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.

Had they stuck to the text it would all have been well; but a reporter is a reporter; in spite of the editors there were numerous little elaborations to pervert the context.  A great man must be careful of his speech.  Dr. Holcomb was often busy refuting; he could not understand the need of these little twistings of wisdom.  It kept him in controversy; the brothers of his profession often took him to task for these little distorted scraps of philosophy.  He did not like journalism.  He had a way of consigning all writers and editors to the devil.

Which was vastly amusing to the reporters.  Once they had him going they poised their pens in glee and began splashing their venomous ink.  It was tragic; the great professor standing at bay to his tormentors.  One and all they loved him and one and all they took delight in his torture.  It was a hard task for a reporter to get in at a lecture; and yet it was often the lot of the professor to find himself and his words featured in his breakfast paper.

On the very day before this the doctor had come out with one of his terse startling statements.  He had a way of inserting parenthetically some of his scraps of wisdom.  It was in an Ethics class.  We quote his words as near as possible: 

“Man, let me tell you, is egotistic.  All our philosophy is based on ego.  We live threescore years and we balance it with all eternity.  We are it.  Did you ever stop and think of eternity?  It is a rather long time.  What right have we to say that life, which we assume to be everlasting, immediately becomes restrospect once it passes out of the conscious individuality which is allotted upon this earth?  The trouble is ourselves.  We are five-sensed.  We weigh everything!  We so measure eternity.  Until we step out into other senses, which undoubtedly exist, we shall never arrive at the conception of infinity.  Now I am going to make a rather startling announcement.