"Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors"
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Huxley is taking a scalpel to the most flattering story people tell about themselves: that sincere conviction is a kind of moral alibi. For a scientist forged in the trench warfare of Victorian debates over evolution, “irrationally held truths” aren’t quaint quirks; they’re social explosives. A truth arrived at by superstition, tribal loyalty, or habit can land in the right place by accident, but it trains the mind to bypass the very mechanisms that keep knowledge corrigible: evidence, doubt, revision. That’s why it can be “more harmful” than an error argued honestly. A reasoned error at least keeps the machinery of thinking intact; it’s legible, challengeable, improvable. An irrational truth is armored against critique precisely because it wears the halo of being “right.”
The subtext is a warning about epistemic character, not just epistemic outcomes. Huxley is less interested in whether you guessed the correct answer than in whether your method makes you dangerous. If you got to the truth without reasons, you can’t reliably get there again, and you can’t persuade others without coercion, charisma, or institutional force. That’s the bridge from private belief to public harm.
Context matters: Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) watched religious and political authorities wield certainty as a tool of governance. This line is a defense of scientific humility as civic virtue. It argues that society should fear the righteous person with a lucky hunch more than the skeptic with a well-argued mistake, because only one of them is building a culture that can correct itself.
The subtext is a warning about epistemic character, not just epistemic outcomes. Huxley is less interested in whether you guessed the correct answer than in whether your method makes you dangerous. If you got to the truth without reasons, you can’t reliably get there again, and you can’t persuade others without coercion, charisma, or institutional force. That’s the bridge from private belief to public harm.
Context matters: Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) watched religious and political authorities wield certainty as a tool of governance. This line is a defense of scientific humility as civic virtue. It argues that society should fear the righteous person with a lucky hunch more than the skeptic with a well-argued mistake, because only one of them is building a culture that can correct itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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