A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 195 



when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament, Tempera- 

 ment is no conventionally recognized reason, and 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 or that fact or 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 

 though 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 the philosophic discussion. 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 are easily talked out of 

 them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs 

 of the most impressive philosopher in their 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, authori- 

 tarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and 

 realists. In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these con- 

 trasts as familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar con- 

 trast expressed in the pair of terms ' rationalist ' and i empiricist,' ' em- 

 piricist ' meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety, ' ra- 

 tionalist ' meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles. 

 ]NTo one can live an hour without both facts and principles, so it is 

 a difference rather of emphasis, yet it breeds antipathies of the most 



