Daily Inspiration Quote by William Kingdon Clifford

Clifford draws attention to the gap between the truth of a belief and the way it is formed. A belief adopted on insufficient evidence might happen to be true, and it might never shape an outward action. That does not absolve the believer. The moral fault lies in licensing a habit of credulity, in training oneself to care less about how one knows. The method of belief formation matters because it fixes character and, through character, conduct.

This line belongs to The Ethics of Belief (1877), where Clifford insists that believing without adequate evidence is always wrong. He is not only worried about bad outcomes. He argues that belief is never purely private. Every assent adds to the social traffic of claims, testimony, and trust. When one relaxes standards in the quiet of one’s own mind, one helps to lower the communal bar for what counts as knowledge. The famous shipowner example makes the point: even if the ship reaches port, persuading oneself it was safe without proper inquiry is a culpable act. Guilt does not depend on the accident of consequences; it stems from the will to believe beyond what the evidence supports.

The sentence acknowledges the tempting excuses. Maybe the belief is true anyway. Maybe it will lie dormant. Clifford replies that such luck does not justify the disposition that produced it. Truth by accident is not vindication, and dormancy today does not guarantee harmlessness tomorrow. Habits harden, and what begins as a private lapse can issue in public error, testimonial negligence, or complicity in collective self-deception.

The essay helped set the terms for modern evidentialism and sparked William James’s permissive counterargument in The Will to Believe. Its core claim resonates in an age of misinformation: epistemic care is an ethical duty. Guarding the integrity of one’s reasons is part of one’s responsibility to others.