[E]rror is popular because people are afraid to grow up. Clear thinkin — Error

"Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. ...it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most nonscientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. ...by the time science becomes a closed—that is, computerizable—project, it is not science anymore. It is not in the area of the exploration of errors."

"Why is error so popular?[…]In the first place, error is often more attractive than truth. Real life is apt to be a drab, humdrum, unglamorous business; but things-that-arent-so are usually spectacularly exciting and fill us with a tingling sense of wonder and awe.[…]Another thing that makes error popular is that we like life to be nice and simple. Of course, life isnt like that; its complex, irregular, hard to understand, and generally a messy thing to deal with. But error has a wonderful neatness.[…]A third reason for our wrong beliefs goes deeper. We believe what is comfortable to believe. If problems are troublesome, there must be an easy solution; if we are worried, there must be something that will make us feel good. This, I think, is at the bottom of the last two on my little list of errors."

"In prison.—My eye, however strong and weak it may be, only encompasses a certain distance, and within this distance I move and live; this horizontal line is my immediate greater and lesser fate, from which I cannot escape. Thus round every being a concentric circle is drawn, which has a centre and which is peculiar to him. In a similar way our ear encloses us in a small space, and so does our touch. By these horizons, wherein our senses are confined as in prison-walls, we measure the world, calling one thing near and another far off, one thing large and another small, one thing hard and another soft: this measuring we call feeling—it is all, in itself, an error! According to the number of experiences and excitements which we may possibly experience during a certain period, we value our lives as short or long, poor or rich, full or void: and in correspondence to the average human life we value that of all other beings—all this is an error in itself! Were our eyes a hundred times quicker with regard to our surroundings, human beings would appear enormously tall to us; nay, we might conceive senses by which mortals might be felt to be of immeasurable size. On the other hand, orligans could be imagined such as to allow whole solar systems to be viewed as if contracted and closely packed together like a single cell: and to beings of the opposite order, one cell of the human body might present itself as a solar system in motion, construction, and harmony. The habits of our senses have plunged us into the lies and deceptions of feeling: these, again, are the foundations of all our judgments and "knowledge," there is no escape whatever, no back-way or by-way into the real world. We spiders are caught in our own nets, and whatever we may catch in them, we cannot catch anything but what allows itself to be caught in our net."

"While every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable. ... For in proportion to a man’s want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibly of “the world” in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society. ... Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. ... It never troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance."

"Every sect, as one knows, is a ground of error; there are no sects of geometers, algebraists, arithmeticians, because all the propositions of geometry, algebra and arithmetic are true. In every other science one may be deceived."

"Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, from which we must first erase. Ignorance is content to stand still with her back to the truth, but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds in the same direction."