The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic         5

must tread the paths of error in order to find the path of
truth, which does not differ from, but is, those very paths of
error which contain a clue to the labyrinth.

The close connection of error and truth arises from the
fact that a complete and total error is inconceivable, and,
since it is inconceivable, does not exist. Error speaks with
two voices, one of which affirms the false, but the other
denies it; it is a colliding of yes and no, which is called con-
tradiction. Therefore, when we descend from general con-
siderations to the examination of a theory that has been
condemned as erroneous in its definite particulars, we find
the cure in the theory itself—that is, the true theory, which
grows out of the soil of error. Thus it happens that those
very people who claim to reduce art to the sexual instinct,
in order to demonstrate their thesis have recourse to argu-
ments and meditations which, instead of uniting, separate
art from that instinct; or that he who would expel poetry
from the well-constituted republic, shudders in so doing, and
himself creates a new and sublime poetry. There have been
historical periods in which the most crude and perverted
doctrines of art have dominated; yet this did not prevent
the habitual and secure separation of the beautiful from the
ugly at those periods, nor the very subtle discussion of the
theme when the abstract theory was forgotten and particular
cases were studied. Error is always condemned, not by the
mouth of the judge, but ex ore suo.

Owing to this close connection with error, the affirmation
of the truth is always a process of strife, by means of which
it keeps freeing itself in error from error; whence arises
another pious but impossible desire, namely, that which de-
mands that truth should be directly exposed, without discus-
sion or polemic; that it should be permitted to proceed

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