Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 | Page 9

those to
whom it would be prejudicial crush it under the name of a sect that is
sure to have already become odious, and are certain to keep it from
obtaining so much as a hearing. Turgot, then, was persuaded that
perhaps the greatest ill you can do to truth is to drive those who love it
to form themselves into a sect, and that these in turn can commit no
more fatal mistake than to have the vanity or the weakness to fall into
the trap.'
Yet we know that with Mr. Mill as with Turgot this deep distrust of
sect was no hindrance to the most careful systematisation of opinion
and conduct. He did not interpret many-sidedness in the flaccid watery
sense which flatters the indolence of so many of our contemporaries,
who like to have their ears amused with a new doctrine each morning,
to be held for a day, and dropped in the evening, and who have little
more seriousness in their intellectual life than the busy insects of a
summer noon. He says that he looked forward 'to a future which shall
unite the best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the
organic periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of
individual action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also convictions
as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven
on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment,
and so firmly grounded in reason and the true exigencies of life, that
they shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and
political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others'
(p. 166). This was in some sort the type at which he aimed in the
formation of his own character--a type that should combine organic
with critical quality, the strength of an ordered set of convictions, with
that pliability and that receptiveness in face of new truth, which are
indispensable to these very convictions being held intelligently and in
their best attainable form. We can understand the force of the eulogy on
John Austin (p. 154), that he manifested 'an equal devotion to the two

cardinal points of Liberty and Duty.' These are the correlatives in the
sphere of action to the two cardinal points of Criticism and Belief in the
sphere of thought.
We can in the light of this double way of viewing the right balance of
the mind, the better understand the combination of earnestness with
tolerance which inconsiderate persons are apt to find so awkward a
stumbling-block in the scheme of philosophic liberalism. Many people
in our time have so ill understood the doctrine of liberty, that in some
of the most active circles in society they now count you a bigot if you
hold any proposition to be decidedly and unmistakably more true than
any other. They pronounce you intemperate if you show anger and
stern disappointment because men follow the wrong course instead of
the right one. Mr. Mill's explanation of the vehemence and decision of
his father's disapproval, when he did disapprove, and his refusal to
allow honesty of purpose in the doer to soften his disapprobation of the
deed, gives the reader a worthy and masculine notion of true tolerance.
James Mill's 'aversion to many intellectual errors, or what he regarded
as such, partook in a certain sense of the character of a moral feeling....
None but those who do not care about opinions will confound this with
intolerance. Those, who having opinions which they hold to be
immensely important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful,
have any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a
class and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right,
and right what they think wrong: though they need not be, nor was my
father, insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in
their estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of
by the whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person, being no
more infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people on account of
opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither himself does them
any ill office, nor connives at its being done by others, he is not
intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a conscientious sense
of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom of all opinions is
the only tolerance which is commendable, or to the highest moral order
of minds, possible' (p. 51). This is another side of the co-ordination of
Criticism and Belief, of Liberty and Duty, which attained in Mr. Mill
himself a completeness that other men, less favoured in education and

with less active power of self-control, are not likely to reach,