In his treatise on medicine, the Roman writer Celsus digresses to make a shrewd observation on the behavior of personalities of rare distinction.  He happened to note, in the writings of Hippocrates, that the great Greek doctor once confessed to having been misled by the presence of sutures in a patient.  Such a comment might have passed without notice with any other reader; but Celsus was a perceptive observer and a man of broad sophistication.  He ventured the following remarks:

In the habit of great men possessed with courage in weighty matters, Hippocrates records that he had once been misled by sutures.  Trivial characters, because they have nothing, never disparage themselves.  A simple confession of the truth is appropriate for an exceptional character, which will still have many attributes to its credit, especially in the responsibility of transmitting what he knows for the use of future generations, so that the same matter by which he himself was once deceived, might not be a source of confusion to others. 

[De Medicina VIII.4.4]

I find this to be a remarkable observation.  For here Celsus solves for us a certain mystery, which often presents itself amid the discourses, contortions, and transactions of common life:  why are good characters so often honest and self-effacing, and the malignant so evasive, and so unwilling to admit error, no matter how insignificant? 

The answer is to be found in the nature of the contrasting characters.  Great men entrusted with important affairs are consumed with the responsibilities arranged before them; they have neither the time nor the inclination to obsess over what they see as trivialities.  They are piloted by duty and curiosity, rather than the preservation of an emotional state; excessive pride is, for them, an obstacle to the advancement of learning.  They seek to solve problems or transmit what they have discovered, rather than safeguard the vanities of those within their sphere of influence.  They plunge forward, unhindered by petty considerations.  It is as Lucan says,

Break through the centers of the gales,

Safe in my protection.

[V.583—584] 

A confession of ignorance or mistake in some matter costs them nothing, and restores the great character to his task with a minimum of fuss, and with no expenditure of his sense of worthiness. Yet the mean, noxious character sees the world through a lens of very different curvature.  For him, life is an interminable score-card of credits and detriments, wherein any error committed by himself reduces his cumulative tally.  Fear of falling behind in his precious mathematics is what animates him, and is what powers his emotional turmoil.  His rigidity is exceeded only by the triviality of his intellect; for, as Celsus notes, he never ventures to disparage himself, because he has nothing to begin with.  That which is already empty, cannot be subtracted from.  Thus we see that the great and the small-minded operate on entirely different mental and emotional planes.     

I have often thought, in many professional and personal circumstances, that the strongest and most impressive statement a man can make is an unequivocal admission of personal error.  Confession disarms; confession restores; and confession engenders confidence.  When a man confesses his error, openly and sincerely, there is nothing more to be said, and nothing further to be done, than to return to the task at hand.  Yet some find this extremely difficult, if not impossible.  This is because confession is essentially a revelatory act:  that is, it entails a kind of disarming of the self.  Admission of error opens the soul; it removes our protective cuirasses, and exposes our vulnerability, if only for a fleeting moment. 

This remains intolerable for the small-minded, for they have spent their lives constructing stained-glass images of themselves which they transport everywhere; and in their estimation, a scratch or crack on any pane of their crystalline lattice dooms them to humiliation or irrelevance.  In our evaluations of the characters of others, and of our own, we should be mindful of these clues.  He who never admits a mistake, or confesses a fault, should fall under our vigilant suspicion; for it may be that, possessing nothing of value to contribute to the common betterment, he is unable to detract from what is already an empty vessel. 

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Read more essays on moral, biographical, philosophical, and historical subjects in the collections Digest and Centuries.