George Walford: Politics and Personalities

In IC 3 we noted the theory that personality determines belief, and pointed out that if it be accepted then it follows that those who believe this theory do so because of the personalities they have, and not because of any intellectual or scientific validity the theory may possess.

We did not claim it as an original insight, and now find that we had in fact been anticipated:

If Hegel’s philosophy is due to his own psychological make-up […] the same is true of the historian’s own methodology and of any possible standard of criticism. In these circumstances questions of truth and falsity cannot arise. (T. V. Knox in the Editor’s Preface to R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History. OUP 1946, reprint 1961).

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AND NOW for something completely different, namely the Cerne Giant: Ithyphallic? Yeth, very.
(With acknowledgments to Andrew Motion, writing in TLS)

from Ideological Commentary 5, February 1980.