THE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY


And now to start in on another angle. There is hardly any
necessity for introducing Dr. Holcomb. All of us, at least, those
who read, and, most of all, those of us who are interested in any
manner of speculation, knew him quite well. He was the professor
of philosophy at the University of California: a great man and a
good one, one of those fine academic souls who, not only by their
wisdom, but by their character, have a way of stamping themselves
upon generations; a speaker of the upstanding class, walking on
his own feet and utterly fearless when it came to dashing out on
some startling philosophy that had not been borne up by his
forebears.

He was original. He believed that the philosophies of the ages are
but stepping stones, that the wisdom of the earth looked but to
the future, and that the study of the classics, however essential,
is but the ground work for combining and working out the problems
of the future. He was epigrammatic, terse, and gifted with a
quaint humour, with which he was apt, even when in the driest
philosophy, to drive in and clinch his argument.

Best of all, he was able to clothe the most abstract thoughts in
language so simple and concrete that he brought the deepest of all
subjects down to the scope of the commonest thinker. It is
needless to say that he was 'copy.' The papers about the bay were
ever and anon running some startling story of the professor.