at grows through
criticism and by modification, we need say no more as to the rough and
imperfect apprehension of truth which constitutes the dominant opinion
of society at any given moment. It needs little effort of detachment to
appreciate the danger of any limitation of inquiry by the collective
will whether its organ be law or the repressive force of public opinion.

The foundation of liberty on this side, then, is the conception of
thought as a growth dependent on spiritual laws, flourishing in the
movement of ideas as guided by experience, reflection and feeling,
corrupted by the intrusion of material considerations, slain by the
guillotine of finality. The same conception is broadened out to cover
the whole idea of personality. Social well-being cannot be incompatible
with individual well-being. But individual well-being has as its
foundation the responsible life of the rational creature. Manhood, and
Mill would emphatically add womanhood too, rests on the spontaneous
development of faculty. To find vent for the capacities of feeling, of
emotion, of thought, of action, is to find oneself. The result is no
anarchy. The self so found has as the pivot of its life the power of
control. To introduce some unity into life, some harmony into thought,
action and feeling, is its central achievement, and to realize its
relation to others and guide its own life thereby, its noblest rule. But
the essential of control is that it should be self-control. Compulsion
may be necessary for the purposes of external order, but it adds nothing
to the inward life that is the true being of man. It even threatens it
with loss of authority and infringes the sphere of its responsibility.
It is a means and not an end, and a means that readily becomes a danger
to ends that are very vital. Under self-guidance individuals will
diverge widely, and some of their eccentricities will be futile, others
wasteful, others even painful and abhorrent to witness. But, upon the
whole, it is good that they should differ. Individuality is an element
of well-being, and that not only because it is the necessary consequence
of self-government, but because, after all allowances for waste, the
common life is fuller and richer for the multiplicity of types that it
includes, and that go to enlarge the area of collective experience. The
larger wrong done by the repression of women is not the loss to women
themselves who constitute one half of the community, but the