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.