this knowledge, gain any new fact by which to guide ourselves.'[10] But
logical coherency, but a kind of practical everyday coherency, which
may be open to a thousand abstract objections, yet which still secures
both to the individual and to society a number of advantages that might
be endangered by any disturbance of opinion or motive. No doubt, 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.