tain income; but
he cannot be said to know at any moment that the capital is there,
because the trustees may have absconded with the money, and the man may
not have been informed of the fact. The danger of the egotist is that
he is apt to regard as scientific certainties what are only relative
certainties; and the first step towards the tolerant attitude is to get
rid of these prejudices as far as possible, and to perceive that the
first duty of the philosopher is not to deal in assumptions, but to
realize that other people's regions of what may be called practical
certainties--that is to say, the assurances which justify practical
action--may be both smaller or even larger than his own. The first duty
then of the man of vivid nature is to fight resolutely against the sin
of impatience. He must realize that some people may regard as a
certainty what is to him a questionable opinion, and that his business
is not the destruction of the certainties of others, but the defining
the limits of his own. The sympathy that can be practised
intellectually is the resolute attempt to enter into the position of
others. The temptation to argue with people of convinced views should
be resolutely resisted; argument only strengthens and fortifies the
convictions of opponents, and I can honestly say that I have never yet
met a man of strong intellectual fibre who was ever converted by
argument. Yet I am sure that it is a duty for all of us to aim at a
just appreciation of various points of view, and that we ought to try
to understand others rather than to persuade them.

So far I have been speaking of the intellectual region, and I would sum
it up by saying that I think that the duty of every thoughtful person,
who desires to avoid egotism in the intellectual region, is to
cultivate what may be called the scientific, or even the sceptical
spirit, to weigh evidence, and not to form conclusions without
evidence. Thus one avoids the dangers of egotism best, because egotism
is the frame of mind of the man who says credo quia credo. Whereas the
aim of the philosopher should be to take nothing for granted, and to be
ready to give up personal preferences in the light of truth. In dealing
with others in the intellectual region, the object should be not to
convince, but to get people to state their own views, and to realize
that unless a man converts himself, no one else can; the method
therefore should be not to attack conclusions, but to ask pat