A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
Interpretation
Hallucinations are real experiences, and judging them as mistakes is where the error lies.
Bertrand Russell's quote suggests that hallucinations, while perhaps not aligned with reality, are genuine experiences that should be recognized as such. The true error occurs when one makes erroneous judgments about these experiences, potentially dismissing significant insights they may offer or misunderstanding the nature of perception and reality.
In practice
In a lecture about the nature of reality and perception, this quote can illustrate how personal experiences shape our understanding.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with him and calling on the gods for help: "Shut up," he said, "so that they do not realize that you are here with me.
The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.
What I have written is but a fleeting intimation of the outside of what one man sees and may tell about the path he walks. No one shares the secret of a life; no one enters into the heart of the mystery.
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
Man's shortcomings and sins are all due to substance of the body and not to its form, while all his merits are exclusively due to his form.
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