Daily Inspiration Quote by William Kingdon Clifford

Credulity, for Clifford, is not a private quirk; its real danger is that it leaks. The sentence pivots on a deceptively modest claim: the harm “is not confined” to the believer. That understated opening is doing the heavy lifting, shifting credulity from an individual failing to a social offense. He’s arguing that believing badly is a kind of public act, because belief is never sealed inside the skull. It shows up in what you endorse, repeat, fund, excuse, and teach others to treat as normal.

The phrasing is tellingly mathematical in spirit: credulity doesn’t just correlate with error, it propagates it. “Fostering of a credulous character in others” frames belief as contagious habit formation, not merely the spread of isolated falsehoods. That’s the subtext: misinformation isn’t only about wrong propositions, it’s about training people to lower their epistemic immune system. Once that happens, “consequent support of false beliefs” follows almost automatically. Clifford makes the moral charge structural: negligent standards of evidence create an ecosystem where bad ideas thrive.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in Victorian Britain amid religious controversy and the prestige of scientific rationality, Clifford is pushing against the comforting notion that faith-without-evidence is harmless so long as it’s sincere. As a mathematician, he imports the ethic of proof into everyday life: you don’t get to treat belief as an aesthetic choice when other people will live inside its consequences.