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II

I shall not impose upon your patience by giving you an abstract of Mill' s argument. I should like to remind you only of those salient ideas to which Mill attached the greatest importance-- beliefs which his opponents attacked in his lifetime, and attack even more vehemently today. These propositions are still far from self-evident, time has not turned them to platitudes; they are not even now undisputed assumptions of a civilized outlook Let me attempt to consider them briefly:

Men want to curtail the liberties of other men, either (a) be cause they wish to impose their power on others; or (b) because they want conformity--they do not wish to think differently from others, or others to think differently from themselves; or, finally, (c) because they believe that to the question of how one should live there can be (as with any genuine question) one true answer and one only; this answer is discoverable by means of reason, or intuition, or direct revelation, or a form of life or `unity of theory and practice'; its authority is identifiable with one of these avenues to final knowledge; all deviation from it is error which imperils human salvation; this justifies legislation against, or even extirpation of, those who lead away from the truth, what ever their character or intentions. Mill dismisses the first two motives as being irrational, since they stake out no intellectually argued claim, and are, therefore incapable of being answered by rational argument. The only motive which hei s prepared to take seriously is the last, namely, that if the true ends of life can be discovered, those who oppose these truths are spreading pernicious falsehood, and must be repressed. To this he replies that men are not infallible; that the supposedly pernicious view might turn out to be true after all; that those who killed Socrates and Christ sincerely believed them to be purveyors of wicked falsehoods, and were themselves men as worthy of respect as any to be found today; that Marcus Aurelius, `the gentlest and most amiable of rulers', known as the most enlightened man of his time and one of the noblest, nevertheless authorized the persecution of Christianity as a moral and social danger, and that no argument ever used by any other persecutor had not been equally open to him. We cannot suppose that persecution never kills the truth. `It is a piece of idle sentimentality', Mill observes, `that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.' Persecution is historically only too effective. `To speak only of religious opinions: a 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. . . . 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. . . . No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire.' And if it be said against this that, just because we have erred in the past, it is mere cowardice to refrain from striking down evil when we see it in the present in case we may be mistaken again; or, to put it in another way; that, even if we are not infallible, yet, if we are to live at all, we must make decisions and act, and must do so on nothing better than probability, according to our lights, with constant risk of error; for all living involves risk, and what alternative have we? Mill answers that `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.'4.4 You can indeed stop `bad men from perverting society with false or pernicious views', but only if you give men liberty to deny that what you yourself call bad, or pernicious, or perverted, or false, is such; otherwise your conviction is founded on mere dogma and is not rational, and cannot be analysed or altered in the light of any new facts and ideas. Without infallibility how can truth emerge save in discussion? there is no a priori road towards it; a new experience, a new argument, can in principle always alter our views, no matter how strongly held. To shut doors is to blind yourself to the truth deliberately, to condemn yourself to incorrigible error.

Mill had a strong and subtle brain and his arguments are never negligible. But it is, in this case, plain that his conclusion only follows from premisses which he does not make explicit. He was an empiricist; that is, he believed that no truths are--or could be--rationally established, except on the evidence of observation. New observations could in principle always upset a conclusion founded on earlier ones. He believed this rule to be true of the laws of physics, even of the laws of logic and mathematics; how much more, therefore, in `ideological' fields where no scientific certainty prevailed--in ethics, politics, religion, history, the entire field of human affairs, where only probability reigns; here, unless full liberty of opinion and argument is permitted, nothing can ever be rationally established. But those who disagree with him, and believe in intuited truths, in principle not corrigible by experience, will disregard this argument. Mill can write them off as obscurantists, dogmatists, irrationalists. Yet something more is needed than mere contemptuous dismissal if their views, more powerful today perhaps than even in Mill's own century, are to be rationally contested. Again, it may well be that without full freedom of discussion the truth cannot emerge. But this may be only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of its discovery; the truth may, for all our efforts, remain at the bottom of a well, and in the mean time the worse cause may win, and do enormous damage to mankind. is it so clear that we must permit opinions advocating, say, race hatred to be uttered freely, because Milton has said that `though all the winds of doctrine are let loose upon the earth ...whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?' because `the truth must always prevail in a fair fight with falsehood'? These are brave and optimistic judgments, but how good is the empirical evidence for them today? Are demagogues and liars, scoundrels and blind fanatics, always, in liberal societies, stopped in time, or refuted in the end? How high a price is it right to pay for the great boon of freedom of discussion? A very high one, no doubt; but is it limitless? And if not, who shall say what sacrifice is, or is not, too great? Mill goes onto say that an opinion believed to be false may yet be partially true; for there is no absolute truth, only different roads towards it; the suppression of an apparent falsehood may also suppress what is true in it to the loss of mankind. This argument, again, will not tell with those who believe that absolute truth is discoverable once and for all, whether by metaphysical or theological argument, or by some direct insight, or by leading a certain kind of life, or, as Mill's own mentors believed, by scientific or empirical methods.

His argument is plausible only on the assumption which, whether he knew it or not, Mill all too obviously made, that human knowledge was in principle never complete, and always fallible; that there was no single, universally visible truth; that each man, each nation, each civilization might take its own road towards its own goal, not necessarily harmonious with those of others; that men are altered, and the truths in which they believe are altered, by new experiences and their own actions--what he calls `experiments in living'; that consequently the conviction, common to Aristotelians and a good many Christian scholastics and atheistical materialists alike, that there exists a basic know able human nature, one and the same, at all times, in all places, in all men--a static, unchanging substance underneath the altering appearances, with permanent needs, dictated by a single, discoverable goal, or pattern of goals, the same for all mankind--is mistaken; and so, too, is the notion that is bound up with it, of a single true doctrine carrying salvation to all men everywhere, contained in natural law, or the revelation of a sacred book, or the insight of a man of genius, or the natural wisdom of ordinary men, or the calculations made by an elite of utilitarian scientists set up to govern mankind.

Mill--bravely for a professed utilitarian--observes that the human (that is. the social) sciences are too confused and uncertain be properly called sciences at all--there are in them no valid generalizations, no laws, and therefore no predictions or rules of action can properly be deduced from them. He honoured the memory of his father, whose whole philosophy was based on the opposite assumption; he respected Auguste Comte, and subsidized Herbert Spencer, both of whom claimed to have laid the foundations for just such a science of society. Yet his own half articulate assumption contradicts this. Mill believes that man is spontaneous, that he has freedom of choice, that he moulds his own character, that as a result of the interplay of men with nature and with other men something novel continually arises, and that this novelty is precisely what is most characteristic and most human in men. Because Mill's entire view of human nature turns out to rest not on the notion of the repetition of an identical pattern, but on his perception of human lives as subject to perpetual incompleteness, self-transformation, and novelty, his words are today alive and relevant to our own problems; whereas the works of James Mill, and of Buckle and Comte and Spencer, remain huge half forgotten hulks in the river of nineteenth century thought. He does not demand or predict ideal conditions for the final solution of human problems or for obtaining universal agreement on all crucial issues. He assumes that finality is impossible, and implies that it is undesirable too. He does not demonstrate this. Rigour in argument is not among his accomplishments. Yet it is this belief, which undermines the foundations on which Helvétius, Bentham, and James Mill built their doctrines--a system never formally repudiated by him--that gives his case both its plausibility and its humanity.

His remaining arguments are weaker still. He says that unless it is contested, truth is liable to degenerate into dogma or prejudice; men would no longer feel it as a living truth; opposition is needed to keep it alive. `Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field', overcome as they are by `the deep slumber of a decided opinion'.4.5 So deeply did Mill believe this, that he declared dissenters, we had an obligation to invent arguments against ourselves, in order to keep ourselves in a state of intellectual fitness. This resembles nothing so much as Hegel's argument for war as keeping human society from stagnation. Yet if the truth about human affairs were in principle demonstrable, as it is, say, in arithmetic, the invention of false propositions in order to be knocked down would scarcely be needed to preserve our understanding of it. What Mill seems really to be asking for is diversity of opinion for its own sake. He speaks of the need for `fair play to all sides of the truth'4.6--a phrase that a man would scarcely employ if he believed in simple, complete truths as the earlier utilitarians did; and he makes use of bad arguments to conceal this scepticism, perhaps even from himself. `In an imperfect state of the human mind', he says, `the interests of the truth require a diversity of opinions.'4.7 Or again, `Do we really accept the logic of the persecutors [and say] we may persecute others because we are right, and they may not persecute us because they are wrong?'4.8Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Moslems have all justified persecution by this argument in their day; and on their premisses there may be nothing logically amiss with it. It is these premisses that Mill rejects, and rejects not, it seems to me, as a result of a chain of reasoning, but because he believes--even if he never, so far as I know, admits this explicitly--that there are no final truths not corrigible by experience, at any rate in what is now called the ideological sphere--that of value judgments and of general out look and attitude to life. Yet within this framework of ideas and values, despite all the stress on the value of `experiments in living' and what they may reveal, Mill is ready to stake a very great deal on the truth of his convictions about what he thinks to be the deepest and most permanent interests of men. Although his reasons are drawn from experience and not a priori knowledge, the propositions themselves are very like those defended on metaphysical grounds by the traditional upholders of the. doctrine of natural rights. Mill believes in liberty, that is, the rigid limitation of the right to coerce, because he is sure that men cannot develop and flourish and become fully human unless they are left free from interference by other men within a certain minimum area of their lives, which he regards as--or wishes to make--inviolable. This is his view of what men are; and therefore of their basic moral and intellectual needs, and he formulates his conclusions in the celebrated maxims according to which 'The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself', 4.9and that `The only reason 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 to forbear ...because in the opinion of others to do so would not be wise or even right.'4.10 This is Mill's profession of faith, and the ultimate basis of political liberalism, and therefore the proper target of attack--both on psychological and moral (and social) grounds--by its opponents during Mill's lifetime and after. Carlyle reacted with characteristic fury in a letter to his brother Alexander:` As if it were a sin to control or coerce into better methods human swine in any way ...Ach Gott in Himmel!'4.11

Milder and more rational critics have not failed to point out that the limits of private and public domain are difficult to demarcate, that anything a man does could, in principle, frustrate others; that no man is an island; that the social and the individual aspects of human beings often cannot, in practice, be dis entangled. Mill was told that when men look upon forms of worship in which other men persist as being not merely `abominable' in themselves, but as an offence to them or to their God, they may be irrational and bigoted, but they are not necessarily lying; and that when he asks rhetorically why Moslems should not forbid the eating of pork to everyone, since they are genuinely disgusted by it, the answer, on utilitarian premisses, is by no means self-evident. It might be argued that there is no a priori reason for supposing that most men would not be happier--if that is the goal--in a wholly socialized world where private life and personal freedom are reduced to vanishing point, than in Mill's individualist order; and that whether this is so or not is a matter for experimental verification. Mill constantly protests against the fact that social and legal rules are too often determined merely by `the likings and dislikings of society', and correctly points out that these are often irrational or are founded on ignorance. But if damage to others is what concerns him most (as he professes), then the fact that their resistance to this or that belief is instinctive, or intuitive, or founded on no rational ground, does not make it the less painful, and, to that extent, damaging to them. Why should rational men be entitled to the satisfaction of their ends more than the irrational? Why not the irrational, if the greatest happiness of the greatest number (and the greatest number are seldom rational) is the sole justified purpose of action? Only a competent social psychologist can tell what will make a given society happiest. If happiness is the sole criterion, then human sacrifice, or the burning of witches, at times when such practices had strong public feeling behind them, did doubtless, in their day, contribute to the happiness of the majority. If there is no other moral criterion, then the question whether the slaughter of innocent old women (together with the ignorance and prejudice which made this acceptable) or the advance in knowledge and rationality (which ended such abominations but robbed men of comforting illusions)--which of these yielded a higher balance of happiness is only a matter of actuarial calculation. Mill paid no attention to such considerations. : nothing could go more violently against all that he felt and believed. At the centre of Mill's thought and feeling lies, not his utilitarianism, nor the concern about enlightenment, nor about dividing, the private from the public domain--for he himself at times concedes that the State may invade the private domain, in order to promote education, hygiene, or social security or justice --but his passionate belief that men are made human by their capacity for choice--choice of evil and good equally. Fallibility, the right to err, as a corollary of the capacity for self-improvement; distrust of symmetry and finality as enemies of freedom--these are the principles which Mill never abandons. He is acutely aware of the many-sidedness of the truth and of the irreducible complexity of life, which rules out the very possibility of any simple solution, or the idea of a final answer to any concrete problem. Greatly daring, and without looking back at the stern intellectual puritanism in which he was brought up, he preaches the necessity of understanding and gaining illumination from doctrines that are incompatible with one another--say those of Coleridge and Bentham; he explained in his autobiography the need to understand and learn from both.4.12


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