THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION [76]
I know quite well that launching myself into this discussion [77] is a
very dangerous operation; that it is a very large subject, and one
which is difficult to deal with, however much I may trespass upon
your patience in the time allotted to me. But the discussion is so
fundamental, it is so completely impossible to make up one's mind on
these matters until one has settled the question, that I will even
venture to make the experiment. A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher
of a former age--I mean Francis Bacon [78]--said that truth came out
of error much more rapidly than it came out of confusion. There is a
wonderful truth in that saying. Next to being right in this world, the
best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you
will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and
wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are
absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of
these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against
a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So I will not trouble
myself as to whether I may be right or wrong in what I am about to say,
but at any rate I hope to be clear and definite; and then you will be
able to judge for yourselves whether, in following out the train of
thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads against facts or not.
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