nd 'disturbing' to those whom it foils! But if it helps those
who, as Cicero says, "vim naturae magis sentiunt," it is good and not
evil. Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we
form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion
co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the
passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over
the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect
verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the
probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose
denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept
as it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are
themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can
be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal
preference, belief, or divination. How have they succeeded in so
stultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not to
perceive that every philosopher, or man of science either, whose
initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has taken
his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one
direction rather than another, and a sort of preliminary assurance that
his notion can be made to work; and has borne his best fruit in trying
to make it work? These mental instincts in different men are the
spontaneous variations upon which the intellectual struggle for
existence is based. The fittest conceptions survive, and with them the
names of their champions shining to all futurity.

The coil is about us, struggle as we may. The only escape from faith
is mental nullity. What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not
the professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to go
in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances. The
concrete man has but one interest,--to be right. That for him is the
art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it. Naked he
is flung into the world, and between him and nature there are no rules
of civilized warfare. The rules of the scientific game, burdens of
proof, presumptions, _experimenta crucis_, complete inductions, and the
like, are only binding on those who enter that game. As a matter of
fact we all more or less do enter it, because it helps us to our end.
But if the means presume to frustrate the end and call us c