It is absurd to demand that what a man thought yesterday he shall continue to think tomorrow. Even stones, if given sufficient time, will crumble and alter: how much more ideas also? Those who find a discrepancy between my earlier writings and my later ones should, if they have enough sense, find it to be an evidence not of insincerity but of sincerity, a testimony to my own published declaration that those books represent an evolutionary movement towards truth and that they are the product of life not of its paralysis. For if riper thinking, wider and deeper experience, maturer balance, combine to bring a man to modify his former views, to revise his earlier estimates, and to correct his self-confessed mistakes, surely he has done what is laudable and not what is reprehensible? He who persists in an error, only because he is ashamed to acknowledge that he can ever be wrong, is to be blamed--not he who prefers to uphold truth rather than uphold his own vanity.
-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 5 : The Literary Work > # 118
