On dogmatism.......................

     Those who have a passion for quick returns and for an exact balance sheet of effort and reward may feel impatient of a study which cannot, in the present state of our knowledge, arrive at certainties, and which encourages what may be thought the time-wasting occupation of inconclusive meditation on insoluble problems.  To this view I cannot in any degree subscribe.  Some kind of philosophy is a necessity to all but the most thoughtless, and in the absence of knowledge it is almost sure to be  silly philosophy.  The result of this is that the human race becomes divided into rival groups of fanatics, each group firmly persuaded that is own brand of nonsense is sacred truth, while the other side's is damnable heresy.  Arians and Catholics, Crusaders and Moslems, Protestants and adherents of the Pope, Communists and Fascists, have filled large parts of the last 1,500 years with futile strife, when a little philosophy would have shown both sides in all these disputes that neither had any good reason to believe itself in the right.  Dogmatism is an enemy to peace, and an insuperable barrier to democracy.  In the present age, at least as much as in former times, it is the greatest of the mental obstacles to human happiness.

-Bertrand Russell, from his essay Philosophy For Laymen