ond, what influence can a
man exert, that should seem to him more useful than that of a protester
against what he counts false opinions, in the most decisive and
important of all regions of thought? Surely if any one is persuaded,
whether rightly or wrongly, that his fellows are expending the best part
of their imaginations and feelings on a dream and a delusion, and that
by so doing moreover they are retarding to an indefinite degree the
wider spread of light and happiness, then nothing that he can tell them
about chemistry or psychology or history can in his eyes be comparable
in importance to the duty of telling them this. There is no advantage
nor honest delight in influence, if it is only to be exerted in the
sphere of secondary objects, and at the cost of the objects which ought
to be foremost in the eyes of serious people. In truth the men who have
done most for the world have taken very little heed of influence. They
have sought light, and left their influence to fare as it might list.
Can we not imagine the mingled mystification and disdain with which a
Spinosa or a Descartes, a Luther or a Pascal, would have listened to an
exhortation in our persuasive modern manner on the niceties of the
politic and the social obligation of pious fraud? It is not given to
many to perform the achievements of such giants as these, but every one
may help to keep the standard of intellectual honesty at a lofty pitch,
and what better service can a man render than to furnish the world with
an example of faithful dealing with his own conscience and with his
fellows? This at least is the one talent that is placed in the hands of
the obscurest of us all.[26]

And what is this smile of the world, to win which we are bidden to
sacrifice our moral manhood; this frown of the world, whose terrors are
more awful than the withering up of truth and the slow going out of
light within the souls of us? Consider the triviality of life and
conversation and purpose, in the bulk of those whose approval is held
out for our prize and the mark of our high calling. Measure, if you can,
the empire over them of prejudice unadulterated by a single element of
rationality, and weigh, if you can, the huge burden of custom,
unrelieved by a single leavening particle of fresh thought. Ponder the
share which selfishness and love of ease have in the vitality and the
maintenance of the opinions that we are forbidden to dispute. Then how
pitiful a thing seems the ap