The progress of science — indeed of all positive knowledge — depends on the courage of Thoreau’s “majority of one” in the face of nearly unanimous error.

by Garrett Hardin (pictured)

“MYTHS,” said Salustios, are “things that never happened but always are.”

Though distinguishable from myths, the best of the fairy tales share this paradoxical relation to reality. A truth we are reluctant to acknowledge can be insinuated into the mind by the account of an event that never happened. Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes tells just such a story. His emperor is a fiction, unnamed and unplaced in time (“many years ago”), but he is also all of . . . → Read More: What Heretics Are For