The inclosed, from an anonymous but appreciative source, may interest
you. It is doubtless true that the philosophy of Neminism goes back to
India, through Hegel and Plato, but the high priestess does not know
this. She made it all out of her own head.
Truly yours,
DAVID S. JORDAN.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MENTIPHYSICS,
LYNN, MASS., _December 6, 1899_.
_President David Starr Jordan, Leland Stanford University, California._
SIR: I have before me the last issue of one of our two or three great
scientific magazines, in which Mr. Giddings lays down the exact method
we are to follow in sociology, thereby creating the pleasing impression
that hereafter he intends to stick to it himself. But, sir, I wish to
say, as a student of “Neminism,” as you call it, that my emotions were
far less agreeable on perusing your brilliant plagiarism, the doctrine
of _Nihil nemini nocet_, an aphorism which apparently you wish to
make rival the _Cogito ergo sum_ of the Cartesian philosophy. I will
concede to you (I being, as it is perhaps necessary for me to remark, a
literary person) the undoubted right all real literary persons have of
appropriating everything of a literary nature that they can lay their
hands upon; but, while we are in perfect harmony upon this occasion,
in regard to that point, I regret to insist that the thing must be
done judiciously--_that_ is the art. Any mere plebeian can accumulate
facts--_that_ is the _raison d’être_ of the plebeian; his duty is to
work--but the real ethereal literary man, such as the monthly magazines
nourish, must disdain facts and theories and the truth, and must float
in the pure, soft twilight of his own imagination while he writes about
people who never existed, in a language which nobody can understand.
Yet, sir, in your unblushing appropriation of the late Professor
Hegel’s dictum of _Sein und nicht Sein sind dieselbe_ (which I presume
you, sir, to exculpate yourself, will swear you do not understand),
and in your changing that immortal antithesis to your _Nihil nemini
nocet_--in doing all this I declare that you have violated one of the
most sacred principles, in fact, the very essence of Neminism; for to
say, as you have said, that nothing hurts nobody, is to say a very
dull, prosaic, vulgar fact which any fool can understand; but to say
that “to be and not to be are the same” is to say something that is not
only very beautiful, but, what is far more to the point, is likewise
utterly incomprehensible; yet to do this _is_ the essence of Neminism,
as you yourself have shown.
As a confirmed Neminist glorying in his Neminism, as Pascal’s
Father Joseph, the Jesuit, gloried in “interpretation” of the words
“murder” and “charity,” I am, sir (and I hope my frequent use of this
monosyllable will not annoy you, for the first Neminist, Plato, uses Ω
Σωκρατες [Greek: Ô Sôkrates] quite as frequently, though his expression
requires four times as much wind or space as mine), I say, then, that I
am always anxious to be thought well of by people who are on top or are
getting there, in order, to use your own undignified and cruel metaphor
in the Rev. Mr. Lyman Abbott’s journal of news and Christianity, that I
may continue “to hold down” my position as the janitor and Professor of
Leibnitzian Monadology in the University of Mentiphysics. But there are
times, sir, when even a feminist rises above his interest, and, like
Richelieu in the play, exchanges the lion’s and the fox’s skins. In
short, I beg to inform you that I believe that you, seeing the growing
attachment of the vulgar mob for the _Wissenshaftliche Pädagogie_ of
the Robinson Crusoeans or concentrationists, have had the thought
to sap the foundations of their success by vulgarizing our noble
monopoly of Neministic science, and I should not be at all surprised
to see your name, after a little, as the editor of a “Journal of
Psycho-Materno-Kinder Apperceptics,” or of a strictly American “Great
Educator Series,” beginning with Pontiac and ending with Jim Fiske.
Or perhaps, sir, you are actuated by deeper motives. Our university
has not yet received the complimentary copy of your work on Imperial
Democracy, the Government probably holding it back until General
Young can catch Mr. Aguinaldo, but I see by the publishers’ lists
that it is out. Now, it is easy to see that if Imperial Democracy
gets within a stone’s throw of China it will get _into_ China, and,
with your knowledge of Aristotle’s Politics and the Highbinders in
Chinatown, you can not have failed to have recognized that Neminism
and Orientalism are very similar. To be or not to be; to be alive or
to be dead; to be drunk or to be sober--’tis all the same for the
people; ’tis _Nirvana_. You wish to vulgarize Neminism. What follows
your success? Immediately every State will make it an obligatory study
in the public schools, and when, in the distant future, we meet the
Chinamen face to face, we will be ready to exterminate them or be
exterminated by them; for it is an axiom of sociology, which it is
to be hoped Mr. Giddings will see the value of and will in the next
edition of his Social Euclid make number one, that when two societies
completely differing in origin, history, manners, institutions, and
laws come together they start in the more quickly to cut each other’s
throats when they have a common idea in which they can locate a
difference, and hence find a logical excuse to begin.
I would have preferred that our president had taken up this unpleasant
task of criticising your mischievous efforts to vulgarize our beautiful
science, which, like the true religion of the Egyptians, should be
retained _sub rosa_ in the temples; but she, as you yourself have
said, does not like controversial publicity, and has often remarked
that our science is like the mushroom, for, though it is the child of
darkness and Byzantian filth, it is eminently adapted to be retained by
weak stomachs, while for others it may be nauseating. I am, sir, very
respectfully,
ANACHARSIS PANGLOSS, _M. Plane_.
Though religiously refraining from introducing my own personality
in the foregoing, it being a cardinal point in our science that it
is good form to appear modest--_videri quam esse_, as was said of
Cato--I am, nevertheless, obliged to observe that I am not at all in
any way related to the Dr. Pangloss, LL. D., A. S. S., mentioned in
the play of the Heir at Law, nor yet, though perhaps more spiritually
akin, to that other Dr. Pangloss--Dr. Leibnitz Pangloss, the tutor
of Candide mentioned by the late Monsieur Voltaire of happy memory.
Dr. L. Pangloss, a fine old fellow at bottom, was engaged in showing
how, in the best possible words, a cause always precedes its effect;
for instance, Monsieur the Baron Thunder den Trockendorf has a nose,
argues he--it will carry spectacles, hence the nose was created for
spectacles, and spectacles are created. It is plain that Dr. L.
Pangloss was a scientist. Now, I am a sociologist, and it is the
hope of my life to fill the chair of Monadology in the new American
university, where I intend to show that while the rich are becoming
richer the poor will become richer than the rich in contemplating how
much more satisfaction the rich get out of their riches than they, the
poor, get out of their poverty. This, as you will at once recognize,
is in the line of what Mr. Lester Ward calls Dynamic Sociology, and,
though it is not the acme of the application of dynamics such as that
which knocked Hebraism out of Saul of Tarsus, I beg to remind you that,
until German science has made further progress in the application of
electricity, we lack the means of producing the necessary phenomena by
which alone such effects can be secured.