); but in some cases I doubt whether they themselves would think that they were met at all. I fear a little that both Bradley and Royce will think that your _reductiones ad absurdum_ are too fine spun and ingenious to have real force. Too complicated, too complicated! is the verdict of my horse-like mind on much of this thesis. Your defense will be, of course, that it is a thesis, and as such, expected to be barbaric. But then I point to the careless, hasty writing of much of it. You _must_ simplify yourself, if you hope to have any influence in print. The writing becomes more careful and the style clearer, the moment you tackle Russell in the 6th part. And when you come to your own dogmatic statement of your vision of things in the last 30 pages or so, I think the thesis splendid, prophetic in tone and _very_ felicitous, often, in expression. This is indeed the _philosophie de l'avenir_, and a dogmatic expression of it will be far more effective than critical demolition of its alternatives. It will render that unnecessary if able enough. One will simply _feel_ them to be diseased. My total impression is that the critter K---- has a _really magnificent vision_ of the lay of the land in philosophy,--of the land of bondage, as well as of that of promise,--but that he has a tremendous lot of work to do yet in the way of getting himself into straight and effective literary shape. He has _elements_ of extraordinary literary power, but they are buried in much sand and shingle.... _May. 26, 1900._