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Title: On Liberty

Author: John Stuart Mill

Release date: January 10, 2011 [eBook #34901]

Most recently updated: August 12, 2019

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON LIBERTY ***

On Liberty. By John Stuart Mill.

With an Introduction by

W. L. Courtney, LL.D.

The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd.

London and Felling-on-Tyne

New York and Melbourne

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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.

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INTRODUCTION. I.

John Stuart Mill was born on 20th May 1806. He was a delicate child, and
the extraordinary education designed by his father was not calculated to
develop and improve his physical powers. "I never was a boy," he says;
"never played cricket." His exercise was taken in the form of walks with
his father, during which the elder Mill lectured his son and examined
him on his work. It is idle to speculate on the possible results of a
different treatment. Mill remained delicate throughout his life, but was
endowed with that intense mental energy which is so often combined with
physical weakness. His youth was sacrificed to an idea; he was designed
by his father to carry on his work; the individuality of the boy was
unimportant. A visit to the south of France at the age of fourteen, in
company with the family of General Sir Samuel Bentham, was not without
its influence. It was a glimpse of another atmosphere, though the
studious habits of his home life were maintained. Moreover, he derived
from it his interest in foreign politics, which remained one of his
characteristics to the end of his life. In 1823 he was appointed junior
clerk in the Examiners' Office at the India House.

Mill's first essays were written in the Traveller about a year before
he entered the India House. From that time forward his literary work was
uninterrupted save by attacks of illness. His industry was stupendous.
He wrote articles on an infinite variety of subjects, political,
metaphysical, philosophic, religious, poetical. He discovered Tennyson
for his generation, he influenced the writing of Carlyle's French
Revolution as well as its success. And all the while he was engaged in
studying and preparing for his more ambitious works, while he rose step
by step at the India Office. His Essays on Unsettled Questions in
Political Economy were written in 1831, although they did not appear
until thirteen years later. His System of Logic, the design of which
was even then fashioning itself in his brain, took thirteen years to
complete, and was actually published before the Political Economy. In
1844 appeared the article on Michelet, which its author anticipated
would cause some discussion, but which did not create the sensation he
expected. Next year there were the "Claims of Labour" and "Guizot," and
in 1847 his articles on Irish affairs in the Morning Chronicle. These
years were very much influenced by his friendship and correspondence
with Comte, a curious comradeship between men of such different
temperament. In 1848 Mill published his Political Economy, to which he
had given his serious study since the completion of his Logic. His
articles and reviews, though they involved a good deal of work—as, for
instance, the re-perusal of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the
original before reviewing Grote's Greece—were recreation to the
student. The year 1856 saw him head of the Examiners' Office in the
India House, and another two years brought the end of his official work,
owing to the transfer of India to the Crown. In the same year his wife
died. Liberty was published shortly after, as well as the Thoughts on
Parliamentary Reform, and no year passed without Mill making important
contributions on the political, philosophical, and ethical questions of
the day.

Seven years after the death of his wife, Mill was invited to contest
Westminster. His feeling on the conduct of elections made him refuse to
take any personal action in the matter, and he gave the frankest
expression to his political views, but nevertheless he was elected by a
large majority. He was not a conventional success in the House; as a
speaker he lacked magnetism. But his influence was widely felt. "For the
sake of the House of Commons at large," said Mr. Gladstone, "I rejoiced
in his advent and deplored his disappearance. He did us all good." After
only three years in Parliament, he was defeated at the next General
Election by Mr. W. H. Smith. He retired to Avignon, to the pleasant
little house where the happiest years of his life had been spent in the
companionship of his wife, and continued his disinterested labours. He
completed his edition of his father's Analysis of the Mind, and also
produced, in addition to less important work, The Subjection of Women,
in which he had the active co-operation of his step-daughter. A book on
Socialism was under consideration, but, like an earlier study of
Sociology, it never was written. He died in 1873, his last years being
spent peacefully in the pleasant society of his step-daughter, from
whose tender care and earnest intellectual sympathy he caught maybe a
far-off reflection of the light which had irradiated his spiritual life.

II.

The circumstances under which John Stuart Mill wrote his Liberty are
largely connected with the influence which Mrs. Taylor wielded over his
career. The dedication is well known. It contains the most extraordinary
panegyric on a woman that any philosopher has ever penned. "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." It is easy for the ordinary worldly cynicism to curl a
sceptical lip over sentences like these. There may be exaggeration of
sentiment, the necessary and inevitable reaction of a man who was
trained according to the "dry light" of so unimpressionable a man as
James Mill, the father; but the passage quoted is not the only one in
which John Stuart Mill proclaims his unhesitating belief in the
intellectual influence of his wife. The treatise on Liberty was
written especially under her authority and encouragement, but there are
many earlier references to the power which she exercised over his mind.
Mill was introduced to her as early as 1831, at a dinner-party at Mr.
Taylor's house, where were present, amongst others, Roebuck, W. J. Fox,
and Miss Harriet Martineau. The acquaintance rapidly ripened into
intimacy and the intimacy into friendship, and Mill was never weary of
expatiating on all the advantages of so singular a relationship. In some
of the presentation copies of his work on Political Economy, he wrote
the following dedication:—"To Mrs. John Taylor, who, of all persons
known to the author, is the most highly qualified either to originate or
to appreciate speculation on social advancement, this work is with the
highest respect and esteem dedicated." An article on the enfranchisement
of women was made the occasion for another encomium. We shall hardly be
wrong in attributing a much later book, The Subjection of Women,
published in 1869, to the influence wielded by Mrs. Taylor. Finally, the
pages of the Autobiography ring with the dithyrambic praise of his
"almost infallible counsellor."

The facts of this remarkable intimacy can easily be stated. The
deductions are more difficult. There is no question that Mill's
infatuation was the cause of considerable trouble to his acquaintances
and friends. His father openly taxed him with being in love with another
man's wife. Roebuck, Mrs. Grote, Mrs. Austin, Miss Harriet Martineau
were amongst those who suffered because they made some allusion to a
forbidden subject. Mrs. Taylor lived with her daughter in a lodging in
the country; but in 1851 her husband died, and then Mill made her his
wife. Opinions were widely divergent as to her merits; but every one
agreed that up to the time of her death, in 1858, Mill was wholly lost
to his friends. George Mill, one of Mill's younger brothers, gave it as
his opinion that she was a clever and remarkable woman, but "nothing
like what John took her to be." Carlyle, in his reminiscences, described
her with ambiguous epithets. She was "vivid," "iridescent," "pale and
passionate and sad-looking, a living-romance heroine of the royalist
volition and questionable destiny." It is not possible to make much of a
judgment like this, but we get on more certain ground when we discover
that Mrs. Carlyle said on one occasion that "she is thought to be
dangerous," and that Carlyle added that she was worse than dangerous,
she was patronising. The occasion when Mill and his wife were brought
into close contact with the Carlyles is well known. The manuscript of
the first volume of the French Revolution had been lent to Mill, and
was accidentally burnt by Mrs. Mill's servant. Mill and his wife drove
up to Carlyle's door, the wife speechless, the husband so full of
conversation that he detained Carlyle with desperate attempts at
loquacity for two hours. But Dr. Garnett tells us, in his Life of
Carlyle, that Mill made a substantial reparation for the calamity for
which he was responsible by inducing the aggrieved author to accept half
of the £200 which he offered. Mrs. Mill, as I have said, died in 1858,
after seven years of happy companionship with her husband, and was
buried at Avignon. The inscription which Mill wrote for her grave is too
characteristic to be omitted:—"Her great and loving heart, her noble
soul, her clear, powerful, original, and comprehensive intellect, made
her the guide and support, the instructor in wisdom and the example in
goodness, as she was the sole earthly delight of those who had the
happiness to belong to her. As earnest for all public good as she was
generous and devoted to all who surrounded her, her influence has been
felt in many of the greatest improvements of the age, and will be in
those still to come. Were there even a few hearts and intellects like
hers, this earth would already become the hoped-for Heaven." These lines
prove the intensity of Mill's feeling, which is not afraid of abundant
verbiage; but they also prove that he could not imagine what the effect
would be on others, and, as Grote said, only Mill's reputation could
survive these and similar displays.

Every one will judge for himself of this romantic episode in Mill's
career, according to such experience as he may possess of the
philosophic mind and of the value of these curious but not infrequent
relationships. It may have been a piece of infatuation, or, if we prefer
to say so, it may have been the most gracious and the most human page in
Mill's career. Mrs. Mill may have flattered her husband's vanity by
echoing his opinions, or she may have indeed been an Egeria, full of
inspiration and intellectual helpfulness. What usually happens in these
cases,—although the philosopher himself, through his belief in the
equality of the sexes, was debarred from thinking so,—is the extremely
valuable action and reaction of two different classes and orders of
mind. To any one whose thoughts have been occupied with the sphere of
abstract speculation, the lively and vivid presentment of concrete fact
comes as a delightful and agreeable shock. The instinct of the woman
often enables her not only to apprehend but to illustrate a truth for
which she would be totally unable to give the adequate philosophic
reasoning. On the other hand, the man, with the more careful logical
methods and the slow processes of formal reasoning, is apt to suppose
that the happy intuition which leaps to the conclusion is really based
on the intellectual processes of which he is conscious in his own case.
Thus both parties to the happy contract are equally pleased. The
abstract truth gets the concrete illustration; the concrete illustration
finds its proper foundation in a series of abstract inquiries. Perhaps
Carlyle's epithets of "iridescent" and "vivid" refer incidentally to
Mrs. Mill's quick perceptiveness, and thus throw a useful light on the
mutual advantages of the common work of husband and wife. But it savours
almost of impertinence even to attempt to lift the veil on a mystery
like this. It is enough to say, perhaps, that however much we may
deplore the exaggeration of Mill's references to his wife, we recognise
that, for whatever reason, the pair lived an ideally happy life.

It still, however, remains to estimate the extent to which Mrs. Taylor,
both before and after her marriage with Mill, made actual contributions
to his thoughts and his public work. Here I may be perhaps permitted to
avail myself of what I have already written in a previous work.[1] Mill
gives us abundant help in this matter in the Autobiography. When first
he knew her, his thoughts were turning to the subject of Logic. But his
published work on the subject owed nothing to her, he tells us, in its
doctrines. It was Mill's custom to write the whole of a book so as to
get his general scheme complete, and then laboriously to re-write it in
order to perfect the phrases and the composition. Doubtless Mrs. Taylor
was of considerable help to him as a critic of style. But to be a critic
of doctrine she was hardly qualified. Mill has made some clear
admissions on this point. "The only actual revolution which has ever
taken place in my modes of thinking was already complete,"[2] he says,
before her influence became paramount. There is a curiously humble
estimate of his own powers (to which Dr. Bain has called attention),
which reads at first sight as if it contradicted this. "During the
greater part of my literary life I have performed the office in relation
to her, which, from a rather early period, I had considered as the most
useful part that I was qualified to take in the domain of thought, that
of an interpreter of original thinkers, and mediator between them and
the public." So far it would seem that Mill had sat at the feet of his
oracle; but observe the highly remarkable exception which is made in the
following sentence:—"For I had always a humble opinion of my own powers
as an original thinker, except in abstract science (logic, metaphysics,
and the theoretic principles of political economy and politics.)"[3] If
Mill then was an original thinker in logic, metaphysics, and the science
of economy and politics, it is clear that he had not learnt these from
her lips. And to most men logic and metaphysics may be safely taken as
forming a domain in which originality of thought, if it can be honestly
professed, is a sufficient title of distinction.

Mrs. Taylor's assistance in the Political Economy is confined to
certain definite points. The purely scientific part was, we are assured,
not learnt from her. "But it was chiefly her influence which gave to the
book that general tone by which it is distinguished from all previous
expositions of political economy that had any pretensions to be
scientific, and which has made it so useful in conciliating minds which
those previous expositions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in
making the proper distinction between the laws of the production of
wealth, which are real laws of Nature, dependent on the properties of
objects, and the modes of its distribution, which, subject to certain
conditions, depend on human will.... I had indeed partially learnt this
view of things from the thoughts awakened in me by the speculations of
St. Simonians; but it was made a living principle, pervading and
animating the book, by my wife's promptings."[4] The part which is
italicised is noticeable. Here, as elsewhere, Mill thinks out the matter
by himself; the concrete form of the thoughts is suggested or prompted
by the wife. Apart from this "general tone," Mill tells us that there
was a specific contribution. "The chapter which has had a greater
influence on opinion than all the rest, that on the Probable Future of
the Labouring Classes, is entirely due to her. In the first draft of the
book that chapter did not exist. She pointed out the need of such a
chapter, and the extreme imperfection of the book without it; she was
the cause of my writing it." From this it would appear that she gave
Mill that tendency to Socialism which, while it lends a progressive
spirit to his speculations on politics, at the same time does not
manifestly accord with his earlier advocacy of peasant proprietorships.
Nor, again, is it, on the face of it, consistent with those doctrines of
individual liberty which, aided by the intellectual companionship of his
wife, he propounded in a later work. The ideal of individual freedom is
not the ideal of Socialism, just as that invocation of governmental aid
to which the Socialist resorts is not consistent with the theory of
laisser-faire. Yet Liberty was planned by Mill and his wife in
concert. Perhaps a slight visionariness of speculation was no less the
attribute of Mrs. Mill than an absence of rigid logical principles. Be
this as it may, she undoubtedly checked the half-recognised leanings of
her husband in the direction of Coleridge and Carlyle. Whether this was
an instance of her steadying influence,[5] or whether it added one more
unassimilated element to Mill's diverse intellectual sustenance, may be
wisely left an open question. We cannot, however, be wrong in
attributing to her the parentage of one book of Mill, The Subjection of
Women. It is true that Mill had before learnt that men and women ought
to be equal in legal, political, social, and domestic relations. This
was a point on which he had already fallen foul of his father's essay on
Government. But Mrs. Taylor had actually written on this very point,
and the warmth and fervour of Mill's denunciations of women's servitude
were unmistakably caught from his wife's view of the practical
disabilities entailed by the feminine position.

III.

Liberty was published in 1859, when the nineteenth century was half
over, but in its general spirit and in some of its special tendencies
the little tract belongs rather to the standpoint of the eighteenth
century than to that which saw its birth. In many of his speculations
John Stuart Mill forms a sort of connecting link between the doctrines
of the earlier English empirical school and those which we associate
with the name of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In his Logic, for instance, he
represents an advance on the theories of Hume, and yet does not see how
profoundly the victories of Science modify the conclusions of the
earlier thinker. Similarly, in his Political Economy, he desires to
improve and to enlarge upon Ricardo, and yet does not advance so far as
the modifications of political economy by Sociology, indicated by some
later—and especially German—speculations on the subject. In the tract
on Liberty, Mill is advocating the rights of the individual as against
Society at the very opening of an era that was rapidly coming to the
conclusion that the individual had no absolute rights against Society.
The eighteenth century view is that individuals existed first, each with
their own special claims and responsibilities; that they deliberately
formed a Social State, either by a contract or otherwise; and that then
finally they limited their own action out of regard for the interests of
the social organism thus arbitrarily produced. This is hardly the view
of the nineteenth century. It is possible that logically the individual
is prior to the State; historically and in the order of Nature, the
State is prior to the individual. In other words, such rights as every
single personality possesses in a modern world do not belong to him by
an original ordinance of Nature, but are slowly acquired in the growth
and development of the social state. It is not the truth that individual
liberties were forfeited by some deliberate act when men made themselves
into a Commonwealth. It is more true to say, as Aristotle said long ago,
that man is naturally a political animal, that he lived under strict
social laws as a mere item, almost a nonentity, as compared with the
Order, Society, or Community to which he belonged, and that such
privileges as he subsequently acquired have been obtained in virtue of
his growing importance as a member of a growing organisation. But if
this is even approximately true, it seriously restricts that liberty of
the individual for which Mill pleads. The individual has no chance,
because he has no rights, against the social organism. Society can
punish him for acts or even opinions which are anti-social in character.
His virtue lies in recognising the intimate communion with his fellows.
His sphere of activity is bounded by the common interest. Just as it is
an absurd and exploded theory that all men are originally equal, so it
is an ancient and false doctrine to protest that a man has an individual
liberty to live and think as he chooses in any spirit of antagonism to
that larger body of which he forms an insignificant part.

Nowadays this view of Society and of its development, which we largely
owe to the Philosophie Positive of M. Auguste Comte, is so familiar
and possibly so damaging to the individual initiative, that it becomes
necessary to advance and proclaim the truth which resides in an opposite
theory. All progress, as we are aware, depends on the joint process of
integration and differentiation; synthesis, analysis, and then a larger
synthesis seem to form the law of development. If it ever comes to pass
that Society is tyrannical in its restrictions of the individual, if, as
for instance in some forms of Socialism, based on deceptive analogies of
Nature's dealings, the type is everything and the individual nothing, it
must be confidently urged in answer that the fuller life of the future
depends on the manifold activities, even though they may be
antagonistic, of the individual. In England, at all events, we know that
government in all its different forms, whether as King, or as a caste
of nobles, or as an oligarchical plutocracy, or even as trades unions,
is so dwarfing in its action that, for the sake of the future, the
individual must revolt. Just as our former point of view limited the
value of Mill's treatise on Liberty, so these considerations tend to
show its eternal importance. The omnipotence of Society means a dead
level of uniformity. The claim of the individual to be heard, to say
what he likes, to do what he likes, to live as he likes, is absolutely
necessary, not only for the variety of elements without which life is
poor, but also for the hope of a future age. So long as individual
initiative and effort are recognised as a vital element in English
history, so long will Mill's Liberty, which he confesses was based on
a suggestion derived from Von Humboldt, remain as an indispensable
contribution to the speculations, and also to the health and sanity, of the world.

What his wife really was to Mill, we shall, perhaps, never know. But
that she was an actual and vivid force, which roused the latent
enthusiasm of his nature, we have abundant evidence. And when she died
at Avignon, though his friends may have regained an almost estranged
companionship, Mill was, personally, the poorer. Into the sorrow of that
bereavement we cannot enter: we have no right or power to draw the veil.
It is enough to quote the simple words, so eloquent of an unspoken
grief—"I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest
manner, what that loss was and is. But because I know that she would
have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of what life I have left,
and to work for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be
derived from thoughts of her, and communion with her memory."

W. L. COURTNEY.

London, July 5th, 1901.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Life of John Stuart Mill, chapter vi. (Walter Scott.)

[2] Autobiography, p. 190.

[3] Ibid., p. 242.

[4] Autobiography, pp. 246, 247.

[5] Cf. an instructive page in the Autobiography, p. 252.

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CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY
1

CHAPTER II.

OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
28

CHAPTER III.

OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING
103

CHAPTER IV.

OF THE LIMITS TO THE AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL
140

CHAPTER V.

APPLICATIONS
177

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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.

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ON LIBERTY.

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