ABSTRACT
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. The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of colleagues, we have to take account of this clash and explain good many of divergencies of philosophers by it. Now the particular difference of temperament that have in mind in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government, and manners as well as in philosophy. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. Among other obstacles to optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz to consider the number of the eternally damned. Expertness in philosophy is measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions.
