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.

Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in
making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art,
government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find
formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians
and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists.
In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as
familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast