ere are false opinions so intimately bound up with the
whole way of thinking and feeling, that to introduce one or two detached
true opinions in their stead, would, even if it were possible, only
serve to break up that coherency of character and conduct which it is
one of the chief objects of moralists and the great art of living to
produce. For a true opinion does not necessarily bring in its train all
the other true opinions that are logically connected with it. On the
contrary, it is only too notorious a fact in the history of belief, that
not merely individuals but whole societies are capable of holding at one
and the same time contradictory opinions and mutually destructive
principles. On the other hand, neither does a false opinion involve
practically all the evil consequences deducible from it. For the results
of human inconsistency are not all unhappy, and if we do not always act
up to virtuous principle, no more do we always work out to its remotest
inference every vicious principle. Not insincerity, but inconsistency,
has constantly turned the adherents of persecuting precepts into friends
of tolerant practice.'

'It is a comparatively small thing to persuade a superstitious person to
abandon this or that article of his superstition. You have no security
that the rejection of the one article which you have displaced will lead
to the rejection of any other, and it is quite possible that it may lead
to all the more fervid an adhesion to what remains behind. Error,
therefore, in view of such considerations may surely be allowed to have
at least a provisional utility.'

Now undoubtedly the repudiation of error is not at all the same thing
as embracing truth. People are often able to see the force of arguments
that destroy a given opinion, without being able to see the force of
arguments for the positive opinion that ought to replace it. They can
only be quite sure of seeing both, when they have acquired not merely a
conviction that one notion is false and another true, but have
furthermore exchanged a generally erroneous way of thinking for a
generally correct way. Hence the truly important object with every one
who holds opinions which he deems it of the highest moment that others
should accept, must obviously be to reach people's general ways of
thinking; to stir their love of truth; to penetrate them with a sense of
the difference in the quality of evidence; to make them willing to
listen to criticism and new