opinion; and perhaps above all to teach them
to take ungrudging and daily trouble to clear up in their minds the
exact sense of the terms they use.

If this be so, a false opinion, like an erroneous motive, can hardly
have even a provisional usefulness. For how can you attack an erroneous
way of thinking except in detail, that is to say through the sides of
this or that single wrong opinion? Each of these wrong opinions is an
illustration and type, as it is a standing support and abettor, of some
kind of wrong reasoning, though they are not all on the same scale nor
all of them equally instructive. It is precisely by this method of
gradual displacement of error step by step, that the few stages of
progress which the race has yet traversed, have been actually achieved.
Even if the place of the erroneous idea is not immediately taken by the
corresponding true one, or by the idea which is at least one or two
degrees nearer to the true one, still the removal of error in this
purely negative way amounts to a positive gain. Why? For the excellent
reason that it is the removal of a bad element which otherwise tends to
propagate itself, or even if it fails to do that, tends at the best to
make the surrounding mass of error more inveterate. All error is what
physiologists term fissiparous, and in exterminating one false opinion
you may be hindering the growth of an uncounted brood of false opinions.

Then as to the maintenance of that coherency, interdependence, and
systematisation of opinions and motives, which is said to make character
organic, and is therefore so highly prized by some schools of thought.
No doubt the loosening of this or that part of the fabric of
heterogeneous origin, which constitutes the character of a man or woman,
tends to loosen the whole. But do not let us feed ourselves upon
phrases. This organic coherency, what does it come to? It signifies in a
general way, to describe it briefly, a harmony between the intellectual,
the moral, and the practical parts of human nature; an undisturbed
cooperation between reason, affection, and will; the reason prescribing
nothing against which the affections revolt, and proscribing nothing
which they crave; and the will obeying the joint impulses of these two
directing forces, without liability to capricious or extravagant
disturbance of their direction. Well, if the reason were perfect in
information and method, and the affections faultless in their impulse,
then org