and the method and season of chasing erroneous opinions and motives out of the mind must always be a matter of much careful and far-seeing consideration.  Only in the course of such consideration, let us not admit the notion in any form that error can have even provisional utility.  For it is not the error which confers the advantages that we desire to preserve, but some true opinion or just motive or high or honest sentiment, which exists and thrives and operates in spite of the error and in face of it, springing from man’s spontaneous and unformulated recognition of the real relations of things.  This recognition is very faint in the beginnings of society.  It grows clearer and firmer with each step forward.  And in a tolerably civilised age it has become a force on which you can fairly lean with a considerable degree of assurance.

And this leads to the central point of the the negative truth that nothing can be known is in fact a truth that guides us. [Transcriber’s note:  sic.] It leads us away from sterile and irreclaimable tracts of thought and emotion, and so inevitably compels the energies which would otherwise have been wasted, to feel after a more profitable direction.  By leaving the old guide-marks undisturbed, you may give ease to an existing generation, but the present ease is purchased at the cost of future growth.  To have been deprived of the faith of the old dispensation, is the first condition of strenuous endeavour after the new.

No doubt history abounds with cases in which a false opinion on moral or religious subjects, or an erroneous motive in conduct, has seemed to be a stepping-stone to truth.  But this is in no sense a demonstration of the utility of error.  For in all such cases the erroneous opinion or motive was far from being wholly erroneous, or wholly without elements of truth and reality.  If it helped to quicken the speed or mend the direction of progress, that must have been by virtue of some such elements within it.  All that was error in it was pure waste, or worse than waste.  It is true that the religious sentiment has clothed itself in a great number of unworthy, inadequate, depressing, and otherwise misleading shapes, dogmatic and liturgic.  Yet on the whole the religious sentiment has conferred enormous benefits on civilisation.  This is no proof of the utility of the mistaken direction which these dogmatic or liturgic shapes imposed upon it.  On the contrary, the effect of the false dogmas and enervating liturgies is so much that has to be deducted from the advantages conferred by a sentiment in itself valuable and of priceless capability.[11]