Accordingly we find that an absolutely and strictly impartial temper never has existed and never will.

If it did, its verdict would still be false, because it would represent an incomplete or half-suppressed humanity.
There is no question that touches, directly or indirectly, on the moral and spiritual nature of man that can be settled by the bare reason.

A certain amount of sympathy is necessary in order to estimate the weight of the forces that are to be analysed: yet that very sympathy itself becomes an extraneous influence, and the perfect balance and adjustment of the reason is disturbed.
But though impartiality, in the strict sense, is not to be had, there is another condition that may be rightly demanded--resolute honesty.

This I hope may be attained as well from one point of view as from another, at least that there is no very great antecedent reason to the contrary.

In past generations indeed there was such a reason.