Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

The aphorism frames human knowledge as asymptotic: “truth” exists as an ideal limit we can approach but never fully possess. Progress, in this view, is not a straight line of accumulating certainties but a corrective sequence in which mistakes, partial models, and failed explanations are indispensable steps. The phrase also carries a moral-epistemic warning: humility is rational, because even our best theories are provisional. Read in a broadly Huxleyan key, it can be taken as a critique of dogmatism—religious, political, or scientific—insisting that error is not merely a defect but the engine of learning and refinement.