act objections, yet which still secures
both to the individual and to society a number of advantages that might
be endangered by any disturbance of opinion or motive. No doubt, and the
method and season of chasing erroneous opinions and motives out of the
mind must always be a matter of much careful and far-seeing
consideration. Only in the course of such consideration, let us not
admit the notion in any form that error can have even provisional
utility. For it is not the error which confers the advantages that we
desire to preserve, but some true opinion or just motive or high or
honest sentiment, which exists and thrives and operates in spite of the
error and in face of it, springing from man's spontaneous and
unformulated recognition of the real relations of things. This
recognition is very faint in the beginnings of society. It grows clearer
and firmer with each step forward. And in a tolerably civilised age it
has become a force on which you can fairly lean with a considerable
degree of assurance.

And this leads to the central point of the the negative truth that
nothing can be known is in fact a truth that guides us. [Transcriber's
note: sic.] It leads us away from sterile and irreclaimable tracts
of thought and emotion, and so inevitably compels the energies which
would otherwise have been wasted, to feel after a more profitable
direction. By leaving the old guide-marks undisturbed, you may give
ease to an existing generation, but the present ease is purchased at
the cost of future growth. To have been deprived of the faith of the
old dispensation, is the first condition of strenuous endeavour after
the new.

No doubt history abounds with cases in which a false opinion on moral or
religious subjects, or an erroneous motive in conduct, has seemed to be
a stepping-stone to truth. But this is in no sense a demonstration of
the utility of error. For in all such cases the erroneous opinion or
motive was far from being wholly erroneous, or wholly without elements
of truth and reality. If it helped to quicken the speed or mend the
direction of progress, that must have been by virtue of some such
elements within it. All that was error in it was pure waste, or worse
than waste. It is true that the religious sentiment has clothed itself
in a great number of unworthy, inadequate, depressing, and otherwise
misleading shapes, dogmatic and liturgic. Yet on the whole the religious
sentiment has conferred enormous benefits on