WORDS OF PROFESSOR ROYCE AT THE WALTON HOTEL AT PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 29, 1915.[1]
I WAS born in 1855 in California. My native town was a mining town in the Sierra Nevada,—a place five or six years older than myself. My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said that this was a new community. I frequently looked at the vestiges left by the former diggings of miners, saw that many pine logs were rotten, and that a miner's grave was to be found in a lonely place not far from my own house. Plainly men had lived and died thereabouts. I dimly reflected that this sort of life had apparently been going on ever since men dwelt thereabouts. The logs and the grave looked old. The sunsets were beautiful. The wide prospects when one looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive, and had long interested the people of whose love for my country I heard much. What was there then in this place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered, and gradually came to feel that part of my life's business was to find out what all this wonder meant. My earliest teachers in philosophy were my mother, whose private school, held for some years in our own house, I attended, and my sisters, who were all older than myself, and one of whom taught me to read. In my home I heard the Bible very frequently read, and very greatly enjoyed my mother's reading of Bible stories, although, so far as I remember, I was very generally dissatisfied with the requirements of observance of Sundays, which stand out somewhat prominently in my memory. Our home training in these respects was not, as I now think, at all excessively strict. But without being aware of the fact, I was a
- ↑ After the dinner at the Walton Hotel, Professor Royce, in acknowledgment of the kindness of his friends, made a brief statement, largely autobiographical in its character. The following is a summary of this statement, and is founded upon some notes which friends present amongst the guests have kindly supplied, to aid the speaker to remind his friends of the spirit of what he tried to express.
