of error.  Least of all is it any justification for those who wish to have impressed upon the people a complete system of religious opinion which men of culture have avowedly put away.  And, moreover, the very priests must, I should think, be supposed to have put it away also.  Else they would hardly be invited deliberately to abdicate their teaching functions in the very seats where teaching is of the weightiest and most far-spreading influence.

Meanwhile our point is that the reforms in opinion which have been effected on the plan of pouring the new wine of truth into the old bottles of superstition—­though not dishonourable to the sincerity of the reformers—­are no testimony to even the temporary usefulness of error.  Those who think otherwise do not look far enough in front of the event.  They forget the evil wrought by the prolonged duration of the error, to which the added particle of truth may have given new vitality.  They overlook the ultimate enervation that is so often the price paid for the temporary exaltation.

Nor, finally, can they know the truths which the error thus prolonged has hindered from coming to the birth.  A strenuous disputant has recently asserted against me that ’the region of the might have been lies beyond the limits of sane speculation.’[12] It in surely extending optimism too far to insist on carrying it back right through the ages.  To me at any rate the history of mankind is a huge pis-aller, just as our present society is; a prodigious wasteful experiment, from which a certain number of precious results have been extracted, but which is not now, nor ever has been at any other time, a final measure of all the possibilities of the time.  This is not inconsistent with the scientific conception of history; it is not to deny the great law that society has a certain order of progress; but only to urge that within that, the only possible order, there is always room for all kinds and degrees of invention, improvement, and happy or unhappy accident.  There is no discoverable law fixing precisely the more or the less of these; nor how much of each of them a community shall meet with, nor exactly when it shall meet with them.  We have to distinguish between possibility and necessity.  Only certain steps in advance are possible at a given time; but it is not inevitable that those potential advances should all be realised.  Does anybody suppose that humanity has had the profit of all the inventive and improving capacity born into the world?  That Turgot, for example, was the only man that ever lived who might have done more for society than he was allowed to do, and spared society a cataclysm?  No,—­history is a pis-aller.  It has assuredly not moved without the relation of cause and effect; it is a record of social growth and its conditions; but it is also a record of interruption and misadventure and perturbation.  You trace the long chain which has made us what we are in this aspect and that.