But that is not the idea which we entertain when we consider this
possible Dictionary of Ignorance and Error. What we really mean is a
Dictionary of the sort of Ignorance and the sort of Error which we know
ourselves to have been guilty of, which we have escaped by special
experience or learning as time went on, and against which we would warn
our fellows.
Flaubert, I think, first put it down in words, and said that such an
encyclopaedia was very urgently needed.
It will never exist, but we all know that it ought to exist. Bits of it
appear from time to time piecemeal and here and there, as for instance
in the annotations which modern scholarship attaches to the great text,
in the printed criticisms to which sundry accepted doctrines are
subjected by the younger men to-day, in the detailed restatement of
historical events which we get from modern research as our fathers could
never have them--but the work itself, the complete Encyclopaedia or
Dictionary of Ignorance and Error, will never be printed. It is a great
pity.
Incidentally one may remark that the process by which a particular error
is propagated is as interesting to watch as the way in which a plant
grows.
The first step seems to be the establishing of an authority and the
giving of that authority a name which comes to connote doctrinal
infallibility. A very good example of this is the title "Science.
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