"If the teachers of mankind are to be cognisant of all that
they ought to know, everything must be free to be written and published
without restraint.
If, however, the mischievous operation of the absence of
free discussion, when the received opinions are true, were confined
to leaving men ignorant of the grounds of those opinions, it might be
thought that this, if an intellectual, is no moral evil, and does not
affect the worth of the opinions, regarded in their influence on the
character. The fact, however, is, that not only the grounds of the opinion
are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning
of the opinion itself. The words which convey it, cease to suggest ideas,
or suggest only a small portion of those they were originally employed
to communicate. Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there
remain only a few phrases retained by rote; or, if any part, the shell
and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost.
The great chapter in human history which this fact occupies and fills,
cannot be too earnestly studied and meditated on...
But when it has come to be an hereditary creed, and to be received passively,
not actively—when the mind is no longer compelled, in the same
degree as at first, to exercise its vital powers on the questions which
its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to forget
all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid
assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of
realizing it in consciousness, or testing it by personal experience;
until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life
of the human being. Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age
of the world as almost to form the majority, in which the creed remains
as it were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all
other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting
its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in,
but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel
over them to keep them vacant."
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859),
"Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion", Penguin edition
pp. 101-3. |
