Again, education, besides actualising exceptional desires which are wholly unaccompanied by any exceptional faculties that correspond to them, actualises desires accompanied by faculties which are really exceptional, and which produce results undoubtedly more than ordinary, but are nevertheless incapable of complete development. Many men, for instance, have gifts for music and poetry which, though genuine so far as they go, have yet some fatal defect in them, and will never produce, however devotedly they are exercised, any results possessing artistic value. Now the fact that progress is caused by a struggle between exceptional men, of course implies that some of them shall be less efficient than the others. It is by struggling with the less efficient that the superiority of the most efficient is realised; and in order that it may be found who the most efficient are, the inferior as well as the superior must put their capacities to the test. It is therefore unavoidably one object of education to stimulate the activity of some exceptional men whose own efforts are foredoomed to ultimate failure. Failures, however, differ in degree and kind. Some men fail because they can accomplish nothing of what they attempt, like the dreamers who have wasted their {340} lives in trying to make perpetual motions. Some fail because, though they accomplish something, others accomplish more; and the production of what is the best makes the second best valueless. Thus nine inventors might produce nine motor-cars, each of which worked well enough to command a considerable sale; but if a tenth inventor was to produce another which was faster, simpler, more durable, and cheaper than any of these, all the rest would drop out of use altogether, and be practically as valueless as the mad aggregation of wheels by which the seeker for the perpetual motion endeavoured to accomplish the impossible. Between the men who fail, however, because they succeed less than others, and the men who fail because they do not succeed at all, there is a great practical difference. The men who fail only because others succeed better than they do, contribute to the very success of the men by whom they are defeated; for they raise the standard of achievement which these men have to overpass. But the men who fail because they accomplish nothing waste their own lives without benefiting anybody. In the domain of economic production the truth of this is obvious. It is not less so in the domain of speculative thought. Scientific theories are constantly put forward which, though not true, are sufficiently near the truth to have some definite relation to it; and those who actually reach it find in errors of this kind an indispensable assistance. Nothing gives to truth so keen and clear an outline as the refuted errors of really powerful thinkers. But {341} there are errors, on the other hand, which, though it may be necessary to refute them because they have