“the other methods do have their merits: a clear logical conscience costs something—just as any virtue, just as all that we cherish, costs us dear. But we should not desire it to be otherwise. The genius of a man’s logical method should be loved and reverenced as his bride, whom he has chosen from all the world. He need not condemn the others; on the contrary he may honor them deeply, and in so doing he only honors her the more. But she is the one that he has chosen, and he knows that he was right in making that choice. And having made it, he will work and fight for her, and will not complain that there are blows to take, hoping that there may be as many and as hard to give, and will strive to be the worthy knight and champion of her from the blaze of whose splendors he draws his inspiration and his courage.”
From this survey of the methods by which opinion comes to be established and disseminated, we emerge with an appreciation of how it arises that the history of belief—not unlike history in general—is an affair of war and peace; that it deals, on the one hand, with the accounts of the warfare of the scientific method with its rivals, and, on the other, with the internal development, the institutional absorption, and the colonization of its own spirit among outlying cultures. “Logic,” Mr. White reminds us, “is not history. History is full of interferences which have cost the earth dear. Strangest of all, some of the direst of them have been made by the best of men, actuated by the purest of motives, and seeking the noblest results.” And in the same strain Mr. Morley: “It is surely the midsummer madness of philosophic complacency to think that we have come by the shortest and easiest of all imaginable routes to our present point in the march; to suppose that we have wasted nothing, lost nothing, cruelly destroyed nothing on the road.” “Benevolent assimilation” has always been, as it still appears to be, a difficult art.
From a consideration of the principles by which belief may be rightly and rationally fixed, we proceed to a contemplation of these principles in action. Counsel may be wise, but not practical. We know that the actual formation of true belief is beset with serious difficulties; that the process is likely to be
