llision.
Born in an age and country abounding in individual greatness, this
man has been handed down to us by those who best knew both him
and the age, as the most virtuous man in it.... This acknowledged
master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived--whose
fame, still growing after two thousand years, all but outweighs the
whole remainder of the names which make his native city illustrious--was
put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction,
for impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the gods recognized
by the State.... Immorality, in being, by his doctrines and
instructions, a "corrupter of youth." Of these charges the tribunal,
there is every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, and
condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best
of mankind to be put to death as a criminal.[2]

[Footnote 2: J. S. Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. II.]

Every important step in human progress has been a variation
from the normal or accustomed, something new. Most
advances in science have been departures from older and
accustomed ways of thinking. Through the permission and
encouragement of individual variation in opinion we may
discover in the first place that accepted beliefs are wrong.
Galileo thought differently from the accepted Ptolemaic
astronomy of his day, and the demonstration of his diverging
belief proved the Ptolemaic astronomy to be wrong. The
evolutionary theory, bitterly attacked in its day, replaced
Cuvier's doctrine of the forms of life upon earth coming about
through a series of successive catastrophes. Lyell, in the face
of the whole scientific world of his day, insisted on the gradual
and uniform development of the earth's surface. Half the
scientific doctrines now accepted as axiomatic were bitterly
denounced when they were first suggested by an inquiring
minority.

Milton in his famous _Areopagitica_, an address to Parliament
written in 1644, protesting against the censorship of
printing, stressed the importance of permitting liberty for the
securing and developing of new ideas:

What should ye do then, should ye suppress all this flowery crop
of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this
city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers [censors] over
it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing
but what is measured us by their bushel? ... That our hearts
are now more capacious, our thoughts more e