ABSTRACT
Behind all philosophy lies human nature, and in every philosopher there lurks a man. The reason why philosophy is mostly so obscure is that we are (not unreasonably) ashamed of ourselves. We are ashamed of human nature, and therefore claim for what is reputed best in us, our thoughts, that they soar far above it, and must win the absolute approval of intelligence as such. We are ashamed of ourselves, and therefore camouflage our motives and our ends. Unfortunately this camouflage too often succeeds in deceiving even ourselves: hence there are many philosophies which are, and will ever be, more or less unintelligible, simply because we do not know enough about the men who made them, and so cannot grasp the central idiosyncrasy that held together what to an outside observer seems their incongruous contents. In other cases we have material enough to reconstruct the author’s mind: we can then often prove of them what we can suspect in all, viz., that the philosopher, in his exposition, deliberately inverted the natural order of his thinking. His conclusions were his starting-point, and his premisses were painfully sought out to support them. But a philosopher should not be too severely blamed for this sort of thing: he is no more bound than other men to give himself away.
