GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

SOVEREIGNTY AND NATURAL RIGHTS 525
eccentricity. Far the case for variety, the case for permitting
the individual to indulge himself in speech and
behaviour which appear shocking, to express himself in
forms of art which appear ugly, to propound opinions
which appear to be false, and not only false but outrageous,
and to dpcak his mind in and out of season, is simply the
case for not blocking the channels through which alone
those intimations can reach the mind of man, whose
embodiment in concrete form, whether in paint or sound,
in moral code or political institution, constitutes, in the
only real sense of the word, his progress. When Mill
championed liberty as being "grounded on the permanent
interests of man as a progressive being", it was the liberty
to be different which he had primarily in mihd. If I may
venture to convey the gist of his argument in terms of the
conclusions reached in Part II, I should say that it is
pre-eminently to those individuals who are "different",
that our race owes such progress in the realization and
embodiment of die absolute values as it has yet succeeded
in achieving. Hence a society which can afford to permit
"difference" is, in Mill's phrase, more advanced, or, as
I should prefer to say, embodies a greater degree of
absolute good than one which insists upon uniformity.
Mill's Fear of Majority Tyranny.
All advance, then,
whether collective or individual, is conditioned by and
dependent upon the freedom of individuals to experiment.
The success of experiment entails the freedom to innovate,
and the freedom to innovate involves once again the
liberty to differ. Now it was precisely this liberty to differ,
both in thought and conduct, which, Mill saw, was liable
to be threatened by the majority. For the eccentric in-
dividual, whether his eccentricity expresses itself in behaviour
or is confined to thought, tends to arouse the ridicule
or the hostility of the herd whose natural disposition is,
as we have seen, to exact conformity to its standards.
Moreover, the threat to the eccentric was, Mill realized,
likely to grow* '"The majority," he wrote, "have not yet