Nearly all the great philosophers of the English tradition have been in this sense popular writers, though I am afraid that the same cannot be said of the Germans. The style of Locke is lucid, if pedestrian; of both Berkeley and Hume beautiful in the extreme; of Mill clear and simple, though undistinguished and marred by some affectations; of Spencer perfectly lucid in spite of the "hurdy-gurdy monotony of him." William James, the greatest of American philosophers, had an absolute genius for graphic, telling, and brilliant English phrases. And of living writers, as I have already said, Mr. Russell's style is the best, and is a standing example of the fact that philosophy, and original philosophy too, can be written in plain English with an absolute minimum of technical terms.
(W. T. Stace, "The Snobbishness of the Learned," in Atlantic Essays, ed. Samuel N. Bogorad and Cary B. Graham [Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1958], 94-104, at 103 [essay first published in 1936])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 