of opinion is a sacred privilege essential to the formation
of belief; wherefore originality, even when it implies stupidity, is
to be carefully protected as a factor of human progress. We need not
follow Mr. Stephen in his victorious analysis of the arguments
wherewith Mill seeks to uphold this uncompromising individualism, and
to guard human perversity against the baneful influence of authority.
It is clear enough that society cannot waste its time in perpetual
wrangling over issues upon which an authoritative verdict has been
delivered; and for most of us a reasonable probability, founded on the
judgment of experts, is sufficient in moral or physical questions as
well as in litigation. The religious arena still remains open, where
experts differ and decisions are always disputable. Yet Mr. Arthur
Balfour devotes a chapter in his _Foundations of Belief_ to the
contention that our convictions on all the deeper subjects of thought
are determined not by reason but by authority; whereby he provides us
with an escape from the scepticism that menaces a philosopher who has
proved all experience to be at bottom illusory. Mill, on the other
hand, would make short work with authority wherever it checks or
discourages the unlimited exercise of free individual inquiry; and in
politics he would entrust the sovereign power to a representation of
the entire aggregate of the community, with the most ample
encouragement of incessant discussion. This is, indeed, the system
actually in force, and in England it has answered very well; but Mill
hardly foresaw that its tendency would be to make the State, as the
embodiment of popular will, not less but more authoritative, with a
tendency to encroach steadily upon the sphere of individual effort and
private enterprise.

It may be said that the abstract Utilitarian doctrine reached its
high-water mark in Mill's book on the Subjection of Women, to which
Mr. Stephen allots one section of a chapter. The book is a particular
enlargement upon Mill's general view that it is a pestilent error to
regard such marked distinctions of human character as sex or race as
innate and in the main indelible. What is called the nature of women
he treats as an artificial thing, an isolated fact which need not at
any rate be recognised by law; the proper test was, he argued, to
leave free competition to determine whether the distinction is radical
or merely the result of external circumstance. But, as Mr. Stephe