Somewhere the end must be reached in the employment of wrong means. Many men do not think so. They fancy that they will make greater gains if they assume there is no time for truth and, therefore, that something else must be believed. If one can dispassionately view the progress of the human race, he can see men hurrying and scurrying about, down through the ages, muddling and bungling along and making what progress they make, not so much by dint of careful individual planning of their own lives, but by trial and error. Man has advanced from the simple brute to what largely could be called the political brute because, in spite of all, he has kept trying.
Life persists and human beings persevere.
Many scholars today are in agreement that one of the reasons we have advanced no further than we have relates to the dearth of a generally accepted philosophy of realism which would both properly and ideally orient man to his environment and his fellow man. But most of us are not willing to move quietly through our lives in pursuit of truth and then in alignment to that truth. In a sense, this slogan could be adapted to our national unrest and applied with some merit to our propensity for action. A certain degree of trial and error, in our more primitive days, was doubtless inevitable and perhaps desirable. With virtually no history to rely on and little in the way of actual knowledge to guide us, trial and error is about all we had.