ch they are placed,
is in some sort falsified, unless they have gone through a training in
the current beliefs of their age: unless they have undergone that, they
miss, as it were, some of the normal antecedents. I do not think this
plea will hold good. However desirable it may be that the young should
know all sorts of erroneous beliefs and opinions as products of the
past, it can hardly be in any degree desirable that they should take
them for truths. If there were no other objection, there would be this,
that the disturbance and waste of force involved in shaking off in their
riper years the erroneous opinions which had been instilled into them
in childhood, would more than counter-balance any advantages, whatever
their precise nature may be, to be derived from having shared in their
own proper persons the ungrounded notions of others.]

[Footnote 26: Miss Martineau has an excellent protest against 'the
dereliction of principle shown in supposing that any "Cause" can be of
so much importance as fidelity to truth, or can be important at all
otherwise than in its relation to truth which wants vindicating. It
reminds me of an incident which happened when I was in America, at the
time of the severest trials of the Abolitionists. A pastor from the
southern States lamented to a brother clergyman in the North the
introduction of the Anti-slavery question, because the views of their
sect were "getting on so well before!" "Getting on!" cried the northern
minister. "What is the use of getting your vessel on when you have
thrown both captain and cargo overboard?" Thus, what signifies the
pursuit of any one reform, like those specified,--Anti-slavery and the
Woman question,--when the freedom which is the very soul of the
controversy, the very principle of the movement,--is mourned over in any
other of its many manifestations? The only effectual advocates of such
reforms as those are people who follow truth wherever it
leads.'--_Autobiography_, ii. 442.]

CHAPTER V.

THE REALISATION OF OPINION.

A person who takes the trouble to form his own opinions and beliefs will
feel that he owes no responsibility to the majority for his conclusions.
If he is a genuine lover of truth, if he is inspired by the divine
passion for seeing things as they are, and a divine abhorrence of
holding ideas which do not conform to the facts, he will be wholly
independent of the approval or assent of the persons around him. When he
proceeds t