Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles D. Broad

Broad’s cool confidence lands like a laboratory door clicking shut: keep your trembling hands off the instruments. In an era when philosophy was trying hard to look like a disciplined science, he’s staking out a methodological ideal - that work on truth, falsehood, and judgment should be insulated from the emotional weather. Not because hopes and fears aren’t powerful, but because they’re the wrong kind of power: they tug at conclusions instead of clarifying criteria.

The intent is quietly polemical. Broad is pushing back against the suspicion that epistemology is just psychology in a tuxedo, or worse, theology by another route. If you let fear of skepticism or hope for moral certainty steer the inquiry, you’ll build a theory that functions as reassurance rather than explanation. The subtext is a defense of analytic restraint: treat “truth” not as a prize to be protected, but as a concept to be anatomized. It’s also a rebuke to wishful metaphysics - systems that smuggle comfort into their premises and then call it knowledge.

Context matters: early-to-mid 20th-century British philosophy was defined by a tightening of standards (clarity, argument, linguistic precision) and a distrust of grand, mood-driven Weltanschauungen. Broad’s sentence performs that ethic. Its understated phrasing - “not very likely” - is strategic modesty, the kind that signals seriousness while still drawing a line. He’s describing an aspiration and applying social pressure: if your account of judgment changes with your anxieties, you’re not doing analysis; you’re doing self-soothing.