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ceased to be legal coercion of opinion. The argument for the suppression of individual opinion has been tersely summarized by the author above quoted:

Those who have the responsibility of governing a society can argue that it is incumbent upon them to prohibit the circulation of pernicious opinions as it is to prohibit any anti-social actions. They can argue that a man may do far more harm by propagating anti-social doctrines than by stealing his neighbor's house or making love to his neighbor's wife. They are responsible for the welfare of the state, and if they are convinced that an opinion is dangerous . . . it is their duty to protect society against it as against any other danger.

The Social Importance of Individuality in Opinion

There have been many notable documents in support of the belief that society is the gainer and not the loser by permitting and encouraging individuality in thought and belief. The following, taken from one of the most famous of these, John Stuart Mill's 'Essay on Liberty' was written to illustrate the fatal results of prohibiting dissenting opinions merely because most people think or call them immoral:

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 his age as the most virtuous man in it; . . . This acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived-whose fame is still growing after two thousand years, and 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 recognized by the state. Immorality, in being by his doctrines and instructions, a corrupter of youth! 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.8

Except in the recent period of excitement and stress during the Great War, when suppression of opinion was, for better or for worse, taken as a measure of national defense. Bury: History of Freedom of Thought, p. 13.

J. S. Mill: Liberty, Chapter XI.

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Every important step in human progress has been a variation from the normal or accustomed, something new. Most advances in science have been departures from older and accustomed ways of thinking. Through the permission and encouragement of individual variation in opinion we may discover in the first place that accepted beliefs are wrong. Galileo thought differently from the accepted Ptolemaic astronomy of his day, and the demonstration of his diverging belief proved the Ptolemaic astronomy to be wrong. The evolutionary theory, bitterly attacked in its day, replaced Cuvier's doctrine of the forms of life upon earth coming about through a series of successive catastrophies. Lyell, in the face of the whole scientific world of his day, insisted on the gradual and uniform development of the earth's surface. Half the scientific doctrines now accepted as axiomatic were bitterly denounced when they were first suggested by an inquiring minority.

Milton in his famous, 'Areopagitica', an address to Parliament written in 1644, protesting against the censorship of printing, stressed the importance of permitting liberty for the securing and developing of new ideas:

What should ye do then, should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge, and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers (censors) over it, bringing a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured us by their bushel? . . . That our hearts are more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of the greatest and exactest things is the issue of your own virtue; ye cannot suppress that unless ye re-enforce an abrogated and merciless law. . . Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Even if the currently accepted doctrines prove to be true, there is, as Mill pointed out, a vast social utility in permitting the expression of contrary opinion though it be an error. New ideas, however extreme, 'may and commonly do possess some portion of truth'; they bring to light and emphasize some aspect or point of view which prevailing theories fail to note.

Milton: Areopagitica.

Thus the possible over-emphasis of certain contemporary writers on the socialization of man's life is a valuable corrective to the equal over-emphasis on individualism which was current among so many thinkers during the nineteenth century. The insistence with which present-day psychologists call our attention to the power of instinct, though it may possibly be over-emphasized, counterbalances that tendency exhibited by such earlier authors as Bentham to picture man as a purely rational being, whose every action was determined by sheer logic.

Finally, unless doctrines are subjected to criticism and inquiry, no matter how beneficial they are to society, they will become merely futile and empty formulæ with very little beyond a mechanical influence on people's lives. The maxims of conventional morality and religion which everybody believes and few practise are solemnly bandied about with little comprehension of their meaning and no tendency to act upon them. A belief becomes, as Mill pointed out, living, vital, and influential in the clash of controversy. Whether novel and dissenting doctrines are true or false, therefore, the encouragement of their expression provides vitality and variation without which progress is not possible.

The social appreciation of persons who display marked individual opinions varies in different ages toward the same individual. The martyr stoned to death by one generation becomes the hero and prophet of the next. One has but to look back at the contemporary villification and ridicule to which Lincoln was subjected to find an illustration. Or on a more monumental scale:

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? A blasphemer.10

One would suppose that men would have learnt not only to tolerate and be receptive to novelty in belief after these

10 Mill: Essay on Liberty, Chapter II.

repeatedly tardy recognitions of greatness. There are dozens of instances in the history of religious, social, and political belief, of men and women who, suppressed with the bitterest cruelty in one generation, have been in effect, and sometimes in fact, canonized by posterity. And a certain degree of tolerance and receptiveness has come to be the result. But while we no longer burn religious and social heretics, condemnation is still meted out in some form of ostracism. Prejudice, custom, and special interest frequently move men to suppress in milder ways extremists, expression of whose opinions seems to them, as unusual opinions have frequently seemed, fraught only with the greatest of harm.

CHAPTER IX

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 'SELF'

Origin and Development of a Sense of Personal Selfhood

The expression of individuality in opinion is only one way men have of expressing their personality, individuality, or self. From the beginnings of childhood, men experience an increasing sense of 'personal selfhood' which finds various outlets in action or thought. So familiar, indeed, in the normal man is his realization that he is a 'self', that it seldom occurs to him that this conception was an attainment gradually accomplished through long years of experience with the world about him. The very young baby does not distinguish between Itself and the Not-Self which constitutes the remainder of the universe. It is nothing but a stream of experi ences, of moment to moment pulsations of desire, of hunger and satisfaction, of bodily comfort and bodily pain. As it grows older, it begins dimly to distinguish between Itself and Everything-Else; it finds itself to be something different, more vivid, more personal and interesting than the chairs and tables, the crib and bottle, the faces and hands, the smiles and rattles that are its familiar setting. It discovers that 'I am I', and that everything else ministers to or frustrates or remains indifferent to its desires. It becomes a person rather than a bundle of reactions. It develops a consciousness of 'self'.

In its simplest form this consciousness of self is nothing more than a continuous stream of inner organic sensations, and the constant process of the body and limbs "and the special interest of these as the seat of various pleasures and pains." This is what James calls the 'bodily self'. As it grows older, the baby distinguishes between persons and things. And as in setting off his own body from other things, it discovers its 'bodily self', so in setting off its own opinions,

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