Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.  It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas.  It ‘bakes no bread,’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives.  These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.  Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it.  Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament.  Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions.  Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises.  It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would.  He trusts his temperament.  Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it.  He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world’s character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and ‘not in it,’ in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability.

Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to superior discernment or authority.  There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions:  the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned.  I am sure it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel free to do so.

Of course I am talking here of very positively marked men, men of radical idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and figure in its history.  Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer, are such temperamental thinkers.  Most of us have, of course, no very definite intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one present very moderately.  We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be.  But the one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them.  There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man’s beliefs.