Daily Inspiration Quote by John Churton Collins

A neat little blade of a sentence, Collins' line turns philosophy into a noble job description and philosophers into its unreliable employees. The structure does most of the work: "Truth" sits upfront as the official mission, then comes the pause of "but not always" - a bureaucratic disclaimer that punctures the ideal. By the time we land on "philosophers", the word feels less like a vocation than a suspect class.

Collins wrote as a Victorian-era critic, steeped in a culture that prized moral seriousness but also ran on reputation, schools, and intellectual fashion. In that context, the jab isn't anti-philosophy; it's anti-professional complacency. He's targeting the gap between a discipline's stated purpose and the incentives that actually govern its practitioners: careerism, sectarian loyalty, the seductions of systems, the ego's need to be right rather than accurate. "Object" is telling - it reduces truth to an aim, an external target - while "philosophers" are rendered as fallible agents, capable of substituting the performance of depth for the pursuit of clarity.

The subtext is almost journalistic: beware of credentialed seekers who become managers of discourse. Collins implies that philosophy can be an instrument for truth, but also a camouflage for temperament - a way to launder prejudice into principle or to mistake cleverness for insight. It's a Victorian warning that still reads contemporary: institutions can sanctify a mission, then quietly reward everything except the mission.