 In 1917 I read a paper to the Aristotelian Society [entitled “Relation and Coherence”], perhaps one of the most muddled papers that have ever been presented to that assembly. … At the outset of the discussion … a man whom I had never seen and took to be quite young, began to ask me questions with a vehement insistence that considerably alarmed me. “What ON EARTH do you mean by that?” he exclaimed again and again, thumping the table as he said “on earth” in a manner that clearly shewed he believed there was no earthly meaning in what I had said. Soon, however, my alarm faded; the vehement philosopher had made me forget not to be a philosopher—nothing mattered except trying to find out what I did mean. In spite of my stumbling replies he managed to elicit the reasons why I had been led to the views I was trying to defend; he shewed me the baselessness of many of my reasons, he unravelled the muddles and enabled me to see more clearly the grain of sense that had been at the back of my inept criticisms. That was my first meeting with Moore, whose name I discovered only towards the end of the discussion. I am inclined to think that this meeting of the Aristotelian Society was somewhat peculiar in the annals of the Society, for the reader of a paper was, before the end of the discussion, convinced that her main contentions were entirely wrong. One does not expect a philosophical society’s meeting to end in a conversion, yet such was the result in my case, owing mainly to the vehement and vigorous clarity of Moore and his patience in pursuing the question to its end … (1942: 530)