THE PHILOSOPHIC TEMPER 



were veritably possessed by the philosophic tem- 

 per, which is, indeed, the mark of a supreme moral 

 excellence. For even if a man be purged of all 

 selfish desires, yet his very burning for the welfare 

 of others may utterly consume the philosophic 

 temper. To love truth as it should be loved 

 you must be possessed of a faith almost infinitely 

 rare the faith that, in the long run, ignorance 

 can never be bliss, the faith of Socrates in knowl- 

 edge as virtue. Whether any man ever acted con- 

 sistently on the belief that truth is always best, 

 one may, indeed, take leave to doubt. 



The writer is not so blind as to fancy that he 

 is possessed of the philosophic temper that he 

 would always rather have his beliefs true than 

 have them upheld. But it is something to have an 

 ideal. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp" 

 whether there be a heaven or not. 



I have called toleration a corollary of the philo- 

 sophic temper; and some attention may properly 

 be paid it here, partly because the evolutionary 

 application of biology to sociology has afforded 

 great support to the idea of toleration, and also 

 because the question is of primal importance in 

 relation to Spencer's work, since a thinker so orig- 

 inal and heterodox could not have worked with- 

 out that toleration which he received grudging- 

 ly and perforce from the academic philosophers, 

 generously from many representative theologians, 

 and as a matter of course from unpledged students 

 everywhere. 



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