A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University

isinterested anxiety for the public welfare, and tender sorrow over the "harm to careful inquiry" which my book is doing by "getting influence over immature or imperfectly trained minds," constrain him to accuse me of "frequently making of late extravagant pretensions as to the originality and profundity" of my "still unpublished system of philosophy."

Precisely what have been these "extravagant pretensions"? Simply these:--

In the preface to "Scientific Theism," I said of that book: "It is a mere résumé of a small portion of a comprehensive philosophical system, so far as I have been able to work it out under most distracting, discouraging, and unpropitious circumstances of many years; and for this reason I must beg some indulgence for the unavoidable incompleteness of my work."

Enumerating some reasons why I hesitated to begin the series of papers afterwards published as "The Way out of Agnosticism," I said, in the first of these papers: "First and foremost, perha