Believing a view while allowing that it may be wrong
Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view.
Having a view normally means taking it to be true; it need not mean taking oneself to be incapable of error. Chesterton's sentence presses those two attitudes together. An earlier alternative appears in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (first published 1859). In chapter II, §§6–8, Mill makes openness to correction the ground of justified confidence and practical action, and even uses the questioning of Newtonian philosophy as an example. A person can therefore believe a proposition while acknowledging that criticism might overturn it. Mill, chapter II.
This comparison limits the reach of Chesterton's street-corner diagnosis: ordinary admission of possible error does not by itself establish the intellectual paralysis he fears. His objection becomes stronger when directed at the chapter's further target, doubt about the validity of thinking altogether. Mill is a philosophical counterexample here, not an identified unnamed opponent or a demonstrated source for this paragraph. The inspected HTML witness labels its text 1869, distinct from the work's first-publication date.
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