He was an instinctive democrat and was always on the side of what, in his social environment, was the unpopular minority. Like Whitman, of whom he often speaks with admiration, he was a born individual aristocrat, with no delusions about the intelligence of the herd but an immense faith in its possibilities. His generosity towards the delusions of common men was warmer than towards the delusions of philosophers, because philosophers have opportunities for study--and should know better. He had only one fear, which sometimes took a belligerent form (there is something in his book on psychology about the relation between belligerency and fear); and that fear was lest he or some other philosopher should try to interfere with a possibly good idea, to put sand, not on the tracks, but in the machinery. The vaguely comforting fatalistic belief that good ideas will prevail and bad ones die he regarded as untrue to the history of human thought, and not good for people whose business it is to express thought. James held that it did make a real difference in the world that a saint or a monster, St. Paul or Bonaparte, did not die in his cradle. It does make a difference--the one illustration that James would have laughed at--that James lived to be a philosopher. Ideas do sometimes seem just to happen, to grow without human guidance, but the precious ideas have to be fought for. Matthew Arnold's idea, that it is our duty to make the best ideas prevail, may seem priggish and dictatorial, yet fundamentally James had the same idea. Pluralism, he says, is not for sick souls but for those in whom the fighting-spirit is alive. Philosophy does not flourish by accident. Men make it. Therefore, philosophy begins in the human mind, and is the history of the action of mind on experience. James was from the very beginning a student of the human mind. He began in epistemology and he ended there. One of his earliest essays is a rather too easy slipping of his knife into the "operose ineptitude" of Spencer's definition of mind, and his last word about a philosophic puzzle was: "We shall not understand these alterations of consciousness either in this generation or the next." The right self-contradiction consists not in turning in obedience to others, but in going against the wind from whichever direction it blows. James attacked the too-much in any philosophy, even his own. To the over-credulous he preached caution; to the over-sceptical, faith. This sort of antagonism between two ideas is not contradiction but balance of mind. Apropos Professor Schiller and others he demands an "all-round statement in classic style," and, himself the jolliest joker that ever was in philosophy, he recommends that Mr. Schiller "tone down a little the exuberance of his polemic wit." But to the too sober he says, "Our errors are not such awfully solemn things. A certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness in their behalf."