JOHN STUART MILL AND THE ENDS OF LIFE

Four Essays On Liberty -42 John Stuart Mill And
The Ends Of Life

`...the importance, to man and society ...of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.' Autobiography

I MUST begin by thanking you for the honour that you have done me, in inviting me to address you on the subject to which the Robert Waley Cohen Memorial Lectures are dedicated-- tolerance. In a world in which human rights were never trampled on, and men did not persecute each other for what they believed or what they were, this Council would have no reason for existence. This, however, is not our world. We are a good deal remoter from this desirable condition than some of our more civilized ancestors, and, in this respect, unfortunately conform only too well to the common pattern of human experience. The periods and societies in which civil liberties were respected, and variety of opinion and faith tolerated, have been very few and far between--oases in the desert of human uniformity, intolerance, and oppression. Among the great Victorian preachers, Carlyle and Marx have turned out to be better prophets than Macaulay and the Whigs, but not necessarily better friends to mankind; sceptical, to put it at its lowest, of the principles which this Council exists to promote. Their greatest champion, the man who formulated these principles most clearly and thereby founded modern liberalism, was, as everyone knows, the author of the Essay on Liberty, John Stuart Mill. This book--this great short book, as Sir Richard Livingstone has justly called it in his own lecture in this series--was published one hundred years ago. The subject was then in the forefront of discussion. The year 1859 saw the death of the two best known champions of individual liberty in Europe, Macaulay and Tocqueville. It marked the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Schiller, who was acclaimed as the poet of the free and creative personality fighting against great odds. The individual was seen by some as the victim of, by others as rising to his apotheosis in, the new and triumphant, forces of nationalism and industrialism which exalted the power and the glory of great disciplined human masses that were transforming the world in factories or battlefields or political assemblies. The predicament of the individual versus the State or the nation or the industrial organization or the social or political group was becoming an acute personal and public problem. In the same year there appeared Darwin's On the Origin of Species, probably the most influential work of science , of its century, which at once did much to destroy the ancient accumulation of dogma and prejudice, and, in its misapplication to psychology, ethics, and politics, was used to justify violent imperialism and naked competition. Almost simultaneously with it there appeared an essay, written by an obscure economist expounding a doctrine which has had a decisive influence on mankind. The author was Karl Marx, the book was the Critique of Political Economy, the preface to which contained the clearest statement of the materialist interpretation of history--the heart of all that goes under the name of Marxism today. But the impact made upon political thought by Mill's treatise was more immediate, and perhaps no less pennanent. It superseded earlier formulations of the case for individualism and toleration, from Milton and Locke to Montesquieu and Voltaire, and, despite its outdated psychology and lack of logical cogency, it remains the classic statement of the case for individual liberty. We are sometimes told that a man's behaviour is a more genuine expression of his beliefs than his words. In Mill's case there is no conflict. His life embodied his beliefs. His single-minded devotion to the cause of toleration and reason was unique even among the dedicated lives of the nineteenth century. The centenary of his profession of faith should not, therefore, be allowed to pass without a word before this Council.