ing the great truth that it is worth while to take pains to find out the best way of doing a given task, even if you have strong grounds for suspecting that it will ultimately be done in a worse way.” “It makes all the difference in the world,” says Whately, “whether we put Truth in the first place or in the second place.” Mr. Morley thus protests against what he calls the House of Commons view of life, which subordinates principle to expediency—which may be unfortunate, but necessary—but in so doing sacrifices the paramount significance of principle—which is both unnecessary and pernicious.
The practical arena wherein truth and error, right and wrong, the better and the worse cause, principle and expediency, are engaged in combat is obviously too complex to admit of ready description or analysis; the few groups of combating influences that have been brought within the field of view occupy but a modest corner of the arena. Other equally important contests are going on at the same time; the ethical aspects of belief are nearly as complex as the intellectual, and as worthy of consideration; and people still find an interest in discussing how far truth should be disseminated when it undermines traditional convictions seemingly essential to happiness or even to virtue; how far, in Clifford’s words, “Truth is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to be whispered over rose-water after dinner, when the ladies are gone away,” and how far the dissemination of right belief is itself controlled by considerations of practical as well as of theoretical morality. Philosophers of so opposite a calling as a Harvard psychologist and a Parliamentary leader[1] unite in telling us that, in the last analysis, with regard to disputed questions of a not too practical sort, men do and have a right to believe, at their own risk, that which seems to them most elevating, fitting, satisfying, and rational; that in this process we all follow custom and temperamental impulse, tho we cover our retreat with arguments. Into these enticing ramifications of the central problem of right and wrong belief, however germane to the comprehension of the forces that make for truth and error, it is not feasible at present to enter. The issues in which these various
