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Liberty

A distinguishing trait of Mill's personality and style is his liberality of spirit or his elaborate fairness to all intellectual positions - a trait that informs his writings and was vital to his analysis of progress in human history.

 

In On Liberty, he defends the concept of liberty as intellectual autonomy, the cultivated habit of being "intellectually active" and fearless when advancing "heterodox speculation."

 

Those periods of human history brilliant for their "high scale of mental activity" were those that allowed free, untrammeled thought and discussion to break "the yoke of authority" and to throw off the "old mental despotism."

 

Mental freedom alone could sustain such liberating impulses that led to progress and improvements in human personal character and social institutions.

 

But mental freedom and truth-seeking are nurtured only by the clash of debate and continuous Socratic examination of rival ideas, however one-sided, or non-conforming, or heretical.

 

Any intellectual position "however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed ... will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth."

 

Even partisan one-sided truths, "compel reluctant attention to the fragment of wisdom which they proclaim as if it were the whole."

from: John Stuart Mill and Liberty