“All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.”
Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
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Robert Louis Stevenson 118
Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer 1850–1894Related quotes
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
“It is no easy task to pick one's way from truth to truth through besetting errors.”
Book II, p. 415.
Collected Works
"The Logic of Common Morality" http://web.archive.org/web/20060616233942/http://www.stephankinsella.com/texts/vandun_philosophy_argument.pdf, from E.M. Barth and J.L. Martens, eds., Argumentation Approaches to Theory Formation: Containing the contributions to the Groningen Conference on the Theory of Argumentation, October 1978 (Benjamins, 1982; original from the University of Michigan, digitized Mar 12, 2007. ISBN 9-027-23007-2, 333 pages).
Die Wahrheit widerspricht unserer Natur, der Irrthum nicht, und zwar aus einem sehr einfachen Grunde: die Wahrheit fordert, daß wir uns für beschränkt erkennen follen, der Irrthum schmeichelt uns. wir seien auf ein- oder die andere Weise unbegränzt.
Maxim 310, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
p, 125
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)
“From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.”
“Truth is an antidote against error. Error is the adultery of the mind.”
Heaven Taken By Storm