rected to the search and
expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own
virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that unless ye reenforce
an abrogated and merciless law.... Give me the liberty to know, to
utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.[1]

[Footnote 1: Milton: _Areopagitica_.]

Even if the currently accepted doctrines prove to be true,
there is, as Mill pointed out, a vast social utility in permitting
the expression of contrary opinion though it be an error.
New ideas, however extreme, "may and commonly do possess
some portion of truth"; they bring to light and emphasize
some aspect or point of view which prevailing theories fail to
note. Thus the possible over-emphasis of certain contemporary
writers on the socialization of man's life is a valuable
corrective to the equal over-emphasis on individualism which
was current among so many thinkers during the nineteenth
century. The insistence with which present-day psychologists
call our attention to the power of instinct, though it may
possibly be over-emphasized, counterbalances that tendency
exhibited by such earlier authors as Bentham to picture man
as a purely rational being, whose every action was determined
by sheer logic.

Finally, unless doctrines are subjected to criticism and
inquiry, no matter how beneficial they are to society, they
will become merely futile and empty formulae with very little
beyond a mechanical influence on people's lives. The maxims
of conventional morality and religion which everybody
believes and few practice are solemnly bandied about with
little comprehension of their meaning and no tendency to act
upon them. A belief becomes, as Mill pointed out, living,
vital, and influential in the clash of controversy. Whether
novel and dissenting doctrines are true or false, therefore, the
encouragement of their expression provides vitality and
variation without which progress is not possible.

The social appreciation of persons who display marked individual
opinions varies in different ages toward the same
individual. The martyr stoned to death by one generation
becomes the hero and prophet of the next. One has but to
look back at the contemporary vilification and ridicule to
which Lincoln was subjected to find an illustration. Or, on
a more monumental scale:

The event which took place on Calvary rather more than eighteen
hundred years ago. The man who left on the memory