ion
forces itself upon our attention. Nor can it be denied that an opposite
fallacy is equally possible, especially in times of revolutionary
passion. The apparent irreconcilability of some new doctrine with the
old may lead to the summary rejection of the implicit truth, together
with the error involved in its imperfect recognition. Hence arises the
necessity for faking into account not only a man's intellectual
idiosyncrasies and the special intellectual horizon, but all the
prepossessions due to his personal character, his social environment,
and his consequent sympathies and antipathies. The philosopher has his
passions like other men. He does not really live in the thin air of
abstract speculation. On the contrary, he starts generally, and surely
is right in starting, with keen interest in the great religious,
ethical, and social problems of the time. He wishes--honestly and
eagerly--to try them by the severest tests, and to hold fast only what
is clearly valid. The desire to apply his principles in fact justifies
his pursuit, and redeems him from the charge that he is delighting in
barren intellectual subtleties. But to an outsider his procedure may
appear in a different light. His real problem comes to be: how the
conclusions which are agreeable to his emotions can be connected with
the postulates which are congenial to his intellect? He may be
absolutely honest and quite unconscious that his conclusions were
prearranged by his sympathies. No philosophic creed of any importance
has ever been constructed, we may well believe, without such sincerity
and without such plausibility as results from its correspondence to at
least some aspects of the truth. But the result is sufficiently shown by
the perplexed controversies which arise. Men agree in their conclusions,
though starting from opposite premises; or from the same premises reach
the most diverging conclusions. The same code of practical morality, it
is often said, is accepted by thinkers who deny each other's first
principles; dogmatism often appears to its opponents to be thoroughgoing
scepticism in disguise, and men establish victoriously results which
turn out in the end to be really a stronghold for their antagonists.

Hence there is a distinction between such a history of a sect as I
contemplate and a history of scientific inquiry or of pure philosophy. A
history of mathematical or physical science would differ from a direct
exposition of the science, but