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        <dc:title>On Liberty</dc:title>
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        <alex:sortTitle>On Liberty</alex:sortTitle>
        <alex:fullText><![CDATA[                                      1859

                                   ON LIBERTY

                              by John Stuart Mill
DEDICATION

  The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument
unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and
essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.

               WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT: Sphere and Duties of Government.

  TO the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer,
and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings- the
friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my
strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward- I
dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years,
it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had,
in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her
revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for
a more careful re-examination, which they are now never destined to
receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half
the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I
should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely
to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted
by her all but unrivalled wisdom.

                             Chapter 1

                           Introductory

  THE SUBJECT of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the
Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of
Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature
and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society
over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever
discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the
practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is
likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the
future. It is so far from being new, that, in a certain sense, it
has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage
of progress into which the more civilised portions of the species have
now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires a
different and more fundamental treatment.

  The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous
feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest
familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England. But in
old times this contest was between subjects, or some classes of
subjects, and the Government. By liberty, was meant protection against
the tyranny of the political rulers. The rulers were conceived (except
in some of the popular governments of Greece) as in a necessarily
antagonistic position to the people whom they ruled. They consisted of
a governing One, or a governing tribe or caste, who derived their
authority from inheritance or conquest, who, at all events, did not
hold it at the pleasure of the governed, and whose supremacy men did
not venture, perhaps did not desire, to contest, whatever
precautions might be taken against its oppressive exercise. Their
power was regarded as necessary, but also as highly dangerous; as a
weapon which they would attempt to use against their subjects, no less
than against external enemies. To prevent the weaker members of the
community from being preyed upon by innumerable vultures, it was
needful that there should be an animal of prey stronger than the rest,
commissioned to keep them down. But as the king of the vultures
would be no less bent upon preying on the flock than any of the
minor harpies, it was indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of
defence against his beak and claws. The aim, therefore, of patriots
was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to
exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant
by liberty. It was attempted in two ways. First, by obtaining a
recognition of certain immunities, called political liberties or
rights, which it was to be regarded as a breach of duty in the ruler
to infringe, and which if he did infringe, specific resistance, or
general rebellion, was held to be justifiable. A second, and generally
a later expedient, was the establishment of constitutional checks,
by which the consent of the community, or of a body of some sort,
supposed to represent its interests, was made a necessary condition to
some of the more important acts of the governing power. To the first
of these modes of limitation, the ruling power, in most European
countries, was compelled, more or less, to submit. It was not so
with the second; and, to attain this, or when already in some degree
possessed, to attain it more completely, became everywhere the
principal object of the lovers of liberty. And so long as mankind were
content to combat one enemy by another, and to be ruled by a master,
on condition of being guaranteed more or less efficaciously against
his tyranny, they did not carry their aspirations beyond this point.

  A time, however, came, in the progress of human affairs, when men
ceased to think it a necessity of nature that their governors should
be an independent power, opposed in interest to themselves. It
appeared to them much better that the various magistrates of the State
should be their tenants or delegates, revocable at their pleasure.
In that way alone, it seemed, could they have complete security that
the powers of government would never be abused to their
disadvantage. By degrees this new demand for elective and temporary
rulers became the prominent object of the exertions of the popular
party, wherever any such party existed; and superseded, to a
considerable extent, the previous efforts to limit the power of
rulers. As the struggle proceeded for making the ruling power
emanate from the periodical choice of the ruled, some persons began to
think that too much importance had been attached to the limitation
of the power itself. That (it might seem) was a resource against
rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to those of the people.
What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be identified with the
people; that their interest and will should be the interest and will
of the nation. The nation did not need to be protected against its own
will. There was no fear of its tyrannising over itself. Let the rulers
be effectually responsible to it, promptly removable by it, and it
could afford to trust them with power of which it could itself dictate
the use to be made. Their power was but the nation&#39;s own power,
concentrated, and in a form convenient for exercise. This mode of
thought, or rather perhaps of feeling, was common among the last
generation of European liberalism, in the Continental section of which
it still apparently predominates. Those who admit any limit to what
a government may do, except in the case of such governments as they
think ought not to exist, stand out as brilliant exceptions among
the political thinkers of the Continent. A similar tone of sentiment
might by this time have been prevalent in our own country, if the
circumstances which for a time encouraged it, had continued unaltered.

  But, in political and philosophical theories, as well as in persons,
success discloses faults and infirmities which failure might have
concealed from observation. The notion, that the people have no need
to limit their power over themselves, might seem axiomatic, when
popular government was a thing only dreamed about, or read of as
having existed at some distant period of the past. Neither was that
notion necessarily disturbed by such temporary aberrations as those of
the French Revolution, the worst of which were the work of a
usurping few, and which, in any case, belonged, not to the permanent
working of popular institutions, but to a sudden and convulsive
outbreak against monarchical and aristocratic despotism. In time,
however, a democratic republic came to occupy a large portion of the
earth&#39;s surface, and made itself felt as one of the most powerful
members of the community of nations; and elective and responsible
government became subject to the observations and criticisms which
wait upon a great existing fact. It was now perceived that such
phrases as &quot;self-government,&quot; and &quot;the power of the people over
themselves,&quot; do not express the true state of the case. The &quot;people&quot;
who exercise the power are not always the same people with those
over whom it is exercised; and the &quot;self-government&quot; spoken of is
not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest.
The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the
most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority,
or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority;
the people, consequently may desire to oppress a part of their number;
and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other
abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of
government over individuals loses none of its importance when the
holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that
is, to the strongest party therein. This view of things,
recommending itself equally to the intelligence of thinkers and to the
inclination of those important classes in European society to whose
real or supposed interests democracy is adverse, has had no difficulty
in establishing itself; and in political speculations &quot;the tyranny
of the majority&quot; is now generally included among the evils against
which society requires to be on its guard.

  Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first,
and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the
acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived
that when society is itself the tyrant- society collectively over the
separate individuals who compose it- its means of tyrannising are not
restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political
functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if
it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in
things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social
tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression,
since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it
leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the
details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore,
against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs
protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and
feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means
than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of
conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development,
and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in
harmony with its ways, and compels all characters to fashion
themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the
legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual
independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against
encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human
affairs, as protection against political despotism.

  But though this proposition is not likely to be contested in general
terms, the practical question, where to place the limit- how to make
the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social
control- is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done.
All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the
enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules
of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and
by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation
of law. What these rules should be is the principal question in
human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is
one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two
ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the
decision of one age or country is a wonder to another. Yet the
people of any given age and country no more suspect any difficulty
in it, than if it were a subject on which mankind had always been
agreed. The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them
self-evident and self-justifying.

  This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the
magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says, a
second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first. The effect
of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct
which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete
because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered
necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others
or by each to himself. People are accustomed to believe, and have been
encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to the character of
philosophers, that their feelings, on subjects of this nature, are
better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical
principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of
human conduct, is the feeling in each person&#39;s mind that everybody
should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises,
would like them to act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that
his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a
point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one
person&#39;s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal
to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many
people&#39;s liking instead of one. To an ordinary man, however, his own
preference, thus supported, is not only a perfectly satisfactory
reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of
morality, taste, or propriety, which are not expressly written in
his religious creed; and his chief guide in the interpretation even of
that. Men&#39;s opinions, accordingly, on what is laudable or blamable,
are affected by all the multifarious causes which influence their
wishes in regard to the conduct of others, and which are as numerous
as those which determine their wishes on any other subject.
Sometimes their reason- at other times their prejudices or
superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their
antisocial ones, their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or
contemptuousness: but most commonly their desires or fears for
themselves- their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest.

  Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the
morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its
feelings of class superiority. The morality between Spartans and
Helots, between planters and negroes, between princes and subjects,
between nobles and roturiers, between men and women, has been for
the most part the creation of these class interests and feelings:
and the sentiments thus generated react in turn upon the moral
feelings of the members of the ascendant class, in their relations
among themselves. Where, on the other hand, a class, formerly
ascendant, has lost its ascendancy, or where its ascendancy is
unpopular, the prevailing moral sentiments frequently bear the impress
of an impatient dislike of superiority. Another grand determining
principle of the rules of conduct, both in act and forbearance,
which have been enforced by law or opinion, has been the servility
of mankind towards the supposed preferences or aversions of their
temporal masters or of their gods. This servility, though
essentially selfish, is not hypocrisy; it gives rise to perfectly
genuine sentiments of abhorrence; it made men burn magicians and
heretics. Among so many baser influences, the general and obvious
interests of society have of course had a share, and a large one, in
the direction of the moral sentiments: less, however, as a matter of
reason, and on their own account, than as a consequence of the
sympathies and antipathies which grew out of them: and sympathies
and antipathies which had little or nothing to do with the interests
of society, have made themselves felt in the establishment of
moralities with quite as great force.

  The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion
of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the
rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law
or opinion. And in general, those who have been in advance of
society in thought and feeling, have left this condition of things
unassailed in principle, however they may have come into conflict with
it in some of its details. They have occupied themselves rather in
inquiring what things society ought to like or dislike, than in
questioning whether its likings or dislikings should be a law to
individuals. They preferred endeavouring to alter the feelings of
mankind on the particular points on which they were themselves
heretical, rather than make common cause in defence of freedom, with
heretics generally. The only case in which the higher ground has
been taken on principle and maintained with consistency, by any but an
individual here and there, is that of religious belief: a case
instructive in many ways, and not least so as forming a most
striking instance of the fallibility of what is called the moral
sense: for the odium theologicum, in a sincere bigot, is one of the
most unequivocal cases of moral feeling. Those who first broke the
yoke of what called itself the Universal Church, were in general as
little willing to permit difference of religious opinion as that
church itself. But when the heat of the conflict was over, without
giving a complete victory to any party, and each church or sect was
reduced to limit its hopes to retaining possession of the ground it
already occupied; minorities, seeing that they had no chance of
becoming majorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those
whom they could not convert, for permission to differ. It is
accordingly on this battle field, almost solely, that the rights of
the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds
of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over
dissentients openly controverted. The great writers to whom the
world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted
freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied
absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his
religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever
they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere
been practically realised, except where religious indifference,
which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels,
has added its weight to the scale. In the minds of almost all
religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of
toleration is admitted with tacit reserves. One person will bear
with dissent in matters of church government, but not of dogma;
another can tolerate everybody, short of a Papist or a Unitarian;
another every one who believes in revealed religion; a few extend
their charity a little further, but stop at the belief in a God and in
a future state. Wherever the sentiment of the majority is still
genuine and intense, it is found to have abated little of its claim to
be obeyed.

  In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political
history, though the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of law is
lighter, than in most other countries of Europe; and there is
considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative or
the executive power, with private conduct; not so much from any just
regard for the independence of the individual, as from the still
subsisting habit of looking on the government as representing an
opposite interest to the public. The majority have not yet learnt to
feel the power of the government their power, or its opinions their
opinions. When they do so, individual liberty will probably be as much
exposed to invasion from the government, as it already is from
public opinion. But, as yet, there is a considerable amount of feeling
ready to be called forth against any attempt of the law to control
individuals in things in which they have not hitherto been
accustomed to be controlled by it; and this with very little
discrimination as to whether the matter is, or is not, within the
legitimate sphere of legal control; insomuch that the feeling,
highly salutary on the whole, is perhaps quite as often misplaced as
well grounded in the particular instances of its application. There
is, in fact, no recognised principle by which the propriety or
impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People
decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they
see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly
instigate the government to undertake the business; while others
prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one
to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental
control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any
particular case, according to this general direction of their
sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel
in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government
should do, or according to the belief they entertain that the
government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but
very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently
adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government. And it
seems to me that in consequence of this absence of rule or
principle, one side is at present as of wrong as the other; the
interference of government is, with about equal frequency,
improperly invoked and improperly condemned.

  The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle,
as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the
individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means
used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral
coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for
which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in
interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is
self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against
his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either
physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully
be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to
do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of
others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good
reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or
persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or
visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that,
the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated
to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of
any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns
others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence
is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind,
the individual is sovereign.

  It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is
meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their
faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons
below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood.
Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by
others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against
external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of
consideration those backward states of society in which the race
itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in
the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any
choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of
improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain
an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode
of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their
improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.
Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things
anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being
improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing
for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if
they are so fortunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind have
attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by
conviction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations
with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either in the
direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is
no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable
only for the security of others.

  It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be
derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing
independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all
ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense,
grounded on the permanent interests of a man as a progressive being.
Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual
spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions of
each, which concern the interest of other people. If any one does an
act hurtful to others, there is a prima facie case for punishing
him, by law, or, where legal penalties are not safely applicable, by
general disapprobation. There are also many positive acts for the
benefit of others, which he may rightfully be compelled to perform;
such as to give evidence in a court of justice; to bear his fair share
in the common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to the
interest of the society of which he enjoys the protection; and to
perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving a
fellow creature&#39;s life, or interposing to protect the defenceless
against ill-usage, things which whenever it is obviously a man&#39;s
duty to do, he may rightfully be made responsible to society for not
doing. A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but
by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them
for the injury. The latter case, it is true, requires a much more
cautious exercise of compulsion than the former. To make any one
answerable for doing evil to others is the rule; to make him
answerable for not preventing evil is, comparatively speaking, the
exception. Yet there are many cases clear enough and grave enough to
justify that exception. In all things which regard the external
relations of the individual, he is de jure amenable to those whose
interests are concerned, and, if need be, to society as their
protector. There are often good reasons for not holding him to the
responsibility; but these reasons must arise from the special
expediencies of the case: either because it is a kind of case in which
he is on the whole likely to act better, when left to his own
discretion, than when controlled in any way in which society have it
in their power to control him; or because the attempt to exercise
control would produce other evils, greater than those which it would
prevent. When such reasons as these preclude the enforcement of
responsibility, the conscience of the agent himself should step into
the vacant judgment seat, and protect those interests of others
which have no external protection; judging himself all the more
rigidly, because the case does not admit of his being made accountable
to the judgment of his fellow creatures.

  But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished
from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest;
comprehending all that portion of a person&#39;s life and conduct which
affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their
free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I
say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance; for
whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the
objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive
consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region
of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of
consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience in the most
comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute
freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or
speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of
expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a
different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of
an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as
much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great
part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it.
Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of
framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we
like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment
from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them,
even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong.
Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty,
within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to
unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons
combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or
deceived.

  No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole,
respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government; and none
is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and
unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of
pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt
to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or
mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each
other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each
to live as seems good to the rest.

  Though this doctrine is anything but new, and, to some persons,
may have the air of a truism, there is no doctrine which stands more
directly opposed to the general tendency of existing opinion and
practice. Society has expended fully as much effort in the attempt
(according to its lights) to compel people to conform to its notions
of personal as of social excellence. The ancient commonwealths thought
themselves entitled to practise, and the ancient philosophers
countenanced, the regulation of every part of private conduct by
public authority, on the ground that the State had a deep interest
in the whole bodily and mental discipline of every one of its
citizens; a mode of thinking which may have been admissible in small
republics surrounded by powerful enemies, in constant peril of being
subverted by foreign attack or internal commotion, and to which even a
short interval of relaxed energy and self-command might so easily be
fatal that they could not afford to wait for the salutary permanent
effects of freedom. In the modern world, the greater size of political
communities, and, above all, the separation between spiritual and
temporal authority (which placed the direction of men&#39;s consciences in
other hands than those which controlled their worldly affairs),
prevented so great an interference by law in the details of private
life; but the engines of moral repression have been wielded more
strenuously against divergence from the reigning opinion in
self-regarding, than even in social matters; religion, the most
powerful of the elements which have entered into the formation of
moral feeling, having almost always been governed either by the
ambition of a hierarchy, seeking control over every department of
human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism. And some of those
modern reformers who have placed themselves in strongest opposition to
the religions of the past, have been noway behind either churches or
sects in their assertion of the right of spiritual domination: M.
Comte, in particular, whose social system, as unfolded in his
Systeme de Politique Positive, aims at establishing (though by moral
more than by legal appliances) a despotism of society over the
individual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of
the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers.

  Apart from the peculiar tenets of individual thinkers, there is also
in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly
the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of
opinion and even by that of legislation; and as the tendency of all
the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society, and
diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one
of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the
contrary, to grow more and more formidable. The disposition of
mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their
own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so
energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst
feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under
restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not
declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction
can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present
circumstances of the world, to see it increase.

  It will be convenient for the argument, if, instead of at once
entering upon the general thesis, we confine ourselves in the first
instance to a single branch of it, on which the principle here
stated is, if not fully, yet to a certain point, recognised by the
current opinions. This one branch is the Liberty of Thought: from
which it is impossible to separate the cognate liberty of speaking and
of writing. Although these liberties, to some considerable amount,
form part of the political morality of all countries which profess
religious toleration and free institutions, the grounds, both
philosophical and practical, on which they rest, are perhaps not so
familiar to the general mind, nor so thoroughly appreciated by many
even of the leaders of opinion, as might have been expected. Those
grounds, when rightly understood, are of much wider application than
to only one division of the subject, and a thorough consideration of
this part of the question will be found the best introduction to the
remainder. Those to whom nothing which I am about to say will be
new, may therefore, I hope, excuse me, if on a subject which for now
three centuries has been so often discussed, I venture on one
discussion more.

                              Chapter 2.

              Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.

  THE TIME, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be
necessary of the &quot;liberty of the press&quot; as one of the securities
against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose,
can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive,
not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to
them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be
allowed to hear. This aspect of the question, besides, has been so
of and so triumphantly enforced by preceding writers, that it needs
not be specially insisted on in this place. Though the law of England,
on the subject of the press, is as servile to this day as it was in
the time of the Tudors, there is little danger of its being actually
put in force against political discussion, except during some
temporary panic, when fear of insurrection drives ministers and judges
from their propriety;* and, speaking generally, it is not, in
constitutional countries, to be apprehended, that the government,
whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often
attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing
so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public.
Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with
the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion
unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I
deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by
themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate.
The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as
noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public
opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one
were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion,
mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person,
than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner;
if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private
injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted
only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing
the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race;
posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from
the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is
right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for
truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the
clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its
collision with error.

  * These words had scarcely been written, when, as if to give them
an emphatic contradiction, occurred the Government Press
Prosecutions of 1858. That ill-judged interference with the liberty of
public discussion has not, however, induced me to alter a single
word in the text, nor has it at all weakened my conviction that,
moments of panic excepted, the era of pains and penalties for
political discussion has, in our own country, passed away. For, in the
first place, the prosecutions were not persisted in; and, in the
second, they were never, properly speaking, political prosecutions.
The offence charged was not that of criticising institutions, or the
acts or persons of rulers, but of circulating what was deemed an
immoral doctrine, the lawfulness of Tyrannicide.

  If the arguments of the present chapter are of any validity, there
ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as
a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may
be considered. It would, therefore, be irrelevant and out of place
to examine here, whether the doctrine of Tyrannicide deserves that
title. I shall content myself with saying that the subject has been at
all times one of the open questions of morals; that the act of a
private citizen in striking down a criminal, who, by raising himself
above the law, has placed himself beyond the reach of legal punishment
or control, has been accounted by whole nations, and by some of the
best and wisest of men, not a crime, but an act of exalted virtue; and
that, right or wrong, it is not of the nature of assassination, but of
civil war. As such, I hold that the instigation to it, in a specific
case, may be a proper subject of punishment, but only if an overt
act has followed, and at least a probable connection can be
established between the act and the instigation. Even then, it is
not a foreign government, but the very government assailed, which
alone, in the exercise of self-defence, can legitimately punish
attacks directed against its own existence.

  It is necessary to consider separately these two hypotheses, each of
which has a distinct branch of the argument corresponding to it. We
can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is
a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil
still.

  First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority
may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course
deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to
decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person
from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion,
because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their
certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of
discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may
be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being
common.

  Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their
fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical
judgment which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every
one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to
take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the
supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may
be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge
themselves to be liable. Absolute princes, or others who are
accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete
confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects. People more
happily situated, who sometimes hear their opinions disputed, and
are not wholly unused to be set right when they are wrong, place the
same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are shared
by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer; for in
proportion to a man&#39;s want of confidence in his own solitary judgment,
does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of
&quot;the world&quot; in general. And the world, to each individual, means the
part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his
church, his class of society; the man may be called, by comparison,
almost liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so
comprehensive as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in
this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that
other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have
thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. He devolves upon his
own world the responsibility of being in the right against the
dissentient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that
mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object
of his reliance, and that the same causes which make him a Churchman
in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin. Yet
it is as evident in itself, as any amount of argument can make it,
that ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having
held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false
but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions now general will
be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are
rejected by the present.

  The objection likely to be made to this argument would probably take
some such form as the following. There is no greater assumption of
infallibility in forbidding the propagation of error, than in any
other thing which is done by public authority on its own judgment
and responsibility. Judgment is given to men that they may use it.
Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought
not to use it at all? To prohibit what they think pernicious, is not
claiming exemption from error, but fulfilling the duty incumbent on
them, although fallible, of acting on their conscientious
conviction. If we were never to act on our opinions, because those
opinions may be wrong, we should leave all our interests uncared
for, and all our duties unperformed. An objection which applies to all
conduct can be no valid objection to any conduct in particular. It
is the duty of governments, and of individuals, to form the truest
opinions they can; to form them carefully, and never impose them
upon others unless they are quite sure of being right. But when they
are sure (such reasoners may say), it is not conscientiousness but
cowardice to shrink from acting on their opinions, and allow doctrines
which they honestly think dangerous to the welfare of mankind,
either in this life or in another, to be scattered abroad without
restraint, because other people, in less enlightened times, have
persecuted opinions now believed to be true. Let us take care, it
may be said, not to make the same mistake: but governments and nations
have made mistakes in other things, which are not denied to be fit
subjects for the exercise of authority: they have laid on bad taxes,
made unjust wars. Ought we therefore to lay on no taxes, and, under
whatever provocation, make no wars? Men, and governments, must act
to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute
certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human
life. We may, and must, assume our opinion to be true for the guidance
of our own conduct: and it is assuming no more when we forbid bad
men to pervert society by the propagation of opinions which we
regard as false and pernicious.

  I answer, that it is assuming very much more. There is the
greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true,
because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been
refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting
its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our
opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth
for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human
faculties have any rational assurance of being right.

  When we consider either the history of opinion, or the ordinary
conduct of human life, to what is it to be ascribed that the one and
the other are no worse than they are? Not certainly to the inherent
force of the human understanding; for, on any matter not self-evident,
there are ninety-nine persons totally incapable of judging of it for
one who is capable; and the capacity of the hundredth person is only
comparative; for the majority of the eminent men of every past
generation held many opinions now known to be erroneous, and did or
approved numerous things which no one will now justify. Why is it,
then, that there is on the whole a preponderance among mankind of
rational opinions and rational conduct? If there really is this
preponderance- which there must be unless human affairs are, and have
always been, in an almost desperate state- it is owing to a quality
of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man
either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors
are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by
discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be
discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong
opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument; but facts
and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought
before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without
comments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value,
then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be
set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the
means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case
of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how
has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of
his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen
to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as
was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the
fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way
in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole
of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of
every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be
looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his
wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human
intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of
correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those
of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it
into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on
it: for, being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be
said against him, and having taken up his position against all
gainsayers- knowing that he has sought for objections and
difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light
which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter- he has a right
to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any
multitude, who have not gone through a similar process.

  It is not too much to require that what the wisest of mankind, those
who are best entitled to trust their own judgment, find necessary to
warrant their relying on it, should be submitted to by that
miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals,
called the public. The most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic
Church, even at the canonisation of a saint, admits, and listens
patiently to, a &quot;devil&#39;s advocate.&quot; The holiest of men, it appears,
cannot be admitted to posthumous honours, until all that the devil
could say against him is known and weighed. If even the Newtonian
philosophy were not permitted to be questioned, mankind could not feel
as complete assurance of its truth as they now do. The beliefs which
we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a
standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the
challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we
are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that
the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected
nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the
lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it
will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in
the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth
as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty
attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.

  Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments
for free discussion, but object to their being &quot;pushed to an extreme&quot;;
not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case,
they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine
that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that
there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly
be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine
should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that
is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any
proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its
certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we
ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty,
and judges without hearing the other side.

  In the present age- which has been described as &quot;destitute of
faith, but terrified at scepticism&quot;- in which people feel sure, not
so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know
what to do without them- the claims of an opinion to be protected
from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its
importance to society. There are, it is alleged, certain beliefs so
useful, not to say indispensable, to well-being that it is as much the
duty of governments to uphold those beliefs, as to protect any other
of the interests of society. In a case of such necessity, and so
directly in the line of their duty, something less than
infallibility may, it is maintained, warrant, and even bind,
governments to act on their own opinion, confirmed by the general
opinion of mankind. It is also often argued, and still oftener
thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary
beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining
bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practise.
This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on
discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their
usefulness; and flatters itself by that means to escape the
responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions.

  But those who thus satisfy themselves, do not perceive that the
assumption of infallibility is merely shifted from one point to
another. The usefulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion:
as disputable, as open to discussion, and requiring discussion as much
as the opinion itself. There is the same need of an infallible judge
of opinions to decide an opinion to be noxious, as to decide it to
be false, unless the opinion condemned has full opportunity of
defending itself. And it will not do to say that the heretic may be
allowed to maintain the utility or harmlessness of his opinion, though
forbidden to maintain its truth. The truth of an opinion is part of
its utility. If we would know whether or not it is desirable that a
proposition should be believed, is it possible to exclude the
consideration of whether or not it is true? In the opinion, not of bad
men, but of the best men, no belief which is contrary to truth can
be really useful: and can you prevent such men from urging that
plea, when they are charged with culpability for denying some doctrine
which they are told is useful, but which they believe to be false?
Those who are on the side of received opinions never fail to take
all possible advantage of this plea; you do not find them handling the
question of utility as if it could be completely abstracted from
that of truth: on the contrary, it is, above all, because their
doctrine is &quot;the truth,&quot; that the knowledge or the belief of it is
held to be so indispensable. There can be no fair discussion of the
question of usefulness when an argument so vital may be employed on
one side, but not on the other. And in point of fact, when law or
public feeling do not permit the truth of an opinion to be disputed,
they are just as little tolerant of a denial of its usefulness. The
utmost they allow is an extenuation of its absolute necessity, or of
the positive guilt of rejecting it.

  In order more fully to illustrate the mischief of denying a
hearing to opinions because we, in our own judgment, have condemned
them, it will be desirable to fix down the discussion to a concrete
case; and I choose, by preference, the cases which are least
favourable to me- in which the argument against freedom of opinion,
both on the score of truth and on that of utility, is considered the
strongest. Let the opinions impugned be the belief in a God and in a
future state, or any of the commonly received doctrines of morality.
To fight the battle on such ground gives a great advantage to an
unfair antagonist; since he will be sure to say (and many who have
no desire to be unfair will say it internally), Are these the
doctrines which you do not deem sufficiently certain to be taken under
the protection of law? Is the belief in a God one of the opinions to
feel sure of which you hold to be assuming infallibility? But I must
be permitted to observe, that it is not the feeling sure of a doctrine
(be it what it may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is
the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing
them to hear what can be said on the contrary side. And I denounce and
reprobate this pretension not the less, if put forth on the side of my
most solemn convictions. However positive any one&#39;s persuasion may be,
not only of the falsity but of the pernicious consequences- not only
of the pernicious consequences, but (to adopt expressions which I
altogether condemn) the immorality and impiety of an opinion; yet
if, in pursuance of that private judgment, though backed by the public
judgment of his country or his contemporaries, he prevents the opinion
from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility. And so
far from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous
because the opinion is called immoral or impious, this is the case
of all others in which it is most fatal. These are exactly the
occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful
mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity. It
is among such that we find the instances memorable in history, when
the arm of the law has been employed to root out the best men and
the noblest doctrines; with deplorable success as to the men, though
some of the doctrines have survived to be (as if in mockery) invoked
in defence of similar conduct towards those who dissent from them,
or from their received interpretation.

  Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a
man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and
public opinion of his time there took place a memorable collision.
Born in an age and country abounding in individual greatness, this man
has been handed down to us by those who best knew both him and the
age, as the most virtuous man in it; while we know him as the head and
prototype of all subsequent teachers of virtue, the source equally
of the lofty inspiration of Plato and the judicious utilitarianism
of Aristotle, &quot;i mastri di color che sanno,&quot; the two headsprings of
ethical as of all other philosophy. This acknowledged master of all
the eminent thinkers who have since lived- whose fame, still growing
after more than two thousand years, all but outweighs the whole
remainder of the names which make his native city illustrious- was
put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for
impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the gods recognised by the
State; indeed his accuser asserted (see the Apologia) that he believed
in no gods at all. Immorality, in being, by his doctrines and
instructions, a &quot;corruptor of youth.&quot; Of these charges the tribunal,
there is every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, and
condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best of
mankind to be put to death as a criminal.

  To pass from this to the only other instance of judicial iniquity,
the mention of which, after the condemnation of Socrates, would not be
an anti-climax: the event which took place on Calvary rather more than
eighteen hundred years ago. The man who left on the memory of those
who witnessed his life and conversation such an impression of his
moral grandeur that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage
to him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously put to death, as
what? As a blasphemer. Men did not merely mistake their benefactor;
they mistook him for the exact contrary of what he was, and treated
him as that prodigy of impiety which they themselves are now held to
be for their treatment of him. The feelings with which mankind now
regard these lamentable transactions, especially the later of the two,
render them extremely unjust in their judgment of the unhappy
actors. These were, to all appearance, not bad men- not worse than
men commonly are, but rather the contrary; men who possessed in a
full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the religious, moral,
and patriotic feelings of their time and people: the very kind of
men who, in all times, our own included, have every chance of
passing through life blameless and respected. The high-priest who rent
his garments when the words were pronounced, which, according to all
the ideas of his country, constituted the blackest guilt, was in all
probability quite as sincere in his horror and indignation as the
generality of respectable and pious men now are in the religious and
moral sentiments they profess; and most of those who now shudder at
his conduct, if they had lived in his time, and been born Jews,
would have acted precisely as he did. Orthodox Christians who are
tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first martyrs must
have been worse men than they themselves are, ought to remember that
one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.

  Let us add one more example, the most striking of all, if the
impressiveness of an error is measured by the wisdom and virtue of him
who falls into it. If ever any one, possessed of power, had grounds
for thinking himself the best and most enlightened among his
contemporaries, it was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Absolute monarch
of the whole civilised world, he preserved through life not only the
most unblemished justice, but what was less to be expected from his
Stoical breeding, the tenderest heart. The few failings which are
attributed to him were all on the side of indulgence: while his
writings, the highest ethical product of the ancient mind, differ
scarcely perceptibly, if they differ at all, from the most
characteristic teachings of Christ. This man, a better Christian in
all but the dogmatic sense of the word than almost any of the
ostensibly Christian sovereigns who have since reigned, persecuted
Christianity. Placed at the summit of all the previous attainments
of humanity, with an open, unfettered intellect, and a character which
led him of himself to embody in his moral writings the Christian
ideal, he yet failed to see that Christianity was to be a good and not
an evil to the world, with his duties to which he was so deeply
penetrated. Existing society he knew to be in a deplorable state.
But such as it was, he saw, or thought he saw, that it was held
together, and prevented from being worse, by belief and reverence of
the received divinities. As a ruler of mankind, he deemed it his
duty not to suffer society to fall in pieces; and saw not how, if
its existing ties were removed, any others could be formed which could
again knit it together. The new religion openly aimed at dissolving
these ties: unless, therefore, it was his duty to adopt that religion,
it seemed to be his duty to put it down. Inasmuch then as the theology
of Christianity did not appear to him true or of divine origin;
inasmuch as this strange history of a crucified God was not credible
to him, and a system which purported to rest entirely upon a
foundation to him so wholly unbelievable, could not be foreseen by him
to be that renovating agency which, after all abatements, it has in
fact proved to be; the gentlest and most amiable of philosophers and
rulers, under a solemn sense of duty, authorised the persecution of
Christianity.

  To my mind this is one of the most tragical facts in all history. It
is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the
world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as
the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius
instead of those of Constantine. But it would be equally unjust to him
and false to truth to deny, that no one plea which can be urged for
punishing anti-Christian teaching was wanting to Marcus Aurelius for
punishing, as he did, the propagation of Christianity. No Christian
more firmly believes that Atheism is false, and tends to the
dissolution of society, than Marcus Aurelius believed the same
things of Christianity; he who, of all men then living, might have
been thought the most capable of appreciating it. Unless any one who
approves of punishment for the promulgation of opinions, flatters
himself that he is a wiser and better man than Marcus Aurelius- more
deeply versed in the wisdom of his time, more elevated in his
intellect above it- more earnest in his search for truth, or more
single-minded in his devotion to it when found; let him abstain from
that assumption of the joint infallibility of himself and the
multitude, which the great Antoninus made with so unfortunate a
result.

  Aware of the impossibility of defending the use of punishment for
restraining irreligious opinions by any argument which will not
justify Marcus Antoninus, the enemies of religious freedom, when
hard pressed, occasionally accept this consequence, and say, with
Dr. Johnson, that the persecutors of Christianity were in the right;
that persecution is an ordeal through which truth ought to pass, and
always passes successfully, legal penalties being, in the end,
powerless against truth, though sometimes beneficially effective
against mischievous errors. This is a form of the argument for
religious intolerance sufficiently remarkable not to be passed without
notice.

  A theory which maintains that truth may justifiably be persecuted
because persecution cannot possibly do it any harm, cannot be
charged with being intentionally hostile to the reception of new
truths; but we cannot commend the generosity of its dealing with the
persons to whom mankind are indebted for them. To discover to the
world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was
previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on
some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important
a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures, and
in certain cases, as in those of the early Christians and of the
Reformers, those who think with Dr. Johnson believe it to have been
the most precious gift which could be bestowed on mankind. That the
authors of such splendid benefits should be requited by martyrdom;
that their reward should be to be dealt with as the vilest of
criminals, is not, upon this theory, a deplorable error and
misfortune, for which humanity should mourn in sackcloth and ashes,
but the normal and justifiable state of things. The propounder of a
new truth, according to this doctrine, should stand as stood, in the
legislation of the Locrians, the proposer of a new law, with a
halter round his neck, to be instantly tightened if the public
assembly did not, on hearing his reasons, then and there adopt his
proposition. People who defend this mode of treating benefactors
cannot be supposed to set much value on the benefit; and I believe
this view of the subject is mostly confined to the sort of persons who
think that new truths may have been desirable once, but that we have
had enough of them now.

  But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over
persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after
one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience
refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by
persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for
centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation
broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down.
Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola
was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put
down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even
after the era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was
successful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire,
Protestantism was rooted out; and, most likely, would have been so
in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth died. Persecution
has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a
party to be effectually persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt
that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It
spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only
occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long
intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle
sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power
denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men
are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a
sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will
generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real
advantage which truth has consists in this, that when an opinion is
true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the
course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it,
until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from
favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such
head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.

  It will be said, that we do not now put to death the introducers
of new opinions: we are not like our fathers who slew the prophets, we
even build sepulchres to them. It is true we no longer put heretics to
death; and the amount of penal infliction which modern feeling would
probably tolerate, even against the most obnoxious opinions, is not
sufficient to extirpate them. But let us not flatter ourselves that we
are yet free from the stain even of legal persecution. Penalties for
opinion, or at least for its expression, still exist by law; and their
enforcement is not, even in these times, so unexampled as to make it
at all incredible that they may some day be revived in full force.
In the year 1857, at the summer assizes of the county of Cornwall,
an unfortunate man,* said to be of unexceptionable conduct in all
relations of life, was sentenced to twenty-one months&#39; imprisonment,
for uttering, and writing on a gate, some offensive words concerning
Christianity. Within a month of the same time, at the Old Bailey,
two persons, on two separate occasions,*(2) were rejected as jurymen,
and one of them grossly insulted by the judge and by one of the
counsel, because they honestly declared that they had no theological
belief; and a third, a foreigner,*(3) for the same reason, was denied
justice against a thief.

  * Thomas Pooley, Bodmin Assizes, July 31, 1857. In December
following, he received a free pardon from the Crown.

  *(2) George Jacob Holyoake, August 17, 1857; Edward Truelove, July,
1857.

  *(3) Baron de Gleichen, Marlborough Street Police Court, August 4,
1857.

  This refusal of redress took place in virtue of the legal
doctrine, that no person can be allowed to give evidence in a court of
justice who does not profess belief in a God (any god is sufficient)
and in a future state; which is equivalent to declaring such persons
to be outlaws, excluded from the protection of the tribunals; who
may not only be robbed or assaulted with impunity, if no one but
themselves, or persons of similar opinions, be present, but any one
else may be robbed or assaulted with impunity, if the proof of the
fact depends on their evidence. The assumption on which this is
grounded is that the oath is worthless of a person who does not
believe in a future state; a proposition which betokens much ignorance
of history in those who assent to it (since it is historically true
that a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of
distinguished integrity and honour); and would be maintained by no one
who had the smallest conception how many of the persons in greatest
repute with the world, both for virtues and attainments, are well
known, at least to their intimates, to be unbelievers. The rule,
besides, is suicidal, and cuts away its own foundation. Under pretence
that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists
who are willing to lie, and rejects only those who brave the obloquy
of publicly confessing a detested creed rather than affirm a
falsehood. A rule thus self-convicted of absurdity so far as regards
its professed purpose, can be kept in force only as a badge of hatred,
a relic of persecution; a persecution, too, having the peculiarity
that the qualification for undergoing it is the being clearly proved
not to deserve it. The rule, and the theory it implies, are hardly
less insulting to believers than to infidels. For if he who does not
believe in a future state necessarily lies, it follows that they who
do believe are only prevented from lying, if prevented they are, by
the fear of hell. We will not do the authors and abettors of the
rule the injury of supposing that the conception which they have
formed of Christian virtue is drawn from their own consciousness.

  These, indeed, are but rags and remnants of persecution, and may
be thought to be not so much an indication of the wish to persecute,
as an example of that very frequent infirmity of English minds,
which makes them take a preposterous pleasure in the assertion of a
bad principle, when they are no longer bad enough to desire to carry
it really into practice. But unhappily there is no security in the
state of the public mind that the suspension of worse forms of legal
persecution, which has lasted for about the space of a generation,
will continue. In this age the quiet surface of routine is as often
ruffled by attempts to resuscitate past evils, as to introduce new
benefits. What is boasted of at the present time as the revival of
religion, is always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as
much the revival of bigotry; and where there is the strong permanent
leaven of intolerance in the feelings of a people, which at all
times abides in the middle classes of this country, it needs but
little to provoke them into actively persecuting those whom they
have never ceased to think proper objects of persecution.* For it is
this- it is the opinions men entertain, and the feelings they
cherish, respecting those who disown the beliefs they deem
important, which makes this country not a place of mental freedom.

  * Ample warning may be drawn from the large infusion of the
passions of a persecutor, which mingled with the general display of
the worst parts of our national character on the occasion of the Sepoy
insurrection. The ravings of fanatics or charlatans from the pulpit
may be unworthy of notice; but the heads of the Evangelical party have
announced as their principle for the government of Hindoos and
Mahometans, that no schools be supported by public money in which
the Bible is not taught, and by necessary consequence that no public
employment be given to any but real or pretended Christians. An
Under-Secretary of State, in a speech delivered to his constituents on
the 12th of November, 1857, is reported to have said: &quot;Toleration of
their faith&quot; (the faith of a hundred millions of British subjects),
&quot;the superstition which they called religion, by the British
Government, had had the effect of retarding the ascendancy of the
British name, and preventing the salutary growth of Christianity....
Toleration was the great corner-stone of the religious liberties of
of this country; but do not let them abuse that precious word
toleration. As he understood it, it meant the complete liberty to
all, freedom of worship, among Christians, who worshipped upon the
same foundation. It meant toleration of all sects and denominations of
Christians who believed in the one mediation.&quot; I desire to call
attention to the fact, that a man who has been deemed fit to fill a
high office in the government of this country under a liberal
ministry, maintains the doctrine that all who do not believe in the
divinity of Christ are beyond the pale of toleration. Who, after
this imbecile display, can indulge the illusion that religious
persecution has passed away, never to return?

  For a long time past, the chief mischief of the legal penalties is
that they strengthen the social stigma. It is that stigma which is
really effective, and so effective is it, that the profession of
opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in
England than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those which
incur risk of judicial punishment. In respect to all persons but those
whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will
of other people, opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law;
men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning
their bread. Those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no
favours from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the
public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but
to be ill-thought of and ill-spoken of, and this it ought not to
require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear. There is no room
for any appeal ad misericordiam in behalf of such persons. But
though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think
differently from us as it was formerly our custom to do, it may be
that we do ourselves as much evil as ever by our treatment of them.
Socrates was put to death, but the Socratic philosophy rose like the
sun in heaven, and spread its illumination over the whole intellectual
firmament. Christians were cast to the lions, but the Christian church
grew up a stately and spreading tree, overtopping the older and less
vigorous growths, and stifling them by its shade. Our merely social
intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to
disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their
diffusion. With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain, or
even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out
far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of
thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without
ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true
or a deceptive light.

  And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some
minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or
imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly
undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of
reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. A
convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and
keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already.
But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the
sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. A state of
things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring
intellects find it advisable to keep the general principles and
grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in
what they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their
own conclusions to premises which they have internally renounced,
cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical,
consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world. The sort of
men who can be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to
commonplace, or time-servers for truth, whose arguments on all great
subjects are meant for their hearers, and are not those which have
convinced themselves. Those who avoid this alternative, do so by
narrowing their thoughts and interests to things which can be spoken
of without venturing within the region of principles, that is, to
small practical matters, which would come right of themselves, if
but the minds of mankind were strengthened and enlarged, and which
will never be made effectually right until then: while that which
would strengthen and enlarge men&#39;s minds, free and daring
speculation on the highest subjects, is abandoned.

  Those in whose eyes this reticence on the part of heretics is no
evil should consider, in the first place, that in consequence of it
there is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions;
and that such of them as could not stand such a discussion, though
they may be prevented from spreading, do not disappear. But it is
not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most by the ban placed
on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The
greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole
mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear
of heresy. Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of
promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not
follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it
should land them in something which would admit of being considered
irreligious or immoral? Among them we may occasionally see some man of
deep conscientiousness, and subtle and refined understanding, who
spends a life in sophisticating with an intellect which he cannot
silence, and exhausts the resources of ingenuity in attempting to
reconcile the promptings of his conscience and reason with
orthodoxy, which yet he does not, perhaps, to the end succeed in
doing.

  No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a
thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever
conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one
who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the
true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer
themselves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form
great thinkers, that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary,
it is as much and even more indispensable to enable average human
beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. There
have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers in a general
atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever
will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people. Where any
people has made a temporary approach to such a character, it has
been because the dread of heterodox speculation was for a time
suspended. Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not
to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which
can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find
that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some
periods of history so remarkable. Never when controversy avoided the
subjects which are large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm,
was the mind of a people stirred up from its foundations, and the
impulse given which raised even persons of the most ordinary intellect
to something of the dignity of thinking beings. Of such we have had an
example in the condition of Europe during the times immediately
following the Reformation; another, though limited to the Continent
and to a more cultivated class, in the speculative movement of the
latter half of the eighteenth century; and a third, of still briefer
duration, in the intellectual fermentation of Germany during the
Goethian and Fichtean period. These periods differed widely in the
particular opinions which they developed; but were alike in this, that
during all three the yoke of authority was broken. In each, an old
mental despotism had been thrown off, and no new one had yet taken its
place. The impulse given at these three periods has made Europe what
it now is. Every single improvement which has taken place either in
the human mind or in institutions, may be traced distinctly to one
or other of them. Appearances have for some time indicated that all
three impulses are well nigh spent; and we can expect no fresh start
until we again assert our mental freedom.

  Let us now pass to the second division of the argument, and
dismissing the supposition that any of the received opinions may be
false, let us assume them to be true, and examine into the worth of
the manner in which they are likely to be held, when their truth is
not freely and openly canvassed. However unwillingly a person who
has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be
false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it
may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it
will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

  There is a class of persons (happily not quite so numerous as
formerly) who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what
they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of
the opinion, and could not make a tenable defence of it against the
most superficial objections. Such persons, if they can once get
their creed taught from authority, naturally think that no good, and
some harm, comes of its being allowed to be questioned. Where their
influence prevails, they make it nearly impossible for the received
opinion to be rejected wisely and considerately, though it may still
be rejected rashly and ignorantly; for to shut out discussion entirely
is seldom possible, and when it once gets in, beliefs not grounded
on conviction are apt to give way before the slightest semblance of an
argument. Waiving, however, this possibility- assuming that the true
opinion abides in the mind, but abides as a prejudice, a belief
independent of, and proof against, argument- this is not the way in
which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not
knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more,
accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.

  If the intellect and judgment of mankind ought to be cultivated, a
thing which Protestants at least do not deny, on what can these
faculties be more appropriately exercised by any one, than on the
things which concern him so much that it is considered necessary for
him to hold opinions on them? If the cultivation of the
understanding consists in one thing more than in another, it is surely
in learning the grounds of one&#39;s own opinions. Whatever people
believe, on subjects on which it is of the first importance to believe
rightly, they ought to be able to defend against at least the common
objections. But, some one may say, &quot;Let them be taught the grounds
of their opinions. It does not follow that opinions must be merely
parroted because they are never heard controverted. Persons who
learn geometry do not simply commit the theorems to memory, but
understand and learn likewise the demonstrations; and it would be
absurd to say that they remain ignorant of the grounds of
geometrical truths, because they never hear any one deny, and
attempt to disprove them.&quot; Undoubtedly: and such teaching suffices
on a subject like mathematics, where there is nothing at all to be
said on the wrong side of the question. The peculiarity of the
evidence of mathematical truths is that all the argument is on one
side. There are no objections, and no answers to objections. But on
every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth
depends on a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting
reasons. Even in natural philosophy, there is always some other
explanation possible of the same facts; some geocentric theory instead
of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be
shown why that other theory cannot be the true one: and until this
is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do not understand
the grounds of our opinion.

  But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals,
religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life,
three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in
dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from
it. The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record
that he always studied his adversary&#39;s case with as great, if not
still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as
the means of forensic success requires to be imitated by all who study
any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own
side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and
no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally
unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so
much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either
opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of
judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led
by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to
which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should
hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented
as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations.
That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into
real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from
persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and
do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most
plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the
difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and
dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion
of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

  Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this
condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions.
Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything
they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental
position of those who think differently from them, and considered what
such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any
proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves
profess. They do not know those parts of it which explain and
justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which
seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that,
of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be
preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and
decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers
to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended
equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the
reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is this
discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that
if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable
to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which
the most skilful devil&#39;s advocate can conjure up.

  To abate the force of these considerations, an enemy of free
discussion may be supposed to say, that there is no necessity for
mankind in general to know and understand all that can be said against
or for their opinions by philosophers and theologians. That it is
not needful for common men to be able to expose all the
misstatements or fallacies of an ingenious opponent. That it is enough
if there is always somebody capable of answering them, so that nothing
likely to mislead uninstructed persons remains unrefuted. That
simple minds, having been taught the obvious grounds of the truths
inculcated on them, may trust to authority for the rest, and being
aware that they have neither knowledge nor talent to resolve every
difficulty which can be raised, may repose in the assurance that all
those which have been raised have been or can be answered, by those
who are specially trained to the task.

  Conceding to this view of the subject the utmost that can be claimed
for it by those most easily satisfied with the amount of understanding
of truth which ought to accompany the belief of it; even so, the
argument for free discussion is no way weakened. For even this
doctrine acknowledges that mankind ought to have a rational
assurance that all objections have been satisfactorily answered; and
how are they to be answered if that which requires to be answered is
not spoken? or how can the answer be known to be satisfactory, if
the objectors have no opportunity of showing that it is
unsatisfactory? If not the public, at least the philosophers and
theologians who are to resolve the difficulties, must make
themselves familiar with those difficulties in their most puzzling
form; and this cannot be accomplished unless they are freely stated,
and placed in the most advantageous light which they admit of. The
Catholic Church has its own way of dealing with this embarrassing
problem. It makes a broad separation between those who can be
permitted to receive its doctrines on conviction, and those who must
accept them on trust. Neither, indeed, are allowed any choice as to
what they will accept; but the clergy, such at least as can be fully
confided in, may admissibly and meritoriously make themselves
acquainted with the arguments of opponents, in order to answer them,
and may, therefore, read heretical books; the laity, not unless by
special permission, hard to be obtained. This discipline recognises
a knowledge of the enemy&#39;s case as beneficial to the teachers, but
finds means, consistent with this, of denying it to the rest of the
world: thus giving to the elite more mental culture, though not more
mental freedom, than it allows to the mass. By this device it succeeds
in obtaining the kind of mental superiority which its purposes
require; for though culture without freedom never made a large and
liberal mind, it can make a clever nisi prius advocate of a cause. But
in countries professing Protestantism, this resource is denied;
since Protestants hold, at least in theory, that the responsibility
for the choice of a religion must be borne by each for himself, and
cannot be thrown off upon teachers. Besides, in the present state of
the world, it is practically impossible that writings which are read
by the instructed can be kept from the uninstructed. If the teachers
of mankind are to be cognisant of all that they ought to know,
everything must be free to be written and published without restraint.

  If, however, the mischievous operation of the absence of free
discussion, when the received opinions are true, were confined to
leaving men ignorant of the grounds of those opinions, it might be
thought that this, if an intellectual, is no moral evil, and does
not affect the worth of the opinions, regarded in their influence on
the character. The fact, however, is, that not only the grounds of the
opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often
the meaning of the opinion itself. The words which convey it cease
to suggest ideas, or suggest only a small portion of those they were
originally employed to communicate. Instead of a vivid conception
and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote;
or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained,
the finer essence being lost. The great chapter in human history which
this fact occupies and fills, cannot be too earnestly studied and
meditated on.

  It is illustrated in the experience of almost all ethical
doctrines and religious creeds. They are all full of meaning and
vitality to those who originate them, and to the direct disciples of
the originators. Their meaning continues to be felt in undiminished
strength, and is perhaps brought out into even fuller consciousness,
so long as the struggle lasts to give the doctrine or creed an
ascendancy over other creeds. At last it either prevails, and
becomes the general opinion, or its progress stops; it keeps
possession of the ground it has gained, but ceases to spread
further. When either of these results has become apparent, controversy
on the subject flags, and gradually dies away. The doctrine has
taken its place, if not as a received opinion, as one of the
admitted sects or divisions of opinion: those who hold it have
generally inherited, not adopted it; and conversion from one of
these doctrines to another, being now an exceptional fact, occupies
little place in the thoughts of their professors. Instead of being, as
at first, constantly on the alert either to defend themselves
against the world, or to bring the world over to them, they have
subsided into acquiescence, and neither listen, when they can help it,
to arguments against their creed, nor trouble dissentients (if there
be such) with arguments in its favour. From this time may usually be
dated the decline in the living power of the doctrine.

  We often hear the teachers of all creeds lamenting the difficulty of
keeping up in the minds of believers a lively apprehension of the
truth which they nominally recognise, so that it may penetrate the
feelings, and acquire a real mastery over the conduct. No such
difficulty is complained of while the creed is still fighting for
its existence: even the weaker combatants then know and feel what they
are fighting for, and the difference between it and other doctrines;
and in that period of every creed&#39;s existence, not a few persons may
be found, who have realised its fundamental principles in all the
forms of thought, have weighed and considered them in all their
important bearings, and have experienced the full effect on the
character which belief in that creed ought to produce in a mind
thoroughly imbued with it. But when it has come to be an hereditary
creed, and to be received passively, not actively- when the mind is
no longer compelled, in the same degree as at first, to exercise its
vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there
is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the
formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting
it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realising it in
consciousness, or testing it by personal experience, until it almost
ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human
being. Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age of the world
as almost to form the majority, in which the creed remains as it
were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all
other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature;
manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction
to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except
standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant.

  To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the deepest
impression upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, without
being ever realised in the imagination, the feelings, or the
understanding, is exemplified by the manner in which the majority of
believers hold the doctrines of Christianity. By Christianity I here
mean what is accounted such by all churches and sects- the maxims and
precepts contained in the New Testament. These are considered
sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing Christians. Yet it
is scarcely too much to say that not one Christian in a thousand
guides or tests his individual conduct by reference to those laws. The
standard to which he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his
class, or his religious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a
collection of ethical maxims, which he believes to have been
vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his government;
and on the other a set of every-day judgments and practices, which
go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so great a length
with others, stand in direct opposition to some, and are, on the
whole, a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests
and suggestions of worldly life. To the first of these standards he
gives his homage; to the other his real allegiance.

  All Christians believe that the blessed are the poor and humble, and
those who are ill-used by the world; that it is easier for a camel
to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven; that they should judge not, lest they be judged;
that they should swear not at all; that they should love their
neighbour as themselves; that if one take their cloak, they should
give him their coat also; that they should take no thought for the
morrow; that if they would be perfect they should sell all that they
have and give it to the poor. They are not insincere when they say
that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people
believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in
the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they
believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to
act upon them. The doctrines in their integrity are serviceable to
pelt adversaries with; and it is understood that they are to be put
forward (when possible) as the reasons for whatever people do that
they think laudable. But any one who reminded them that the maxims
require an infinity of things which they never even think of doing,
would gain nothing but to be classed among those very unpopular
characters who affect to be better than other people. The doctrines
have no hold on ordinary believers- are not a power in their minds.
They have an habitual respect for the sound of them, but no feeling
which spreads from the words to the things signified, and forces the
mind to take them in, and make them conform to the formula. Whenever
conduct is concerned, they look round for Mr. A and B to direct them
how far to go in obeying Christ.

  Now we may be well assured that the case was not thus, but far
otherwise, with the early Christians. Had it been thus, Christianity
never would have expanded from an obscure sect of the despised Hebrews
into the religion of the Roman empire. When their enemies said, &quot;See
how these Christians love one another&quot; (a remark not likely to be made
by anybody now), they assuredly had a much livelier feeling of the
meaning of their creed than they have ever had since. And to this
cause, probably, it is chiefly owing that Christianity now makes so
little progress in extending its domain, and after eighteen
centuries is still nearly confined to Europeans and the descendants of
Europeans. Even with the strictly religious, who are much in earnest
about their doctrines, and attach a greater amount of meaning to
many of them than people in general, it commonly happens that the part
which is thus comparatively active in their minds is that which was
made by Calvin, or Knox, or some such person much nearer in
character to themselves. The sayings of Christ coexist passively in
their minds, producing hardly any effect beyond what is caused by mere
listening to words so amiable and bland. There are many reasons,
doubtless, why doctrines which are the badge of a sect retain more
of their vitality than those common to all recognised sects, and why
more pains are taken by teachers to keep their meaning alive; but
one reason certainly is, that the peculiar doctrines are more
questioned, and have to be oftener defended against open gainsayers.
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there
is no enemy in the field.

  The same thing holds true, generally speaking, of all traditional
doctrines- those of prudence and knowledge of life, as well as of
morals or religion. All languages and literatures are full of
general observations on life, both as to what it is, and how to
conduct oneself in it; observations which everybody knows, which
everybody repeats, or hears with acquiescence, which are received as
truisms, yet of which most people first truly learn the meaning when
experience, generally of a painful kind, has made it a reality to
them. How often, when smarting under some unforeseen misfortune or
disappointment, does a person call to mind some proverb or common
saying, familiar to him all his life, the meaning of which, if he
had ever before felt it as he does now, would have saved him from
the calamity. There are indeed reasons for this, other than the
absence of discussion; there are many truths of which the full meaning
cannot be realised until personal experience has brought it home.
But much more of the meaning even of these would have been understood,
and what was understood would have been far more deeply impressed on
the mind, if the man had been accustomed to hear it argued pro and con
by people who did understand it. The fatal tendency of mankind to
leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the
cause of half their errors. A contemporary author has well spoken of
&quot;the deep slumber of a decided opinion.&quot;

  But what! (it may be asked) Is the absence of unanimity an
indispensable condition of true knowledge? Is it necessary that some
part of mankind should persist in error to enable any to realise the
truth? Does a belief cease to be real and vital as soon as it is
generally received- and is a proposition never thoroughly understood
and felt unless some doubt of it remains? As soon as mankind have
unanimously accepted a truth, does the truth perish within them? The
highest aim and best result of improved intelligence, it has
hitherto been thought, is to unite mankind more and more in the
acknowledgment of all important truths; and does the intelligence only
last as long as it has not achieved its object? Do the fruits of
conquest perish by the very completeness of the victory?

  I affirm no such thing. As mankind improve, the number of
doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly
on the increase: and the well-being of mankind may almost be
measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached
the point of being uncontested. The cessation, on one question after
another, of serious controversy, is one of the necessary incidents
of the consolidation of opinion; a consolidation as salutary in the
case of true opinions, as it is dangerous and noxious when the
opinions are erroneous. But though this gradual narrowing of the
bounds of diversity of opinion is necessary in both senses of the
term, being at once inevitable and indispensable, we are not therefore
obliged to conclude that all its consequences must be beneficial.
The loss of so important an aid to the intelligent and living
apprehension of a truth, as is afforded by the necessity of explaining
it to, or defending it against, opponents, though not sufficient to
outweigh, is no trifling drawback from, the benefit of its universal
recognition. Where this advantage can no longer be had, I confess I
should like to see the teachers of mankind endeavouring to provide a
substitute for it; some contrivance for making the difficulties of the
question as present to the learner&#39;s consciousness, as if they were
pressed upon him by a dissentient champion, eager for his conversion.

  But instead of seeking contrivances for this purpose, they have lost
those they formerly had. The Socratic dialectics, so magnificently
exemplified in the dialogues of Plato, were a contrivance of this
description. They were essentially a negative discussion of the
great question of philosophy and life, directed with consummate
skill to the purpose of convincing any one who had merely adopted
the commonplaces of received opinion that he did not understand the
subject- that he as yet attached no definite meaning to the doctrines
he professed; in order that, becoming aware of his ignorance, he might
be put in the way to obtain a stable belief, resting on a clear
apprehension both of the meaning of doctrines and of their evidence.
The school disputations of the Middle Ages had a somewhat similar
object. They were intended to make sure that the pupil understood
his own opinion, and (by necessary correlation) the opinion opposed to
it, and could enforce the grounds of the one and confute those of
the other. These last-mentioned contests had indeed the incurable
defect, that the premises appealed to were taken from authority, not
from reason; and, as a discipline to the mind, they were in every
respect inferior to the powerful dialectics which formed the
intellects of the &quot;Socratici viri&quot;; but the modern mind owes far
more to both than it is generally willing to admit, and the present
modes of education contain nothing which in the smallest degree
supplies the place either of the one or of the other. A person who
derives all his instruction from teachers or books, even if he
escape the besetting temptation of contenting himself with cram, is
under no compulsion to hear both sides; accordingly it is far from a
frequent accomplishment, even among thinkers, to know both sides;
and the weakest part of what everybody says in defence of his
opinion is what he intends as a reply to antagonists.

  It is the fashion of the present time to disparage negative
logic- that which points out weaknesses in theory or errors in
practice, without establishing positive truths. Such negative
criticism would indeed be poor enough as an ultimate result; but as
a means to attaining any positive knowledge or conviction worthy the
name, it cannot be valued too highly; and until people are again
systematically trained to it, there will be few great thinkers, and
a low general average of intellect, in any but the mathematical and
physical departments of speculation. On any other subject no one&#39;s
opinions deserve the name of knowledge, except so far as he has either
had forced upon him by others, or gone through of himself, the same
mental process which would have been required of him in carrying on an
active controversy with opponents. That, therefore, which when absent,
it is so indispensable, but so difficult, to create, how worse than
absurd it is to forego, when spontaneously offering itself! If there
are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if
law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds
to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us
what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the
certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much
greater labour for ourselves.

  It still remains to speak of one of the principal causes which
make diversity of opinion advantageous, and will continue to do so
until mankind shall have entered a stage of intellectual advancement
which at present seems at an incalculable distance. We have hitherto
considered only two possibilities: that the received opinion may be
false, and some other opinion, consequently, true; or that, the
received opinion being true, a conflict with the opposite error is
essential to a clear apprehension and deep feeling of its truth. But
there is a commoner case than either of these; when the conflicting
doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the
truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to
supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine
embodies only a part. Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to
sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth. They are a
part of the truth; sometimes a greater, sometimes a smaller part,
but exaggerated, distorted, and disjointed from the truths by which
they ought to be accompanied and limited. Heretical opinions, on the
other hand, are generally some of these suppressed and neglected
truths, bursting the bonds which kept them down, and either seeking
reconciliation with the truth contained in the common opinion, or
fronting it as enemies, and setting themselves up, with similar
exclusiveness, as the whole truth. The latter case is hitherto the
most frequent, as, in the human mind, one-sidedness has always been
the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions
of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises.
Even progress, which ought to superadd, for the most part only
substitutes, one partial and incomplete truth for another; improvement
consisting chiefly in this, that the new fragment of truth is more
wanted, more adapted to the needs of the time, than that which it
displaces. Such being the partial character of prevailing opinions,
even when resting on a true foundation, every opinion which embodies
somewhat of the portion of truth which the common opinion omits, ought
to be considered precious, with whatever amount of error and confusion
that truth may be blended. No sober judge of human affairs will feel
bound to be indignant because those who force on our notice truths
which we should otherwise have overlooked, overlook some of those
which we see. Rather, he will think that so long as popular truth is
one-sided, it is more desirable than otherwise that unpopular truth
should have one-sided assertors too; such being usually the most
energetic, and the most likely to compel reluctant attention to the
fragment of wisdom which they proclaim as if it were the whole.

  Thus, in the eighteenth century, when nearly all the instructed, and
all those of the uninstructed who were led by them, were lost in
admiration of what is called civilisation, and of the marvels of
modern science, literature, and philosophy, and while greatly
overrating the amount of unlikeness between the men of modern and
those of ancient times, indulged the belief that the whole of the
difference was in their own favour; with what a salutary shock did the
paradoxes of Rousseau explode like bombshells in the midst,
dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion, and forcing its
elements to recombine in a better form and with additional
ingredients. Not that the current opinions were on the whole farther
from the truth than Rousseau&#39;s were; on the contrary, they were nearer
to it; they contained more of positive truth, and very much less of
error. Nevertheless there lay in Rousseau&#39;s doctrine, and has
floated down the stream of opinion along with it, a considerable
amount of exactly those truths which the popular opinion wanted; and
these are the deposit which was left behind when the flood subsided.
The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and
demoralising effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial
society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from
cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time produce
their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted as much
as ever, and to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have
nearly exhausted their power.

  In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of
order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both
necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one
or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a
party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing
what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each
of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies
of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other
that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity. Unless
opinions favourable to democracy and to aristocracy, to property and
to equality, to cooperation and to competition, to luxury and to
abstinence, to sociality and individuality, to liberty and discipline,
and all the other standing antagonisms of practical life, are
expressed with equal freedom, and enforced and defended with equal
talent and energy, there is no chance of both elements obtaining their
due; one scale is sure to go up, and the other down. Truth, in the
great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the
reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds
sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an
approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of
a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners. On any
of the great open questions just enumerated, if either of the two
opinions has a better claim than the other, not merely to be
tolerated, but to be encouraged and countenanced, it is the one
which happens at the particular time and place to be in a minority.
That is the opinion which, for the time being, represents the
neglected interests, the side of human well-being which is in danger
of obtaining less than its share. I am aware that there is not, in
this country, any intolerance of differences of opinion on most of
these topics. They are adduced to show, by admitted and multiplied
examples, the universality of the fact, that only through diversity of
opinion is there, in the existing state of human intellect, a chance
of fair play to all sides of the truth. When there are persons to be
found who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world
on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always
probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for
themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.

  It may be objected, &quot;But some received principles, especially on the
highest and most vital subjects, are more than half-truths. The
Christian morality, for instance, is the whole truth on that
subject, and if any one teaches a morality which varies from it, he is
wholly in error.&quot; As this is of all cases the most important in
practice, none can be fitter to test the general maxim. But before
pronouncing what Christian morality is or is not, it would be
desirable to decide what is meant by Christian morality. If it means
the morality of the New Testament, I wonder that any one who derives
his knowledge of this from the book itself, can suppose that it was
announced, or intended, as a complete doctrine of morals. The Gospel
always refers to a pre-existing morality, and confines its precepts to
the particulars in which that morality was to be corrected, or
superseded by a wider and higher; expressing itself, moreover, in
terms most general, often impossible to be interpreted literally,
and possessing rather the impressiveness of poetry or eloquence than
the precision of legislation. To extract from it a body of ethical
doctrine, has never been possible without eking it out from the Old
Testament, that is, from a system elaborate indeed, but in many
respects barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous people. St.
Paul, a declared enemy to this Judaical mode of interpreting the
doctrine and filling up the scheme of his Master, equally assumes a
preexisting morality, namely that of the Greeks and Romans; and his
advice to Christians is in a great measure a system of accommodation
to that; even to the extent of giving an apparent sanction to slavery.
What is called Christian, but should rather be termed theological,
morality, was not the work of Christ or the Apostles, but is of much
later origin, having been gradually built up by the Catholic church of
the first five centuries, and though not implicitly adopted by moderns
and Protestants, has been much less modified by them than might have
been expected. For the most part, indeed, they have contented
themselves with cutting off the additions which had been made to it in
the Middle Ages, each sect supplying the place by fresh additions,
adapted to its own character and tendencies.

  That mankind owe a great debt to this morality, and to its early
teachers, I should be the last person to deny; but I do not scruple to
say of it that it is, in many important points, incomplete and
one-sided, and that unless ideas and feelings, not sanctioned by it,
had contributed to the formation of European life and character, human
affairs would have been in a worse condition than they now are.
Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction;
it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is
negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence
rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic
Pursuit of Good; in its precepts (as has been well said) &quot;thou shalt
not&quot; predominates unduly over &quot;thou shalt.&quot; In its horror of
sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually
compromised away into one of legality. It holds out the hope of heaven
and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to
a virtuous life: in this falling far below the best of the ancients,
and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially
selfish character, by disconnecting each man&#39;s feelings of duty from
the interests of his fellow creatures, except so far as a
self-interested inducement is offered to him for consulting them. It
is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates
submission to all authorities found established; who indeed are not to
be actively obeyed when they command what religion forbids, but who
are not to be resisted, far less rebelled against, for any amount of
wrong to ourselves. And while, in the morality of the best Pagan
nations, duty to the State holds even a disproportionate place,
infringing on the just liberty of the individual; in purely
Christian ethics, that grand department of duty is scarcely noticed or
acknowledged. It is in the Koran, not the New Testament, that we
read the maxim- &quot;A ruler who appoints any man to an office, when
there is in his dominions another man better qualified for it, sins
against God and against the State.&quot; What little recognition the idea
of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality is derived from
Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the
morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity,
highmindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived
from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and
never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only
worth, professedly recognised, is that of obedience.

  I am as far as any one from pretending that these defects are
necessarily inherent in the Christian ethics in every manner in
which it can be conceived, or that the many requisites of a complete
moral doctrine which it does not contain do not admit of being
reconciled with it. Far less would I insinuate this of the doctrines
and precepts of Christ himself. I believe that the sayings of Christ
are all that I can see any evidence of their having been intended to
be; that they are irreconcilable with nothing which a comprehensive
morality requires; that everything which is excellent in ethics may be
brought within them, with no greater violence to their language than
has been done to it by all who have attempted to deduce from them
any practical system of conduct whatever. But it is quite consistent
with this to believe that they contain, and were meant to contain,
only a part of the truth; that many essential elements of the
highest morality are among the things which are not provided for,
nor intended to be provided for, in the recorded deliverances of the
Founder of Christianity, and which have been entirely thrown aside
in the system of ethics erected on the basis of those deliverances
by the Christian Church. And this being so, I think it a great error
to persist in attempting to find in the Christian doctrine that
complete rule for our guidance which its author intended it to
sanction and enforce, but only partially to provide. I believe, too,
that this narrow theory is becoming a grave practical evil, detracting
greatly from the moral training and instruction which so many
well-meaning persons are now at length exerting themselves to promote.
I much fear that by attempting to form the mind and feelings on an
exclusively religious type, and discarding those secular standards (as
for want of a better name they may be called) which heretofore
coexisted with and supplemented the Christian ethics, receiving some
of its spirit, and infusing into it some of theirs, there will result,
and is even now resulting, a low, abject, servile type of character,
which, submit itself as it may to what it deems the Supreme Will, is
incapable of rising to or sympathising in the conception of Supreme
Goodness. I believe that other ethics than any which can be evolved
from exclusively Christian sources, must exist side by side with
Christian ethics to produce the moral regeneration of mankind; and
that the Christian system is no exception to the rule, that in an
imperfect state of the human mind the interests of truth require a
diversity of opinions.

  It is not necessary that in ceasing to ignore the moral truths not
contained in Christianity men should ignore any of those which it does
contain. Such prejudice, or oversight, when it occurs, is altogether
an evil; but it is one from which we cannot hope to be always
exempt, and must be regarded as the price paid for an inestimable
good. The exclusive pretension made by a part of the truth to be the
whole, must and ought to be protested against; and if a reactionary
impulse should make the protestors unjust in their turn, this
one-sidedness, like the other, may be lamented, but must be tolerated.
If Christians would teach infidels to be just to Christianity, they
should themselves be just to infidelity. It can do truth no service to
blink the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance
with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most
valuable moral teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not
know, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian faith.

  I do not pretend that the most unlimited use of the freedom of
enunciating all possible opinions would put an end to the evils of
religious or philosophical sectarianism. Every truth which men of
narrow capacity are in earnest about, is sure to be asserted,
inculcated, and in many ways even acted on, as if no other truth
existed in the world, or at all events none that could limit or
qualify the first. I acknowledge that the tendency of all opinions
to become sectarian is not cured by the freest discussion, but is
often heightened and exacerbated thereby; the truth which ought to
have been, but was not, seen, being rejected all the more violently
because proclaimed by persons regarded as opponents. But it is not
on the impassioned partisan, it is on the calmer and more
disinterested bystander, that this collision of opinions works its
salutary effect. Not the violent conflict between parts of the
truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable
evil; there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both
sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into
prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by
being exaggerated into falsehood. And since there are few mental
attributes more rare than that judicial faculty which can sit in
intelligent judgment between two sides of a question, of which only
one is represented by an advocate before it, truth has no chance but
in proportion as every side of it, every opinion which embodies any
fraction of the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated
as to be listened to.

  We have now recognised the necessity to the mental well-being of
mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of
opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct
grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate.

  First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for
aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our
own infallibility.

  Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and
very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the
general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the
whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that
the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

  Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the
whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is,
vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who
receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little
comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this,
but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of
being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the
character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession,
inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the
growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal
experience.

  Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take
some notice of those who say that the free expression of all
opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be
temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might
be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are
to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinions are
attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given
whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent
who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer,
appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an
intemperate opponent.

  But this, though an important consideration in a practical point
of view, merges in a more fundamental objection. Undoubtedly the
manner of asserting an opinion, even though it be a true one, may be
very objectionable, and may justly incur severe censure. But the
principal offences of the kind are such as it is mostly impossible,
unless by accidental self-betrayal, to bring home to conviction. The
gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or
arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the
opposite opinion. But all this, even to the most aggravated degree, is
so continually done in perfect good faith, by persons who are not
considered, and in many other respects may not deserve to be
considered, ignorant or incompetent, that it is rarely possible, on
adequate grounds, conscientiously to stamp the misrepresentation as
morally culpable; and still less could law presume to interfere with
this kind of controversial misconduct. With regard to what is commonly
meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm,
personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would
deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them
equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the
employmen