APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 15 



If the blind acceptance of authority appears to 

 him in its true colours, as mere private judgment in 

 excelsis, and if he have the courage to stand alone, 

 face to face with the abyss of the eternal and 

 unknowable, let him be content, once for all, not 

 only to renounce the good things promised by 

 "Infallibility," but even to bear the bad things 

 which it prophesies ; content to follow reason and 

 fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, wherever 

 they may lead, in the sure faith that a hell of honest 

 men will, to him, be more endurable than a paradise 

 full of angelic shams. 



History warns us that it is the customary fate 

 of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as 

 superstitions. 



The struggle for existence holds as much in the 

 intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a 

 species of thinking, and its right to exist is 

 coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by 

 its rivals. 



The scientific spirit is of more value than its 

 products, and irrationally held truths may be more 

 harmful than reasoned errors. 



Every belief is the product of two factors: the 

 first is the state of the mind to which the evidence in 

 favour of that belief is presented ; and the second 

 is the logical cogency of the evidence itself. 



