e have been accepted as final. All sorts of
allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost
none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and
somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman
waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when I was your age." It is
not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: "My venerable
sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And yet the one is
as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an
Oliver.

"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge in the making."
All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It
does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really
considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far.
This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road
to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in
your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it
the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of
these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an
oath and by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual
counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else.
They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory in the background. The
imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown arguments is supposed to
reside in them, just as some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells
in the constable's truncheon. They are used in pure superstition, as old
clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly
serviceable for checking unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths
of babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes to a certain stage of
intellectual growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic
at once amusing and fortifying to the mind.

Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through
Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good places to pass through, and I
am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages
on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way
to something else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot
Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking infant.
Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be
kicked about a l