...I have been unpardonably long; and if you were a man, I should assuredly not expect to influence you a jot by what I write. Being a woman, there may be yet a gleam of hope!--which may serve as the excuse for my prolixity. (It is not for the likes of _you_, however, to hurl accusations of prolixity!) Now if I may presume to give a word of advice to one so much more accomplished than myself in dialectic technique, may I urge, since you have shown what a superb mistress you are in that difficult art of discriminating abstractions and opposing them to each other one by one, since in short there is no university extant that wouldn't give you its _summa cum laude_,--I should certainly so reward your thesis at Harvard,--may I urge, I say, that you should now turn your back upon that academic sort of artificiality altogether, and devote your great talents to the study of reality in its concreteness? In other words, do some _positive_ work at the problem of what truth signifies, substitute a definitive alternative for the humanism which I present, as the latter's substitute. Not by proving their inward incoherence does one refute philosophies--every human being is incoherent--but only by superseding them by other philosophies more satisfactory. Your wonderful technical skill ought to serve you in good stead if you would exchange the philological kind of criticism for constructive work. I fear however that you won't--the iron may have bitten too deeply into your soul!! Have you seen Knox's paper on pragmatism in the "Quarterly Review" for April--perhaps the deepest-cutting thing yet written on the pragmatist side? On the other side read Bertrand Russell's paper in the "Edinburgh Review" just out. A thing after your own heart, but ruined in my eyes by the same kind of vicious abstractionism which your thesis shows. It is amusing to see the critics of the will to believe furnish such exquisite instances of it in their own persons. _E.g._, Russell's own splendid atheistic-titanic confession of faith in that volume of essays on "Ideals of Science and of Faith" edited by one Hand. X----, whom you quote, has recently worked himself up to the pass of being ordained in the Episcopal church.... I justify them both; for only by such experiments on the part of individuals will social man gain the evidence required. They meanwhile seem to think that the only "true" position to hold is that everything not imposed upon a will-less and non-coöperant intellect must count as false--a preposterous principle which no human being follows in real life. Well! There! that is all! But, dear Madam, I should like to know where you come from, who you are, what your present "situation" is, etc., etc.--It is natural to have some personal curiosity about a lady who has taken such an extraordinary amount of pains for me! Believe me, dear Miss S----, with renewed apologies for the extreme tardiness of this acknowledgment, yours with mingled admiration and abhorrence,