But the partisans of “beneficent error” will object: Why endeavour to dissipate poetic illusion and to call things by their names? Are there not for peoples, for men, for children, certain useful errors and permissible illusions?[6] Surely a great number of errors may be considered as having been necessary in the history of humanity; but has not progress precisely consisted in restricting the number of these useful errors? There have been also organs in the body which have become superfluous, and have disappeared or been fundamentally transformed; such, for example, are the muscles which, no doubt, served our ancestors to move their ears. There exist evidently also, in the human mind, instincts, sentiments, and beliefs which have already atrophied and are destined to disappear or to be transformed. To show the deep roots that religion has sent down into the depths of the human mind is not to demonstrate the perpetuity of religion, for the human mind itself is incessantly changing. “Our fathers,” said Fontenelle, “made the mistake of hoarding up their errors for our benefit”; and in effect, before arriving at the truth, a certain number of false hypotheses must be tried; to discover the true is in some sense to have exhausted the possibilities of the false. Religions have rendered the human mind this immense service, they have exhausted a whole class of side-issues in science, metaphysics, and ethics; one must cross the marvellous to attain the natural, one must cross direct revelation and mystical intention to attain to rational induction and deduction. All the fantastic and apocalyptical ideas with which religion has peopled the human mind once possessed their utility, just as the incomplete and often grotesque sketches with which the studio of the artist is filled once possessed theirs. This straying of the human mind was a sort of reconnoitering, this play of imagination was a veritable labour, a preliminary labour; but the products of it must not be presented as final. The false and even the absurd have always played so great a rôle in human affairs that it would assuredly be dangerous to attempt abruptly to proceed without them; transitions are useful, even in passing from darkness into light, and one needs to become accustomed even to the truth. It is for that reason that society has always rested in a great measure upon error. To-day this portion of its foundation is being withdrawn, and conservatives are sadly frightened lest the whole social equilibrium be destroyed; but we repeat, this diminution of the number of errors is precisely what constitutes progress, and in some sort defines it. Progress in effect is not simply a sensible amelioration of life, it is also the achievement of a better intellectual formulation of life, it is a triumph of logic; to progress is to attain to a more complete consciousness of one’s self and of the world, and by that very fact to a more complete inner consistency of one’s theory of the world.