"No consensus of men can make an error erroneous. We can only find or commit an error, not create it. When we commit an error, we say what was an error already"
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Royce is picking a fight with the comforting modern idea that truth is whatever enough people agree on. In a few coolly clipped sentences, he draws a hard line between discovery and manufacture: errors aren’t social products, they’re realities you stumble into. “No consensus of men can make an error erroneous” is deliberately tautological, almost like a logical gavel strike. The redundancy is the point. He’s refusing the seductive loophole that lets majorities rename a mistake into correctness by sheer volume.
The subtext is an anxiety about the social prestige of belief. Royce is warning that a crowd’s confidence has nothing to do with a claim’s actual fit with the world. That matters in any era, but it lands with special force in his late-19th/early-20th-century context: American pragmatism is ascendant, science is professionalizing, public opinion is becoming mass-mediated, and democracy is being asked to double as an epistemology. Royce, a leading idealist, won’t let “what we find useful to believe” quietly replace “what is the case.”
The line “When we commit an error, we say what was an error already” also smuggles in a moral stance. It frames mistakes as a kind of responsibility: you don’t get to plead that your era, your party, or your peer group made it true at the time. Consensus can coordinate action, shield reputations, even rewrite textbooks, but it can’t alchemize falsehood into fact. Royce is arguing for a stubborn, almost austere realism: the world doesn’t take votes.
The subtext is an anxiety about the social prestige of belief. Royce is warning that a crowd’s confidence has nothing to do with a claim’s actual fit with the world. That matters in any era, but it lands with special force in his late-19th/early-20th-century context: American pragmatism is ascendant, science is professionalizing, public opinion is becoming mass-mediated, and democracy is being asked to double as an epistemology. Royce, a leading idealist, won’t let “what we find useful to believe” quietly replace “what is the case.”
The line “When we commit an error, we say what was an error already” also smuggles in a moral stance. It frames mistakes as a kind of responsibility: you don’t get to plead that your era, your party, or your peer group made it true at the time. Consensus can coordinate action, shield reputations, even rewrite textbooks, but it can’t alchemize falsehood into fact. Royce is arguing for a stubborn, almost austere realism: the world doesn’t take votes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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