In Response To Fro's Curiousity

(This is regarding the actual quote, by Emerson.)

Actually, I am curious too. I have seen it as "false consistency," but more often I have seen it as "foolish consistency." The place I first saw it in was in somebody else's blog post, and they started the quote at "consistency". This original, shortened quote, is what originally sparked my imagination.

The difference between "false" and "foolish" in my mind is pretty large. False implying an intention to deceit, and foolish being more in line with a sort of silliness. Taking away these modifiers makes the claim stronger to me. The ideas of falseness or foolishness are already included in the idea of the hobgoblin.

Emerson himself, was often criticized by his contemporaries for what one article I read called "intellectual laziness". In other words, he had a lot of really cool ideas, and some of them didn't seem to quite mesh very well, but he didn't seem to make an effort to reconcile them. It seems to me this is probably what was on his mind when he spoke of consistency as a hobgoblin.

I don't think Emerson would have been nearly as interesting of a guy if he had spent more time trying to make his ideas consistent rather than developing them and making them magical.

Long reply but you made a thought-provoking point.

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I should note as well that I think the quote would be just as interesting, and in my mind no less true, if it were "inconsistency is the hobgoblin of small minds". In fact, I think that the quote implies that a balance needs to be reached, that both consistency and inconsistency should be used to our advantage. It's the fear of either, the fear of the hobgoblin, or over concern with it, that are disadvantageous.

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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

This is the full, official quote, I believe. From Emerson's Self-Reliance essays.

This is a point I have been trying to get at, I think this quote has everything to do with self-reliance. I can't help but be consistent with who I am, even if that means I am inconsistent with who I was yesterday. It is only through some outside pressure that I might become concerned about whether I am being consistent or not.