Well, of course I do not deny it. When I urge you to think for yourself (as all our nurses and mothers and schoolmistresses do even though they clout our heads the moment our conclusions differ from theirs) I do not mean that you should shut your eyes to everyone else’s opinions. I myself, though I am by way of being a professional thinker, have to content myself with secondhand opinions on a great many most important subjects on which I can neither form an opinion of my own nor criticize the opinions I take from others. I take the opinion of the Astronomer Royal as to when it is twelve o’clock; and if I am in a strange town I take the opinion of the first person I meet in the street as to the way to the railway station. If I go to law I have to consent to the absurd but necessary dogma that the king can do no wrong. Otherwise trains would be no use to me, and lawsuits could never be finally settled. We should never arrive anywhere or do anything if we did not believe what we are told by people who ought to know better than ourselves, and agree to stand by certain dogmas of the infallibility of authorities whom we nevertheless know to be fallible. Thus on most subjects we are forced by our ignorance to proceed with closed minds in spite of all exhortations to think boldly for ourselves, and be, above all things, original. St Paul, a rash and not very deep man, as his contempt for women shews, cried “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good”. He forgot that it is quite impossible for one woman to prove all things: she has not the time even if she had the knowledge. For a busy woman there are no Open Questions: everything is settled except the weather; and even that is settled enough for her to buy the right clothes for summer and winter. Why, then, did St Paul give a counsel which he must have known to be impracticable if he ever thought about it for five minutes? The explanation is that the Settled Questions are never really settled, because the answers to them are never complete and final truths. We make laws and institutions because we cannot live in society without them. We cannot make perfect institutions because we are not perfect ourselves. Even if we could make perfect institutions, we could not make eternal and universal ones, because the conditions change, and the laws and institutions that work well with fifty enclosed nuns in a convent would be impossible in a nation of forty million people at large. So we have to do the best we can at the moment, leaving posterity free to do better if it can. When we have made our laws in this makeshift way, the questions they concern are settled for the moment only. And in politics the moment may be twelve months or twelve hundred years, a mere breathing space or a whole epoch.