There is a tone of voice that you can hear in the way a sentence is balanced, even if you are not equipped to understand its content. “What the idealist has, in fact, to show is that there is no real distinction, and the answer is that in that case there can be no real relation.” Thus wrote John Anderson, in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, and as soon as I read that sentence I was home. Actually I was leaving home. I read it on the ship to England. At Sydney University I had managed to avoid his lectures, as I had avoided the lectures of everyone else, but his spirit was all around the place. Everyone you met was either an Andersonian or a non-Andersonian. Now, as the Indian ocean ran slowly past, I was an Andersonian too. Or perhaps a non-Andersonian. Either way, his name was in there somewhere. His name was all over Australia 's intellectual world.