conviction which I have set down, survive, and remain in our adult
hesitating state as vestiges of our primitive all-believing state. They
are all from various causes ‘adhesive’ states—states which it is very
difficult to get rid of, and which, in consequence, have retained their
power of creating belief in the mind, when other states, which once
possessed it too, have quite lost it. _Clear_ ideas are certainly more
difficult to get rid of than obscure ones. Indeed, some obscure ones we
cannot recover, if we once lose them. Everybody, perhaps, has felt all
manner of doubts and difficulties in mastering a mathematical problem. At
the time, the difficulties seemed as real as the problem, but a day or
two after a man has mastered it, he will be wholly unable to imagine or
remember where the difficulties were. The demonstration will be perfectly
clear to him, and he will be unable to comprehend how anyone should fail
to perceive it. For life he will recall the clear ideas, but the obscure
ones he will never recall, though for some hours, perhaps, they were
painful, confused, and oppressive obstructions. _Intense_ ideas are, as
every one will admit, recalled more easily than slight and weak ideas.
_Constantly_ impressed ideas are brought back by the world around us,
and if they are so often, get so tied to our other ideas that we can
hardly wrench them away. _Interesting_ ideas stick in the mind by the
associations which give them interest. All the minor laws of conviction
resolve themselves into this great one: ‘That at first we believe all
which occurs to us—that afterwards we have a tendency to believe that
which we cannot help often occurring to us, and that this tendency is
stronger or weaker in some sort of proportion to our inability to prevent
their recurrence.’ When the inability to prevent the recurrence of the
idea is very great, so that the reason is powerless on the mind, the
consequent ‘conviction’ is an eager, irritable, and ungovernable passion.
If these principles are true, they suggest some lessons which are not now
accepted. They prove:
1. That we should be very careful how we let ourselves believe that
which may turn out to be error. Milton says that ‘error is but opinion,’
meaning true opinion, ‘in the making.’ But when the conviction of
any error is a strong passion, it leaves, like all other passions, a
permanent mark on the mind. We can never be as if we had never felt
it. ‘Once a heretic, always a heretic,’ is thus far true, that a mind
once given over to a passionate conviction is never as fit as it would
otherwise have been to receive the truth on the same subject. Years after
the passion may return upon him, and inevitably small recurrences of it
will irritate his intelligence and disturb its calm. We cannot at once
expel a familiar idea, and so long as the idea remains, its effect will
remain too.
2. That we must always keep an account in our minds of the degree of
evidence on which we hold our convictions, and be most careful that we
do not permanently permit ourselves to feel a stronger conviction than
the evidence justifies. If we do, since evidence is the only criterion of
truth, we may easily get a taint of error that may be hard to clear away.
This may seem obvious, yet, if I do not mistake, Father Newman’s _Grammar
of Assent_ is little else than a systematic treatise designed to deny and
confute it.
3. That if we do, as in life we must sometimes, indulge a ‘provisional
enthusiasm,’ as it may be called, for an idea—for example, if an orator
in the excitement of speaking does not keep his phrases to probability,
and if in the hurry of emotion he quite believes all he says, his plain
duty is on other occasions to watch himself carefully, and to be sure
that he does not as a permanent creed believe what in a peculiar and
temporary state he was led to say he felt and to feel.
Similarly, we are all in our various departments of life in the habit of
assuming various probabilities as if they were certainties. In Lombard
Street the dealers assume that ‘Messrs. Baring’s acceptance at three
months’ date is sure to be paid,’ and that ‘Peel’s Act will always be
suspended in a panic.’ And the familiarity of such ideas makes it nearly
impossible for anyone who spends his day in Lombard Street to doubt of
them. But, nevertheless, a person who takes care of his mind will keep up
the perception that they are not certainties.
Lastly, we should utilise this intense emotion of conviction as far as
we can. Dry minds, which give an intellectual ‘assent’ to conclusions
which feel no strong glow of faith in them, often do not know what their
opinions are. They have every day to go over the arguments again, or to
refer to a note-book to know what they believe. But intense convictions
make a memory for themselves, and if they can be kept to the truths of
which there is good evidence, they give a readiness of intellect, a
confidence in action, a consistency in character, which are not to be
had without them. For a time, indeed, they give these benefits when the
propositions believed are false, but then they spoil the mind for seeing
the truth, and they are very dangerous, because the believer may discover
his error, and a perplexity of intellect, a hesitation in action, and
an inconsistency in character are the sure consequences of an entire
collapse in pervading and passionate conviction.
_THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS OF TOLERATION._[25]
(1874.)
One of the most marked peculiarities of recent times in England is the
increased liberty in the expression of opinion. Things are now said
constantly and without remark, which even ten years ago would have
caused a hubbub, and have drawn upon those who said them much obloquy.
But already I think there are signs of a reaction. In many quarters of
orthodox opinion I observe a disposition to say, ‘Surely this is going
too far; really we cannot allow such things to be said.’ And what is more
curious, some writers, whose pens are just set at liberty, and who would,
not at all long ago, have been turned out of society for the things that
they say, are setting themselves to explain the ‘weakness’ of liberty,
and to extol the advantages of persecution. As it appears to me that the
new practice of this country is a great improvement on its old one, and
as I conceive that the doctrine of Toleration rests on what may be called
a metaphysical basis, I wish shortly to describe what that basis is.
I should say that, except where it is explained to the contrary, I use
the word ‘Toleration’ to mean toleration by law. Toleration by Society of
matters not subject to legal penalty is a kindred subject on which, if
I have room, I will add a few words, but in the main I propose to deal
with the simpler subject,—toleration by law. And by toleration, too, I
mean, when it is not otherwise said, toleration in the public expression
of opinions. Toleration of acts and practices is another allied subject
on which I can, in a paper like this, but barely hope to indicate what
seems to me to be the truth. And I should add, that I deal only with the
discussion of impersonal doctrines. The law of libel, which deals with
accusations of living persons, is a topic requiring consideration by
itself.
Meaning this by ‘toleration,’ I do not think we ought to be surprised
at a reaction against it. What was said long ago of slavery seems to be
equally true of persecution,—it ‘exists by the law of nature.’ It is so
congenial to human nature, that it has arisen everywhere in past times,
as history shows; that the cessation of it is a matter of recent times
in England; that even now, taking the world as a whole, the practice and
the theory of it are in a triumphant majority. Most men have always much
preferred persecution, and do so still; and it is therefore only natural
that it should continually reappear in discussion and argument.
One mode in which it tempts human nature is very obvious. Persons of
strong opinions wish, above all things, to propagate those opinions. They
find close at hand what seems an immense engine for that propagation;
they find the _State_, which has often in history interfered for and
against opinions,—which has had a great and undeniable influence in
helping some and hindering others,—and in their eagerness they can hardly
understand why they should not make use of this great engine to crush
the errors which they hate, and to replace them with the tenets they
approve. So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will
always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is
unwise, and their conscience that it is wrong. They may not gratify their
inclination, but the inclination will not be the less real.
Since the time of Carlyle, ‘earnestness’ has been a favourite virtue
in literature, and it is customary to treat this wish to twist other
people’s belief into ours as if it were a part of the love of truth.
And in the highest minds so it may be. But the mass of mankind have, as
I hold, no such fine motive. Independently of truth or falsehood, the
spectacle of a different belief from ours is disagreeable to us, in the
same way that the spectacle of a different form of dress and manners is
disagreeable. A set of schoolboys will persecute a new boy with a new
sort of jacket; they will hardly let him have a new-shaped penknife.
Grown-up people are just as bad, except when culture has softened them. A
mob will hoot a foreigner who looks very unlike themselves. Much of the
feeling of ‘earnest believers’ is, I believe, altogether the same. They
wish others to think as they do, not only because they wish to diffuse
doctrinal truth, but also and much more because they cannot bear to hear
the words of a creed different from their own. At any rate, without
further analysing the origin of the persecuting impulse, its deep root in
human nature, and its great power over most men, are evident.
But this natural impulse was not the only motive—perhaps was not the
principal one—of historical persecutions. The main one, or a main one,
was a most ancient political idea which once ruled the world, and of
which deep vestiges are still to be traced on many sides. The most
ancient conception of a State is that of a ‘religious partnership,’ in
which any member may by his acts bring down the wrath of the gods on
the other members, and, so to speak, on the whole company. This danger
was, in the conception of the time, at once unlimited and inherited;
in any generation, partners A, C, D, &c., might suffer loss of life,
or health, or goods—the whole association even might perish, because
in a past generation the ancestors of Z had somehow offended the gods.
Thus the historian of Athens tells us that after a particular act of
sacrilege—a breach of the local privileges of sanctuary—the perpetrators
were compelled ‘to retire into banishment;’ and that those who had died
before the date he is speaking of were ‘disinterred and cast beyond the
borders.’ ‘Yet,’ he adds, ‘their exile continuing, as it did, only for
a time, was not held sufficient to expiate the impiety for which they
had been condemned. The Alkmoônids, one of the most powerful families
in Attica, long continued to be looked upon as a tainted race, and in
cases of public calamity were liable to be singled out as having by their
sacrilege drawn down the judgment of the gods upon their countrymen.’
And as false opinions about the gods have almost always been thought
to be peculiarly odious to them, the misbeliever, the ‘miscreant,’ has
been almost always thought to be likely not only to impair hereafter the
salvation of himself and others in a future world, but also to bring on
his neighbours and his nation grievous calamities immediately in this.
He has been persecuted to stop political danger more than to arrest
intellectual error.
But it will be said,—Put history aside, and come to things now. Why
should not those who are convinced that certain doctrines are errors,
that they are most dangerous, that they may ruin man’s welfare here
and his salvation hereafter, use the power of the State to extirpate
those errors? Experience seems to show that the power of the State can
be put forth in that way effectually. Why, then, should it not be put
forth? If I had room, I should like for a moment to criticise the word
‘effectually.’ I should say that the State, in the cases where it is most
wanted, is not of the use which is thought. I admit that it extirpates
error, but I doubt if it creates belief—at least, if it does so in cases
where the persecuted error is suitable to the place and time. In such
cases, I think the effect has often been to eradicate a heresy among
the few, at the cost of creating a scepticism among the many; to kill
the error, no doubt, but also to ruin the general belief. And this is
the cardinal point, for the propagation of the ‘truth’ is the end of
persecution; all else is only a means. But I have not space to discuss
this, and will come to the main point.
I say that the State power should not be used to arrest discussion,
because the State power may be used equally for truth or error, for
Mohammedanism or Christianity, for belief or no-belief, but in discussion
truth has an advantage. Arguments always tell for truth, as such,
and against error as such; if you let the human mind alone, it has a
preference for good argument over bad; it oftener takes truth than not.
But if you do not let it alone, you give truth no advantage at all; you
substitute a game of force, where all doctrines are equal, for a game of
logic, where the truer have the better chance.
The process by which truth wins in discussion is this,—certain strong
and eager minds embrace original opinions, seldom all wrong, never quite
true, but of a mixed sort, part truth, part error. These they inculcate
on all occasions, and on every side, and gradually bring the cooler sort
of men to a hearing of them. These cooler people serve as quasi-judges,
while the more eager ones are a sort of advocates; a Court of Inquisition
is sitting perpetually, investigating, informally and silently, but not
ineffectually, what, on all great subjects of human interest, is truth
and error. There is no sort of infallibility about the Court; often it
makes great mistakes, most of its decisions are incomplete in thought
and imperfect in expression. Still, on the whole, the force of evidence
keeps it right. The truth has the best of the proof, and therefore wins
most of the judgments. The process is slow, far more tedious than the
worst Chancery suit. Time in it is reckoned not by days, but by years, or
rather by centuries. Yet, on the whole, it creeps along, if you do not
stop it. But all is arrested, if persecution begins—if you have a _coup
d’état_, and let loose soldiers on the Court; for it is perfect chance
which litigant turns them in, or what creed they are used to compel men
to believe.
This argument, however, assumes two things. In the first place, it
presupposes that we are speaking of a state of society in which
discussion is possible. And such societies are not very common.
Uncivilised man is not capable of discussion: savages have been justly
described as having ‘the intellect of children with the passions and
strength of men.’ Before anything like speculative argument can be used
with them, their intellect must be strengthened and their passions
restrained. There was, as it seems to me, a long preliminary period
before human nature, as we now see it, existed, and while it was being
formed. During that preliminary period, persecution, like slavery, played
a most considerable part. Nations mostly became nations by having a
common religion. It was a necessary condition of the passage from a loose
aggregate of savages to a united polity, that they should believe in the
same gods and worship these gods in the same way. What was necessary
was, that they should for a long period—for centuries, perhaps—lead the
same life and conform to the same usages. They believed that the ‘gods
of their fathers’ had commanded these usages. Early law is hardly to
be separated from religious ritual; it is more like the tradition of a
Church than the enactments of a statute-book. It is a thing essentially
immemorial and sacred. It is not conceived of as capable either of
addition or diminution; it is a body of holy customs which no one is
allowed either to break or to impugn. The use of these is to aid in
creating a common national character, which in after-times may be tame
enough to bear discussion, and which may suggest common axioms upon which
discussion can be founded. Till that common character has been formed,
discussion is impossible; it cannot be used to find out truth, for it
cannot exist; it is not that we have to forego its efficacy on purpose,
we have not the choice of it, for its prerequisites cannot be found.
The case of civil liberty is, as I conceive, much the same. Early ages
need a coercive despotism more than they need anything else. The age of
debate comes later. An omnipotent power to enforce the sacred law is
that which is then most required. A constitutional opposition would be
born before its time. It would be dragging the wheel before the horses
were harnessed. The strongest advocates both of Liberty and Toleration
may consistently hold that there were unhappy ages before either became
possible, and when attempts at either would have been pernicious.
The case is analogous to that of education. Every parent wisely teaches
his child his own creed, and till the child has attained a certain age,
it is better that he should not hear too much of any other. His mind will
in the end be better able to weigh arguments, because it does not begin
to weigh them so early. He will hardly comprehend any creed unless he
has been taught some creed. But the restrictions of childhood must be
relaxed in youth, and abandoned in manhood. One object of education is
to train us for discussion, and as that training gradually approaches to
completeness, we should gradually begin to enter into and to take part
in discussion. The restrictions that are useful at nine years old are
pernicious at nineteen.
This analogy would have seemed to me obvious, but there are many most
able persons who turn the matter just the other way. They regard the
discipline of education as a precedent for persecution. They say, ‘I
would no sooner let the nation at large read that bad book than I would
let my children read it.’ They refuse to admit that the age of the
children makes any difference. At heart they think that they are wiser
than the mass of mankind, just as they are wiser than their children, and
would regulate the studies of both unhesitatingly. But experience shows
that no man is on all points so wise as the mass of men are after a good
discussion, and that if the ideas of the very wisest were by miracle to
be fixed on the race, the certain result would be to stereotype monstrous
error. If we fixed the belief of Bacon, we should believe that the earth
went round the sun: if we fixed that of Newton, we should believe ‘that
the Argonautic expedition was a real event, and occurred B.C. 937; that
Hercules was a real person, and delivered Theseus, another real person,
B.C. 936; that in the year 1036 Ceres, a woman of Sicily, in seeking her
daughter who was stolen, came into Attica, and there taught the Greeks to
sow corn.’ And the worst is, that the minds of most would-be persecutors
are themselves unfixed; their opinions are in a perpetual flux; they
would persecute all others for tenets which yesterday they had not heard
of and which they will not believe to-morrow.
But it will be said, the theory of Toleration is not so easy as that
of education. We know by a certain fact when a young man is grown up
and can bear discussion. We judge by his age, as to which every one is
agreed. But we cannot tell by any similar patent fact when a state is
mature enough to bear discussion. There may be two opinions about it.
And I quite agree that the matter of fact is more difficult to discover
in one case than in the other; still it is a matter of fact which the
rulers of the State must decide upon their responsibility, and as best
they can. And the highest sort of rulers will decide it like the English
in India—with no reference to their own belief. For years the English
prohibited the preaching of Christianity in India, though it was their
own religion, because they thought that it could not be tranquilly
listened to. They now permit it, because they find that the population
can bear the discussion. Of course, most Governments are wholly unequal
to so high a morality and so severe a self-command. The Governments of
most countries are composed of persons who wish everybody to believe
as they do, merely because they do. Some here and there, from a higher
motive, so eagerly wish to propagate their opinions, that they are
unequal to consider the problem of toleration impartially. They persecute
till the persecuted become strong enough to make them desist. But the
delicacy of a rule and the unwillingness of Governments to adopt it, do
not prove that it is not the best and the right one. There are already in
inevitable jurisprudence many lines of vital importance just as difficult
to draw. The line between sanity and insanity has necessarily to be
drawn, and it is as nice as anything can be. The competency of people to
bear discussion is not intrinsically more difficult than their competency
to manage their own affairs, though perhaps a Government is less likely
to be impartial and more likely to be biassed in questions of discussion
than in pecuniary ones.
Secondly, the doctrine that rulers are to permit discussion assumes
not only, as we have seen, that discussion is possible, but also that
discussion will not destroy the Government. No Government is bound to
permit a controversy which will annihilate itself. It is a trustee
for many duties, and if possible, it must retain the power to perform
those duties. The controversies which may ruin it are very different in
different countries. The Government of the day must determine in each
case what those questions are. If the Roman Emperors who persecuted
Christianity really did so because they imagined that Christianity would
destroy the Roman Empire, I think they are to be blamed not for their
misconception of duty, but for their mistake of fact. The existence of
Christianity was not really more inconsistent with the existence of the
Empire in the time of Diocletian than in that of Constantine; but if
Diocletian thought that it was inconsistent, it was his duty to preserve
the Empire.
It will be asked, ‘What do you mean by preserving a society? All
societies are in a state of incipient change; the best of them are often
the most changing; what is meant, then, by saying you will “preserve”
any? You admit that you cannot keep them unaltered, what then do you
propose to do?’ I answer that, in this respect, the life of societies is
like the life of the individuals composing them. You cannot interfere
so as to keep a man’s body unaltered; you can interfere so as to keep
him alive. What changes in such cases will be fatal, is a question of
fact. The Government must determine what will, so to say, ‘break up
the whole thing’ and what will not. No doubt it may decide wrong. In
France, the country of experiments, General Cavaignac said, ‘A Government
which allows its principle to be discussed, is a lost Government,’ and
therefore he persecuted on behalf of the Republic, thinking it was
essential to society. Louis Napoleon similarly persecuted on behalf of
the Second Empire; M. Thiers on behalf of the Republic again; the Duc de
Broglie now persecutes on behalf of the existing nondescript. All these
may be mistakes or some of them, or none. Here, as before, the practical
difficulties in the application of a rule do not disprove its being the
true and the only one.
It will be objected that this principle is applicable only to truths
which are gained by discussion. ‘We admit,’ such objectors say, ‘that
where discussion is the best or the only means of proving truth, it
is unadvisable to prohibit that discussion, but there are other means
besides discussion of arriving at truth, which are sometimes better than
discussion even where discussion is applicable, and sometimes go beyond
it and attain regions in which it is inapplicable; and where those more
efficient means are applicable it may be wise to prohibit discussion, for
in these instances discussion may confuse the human mind and impede it
in the use of those higher means. The case is analogous to that of the
eyes. For the most part it is a sound rule to tell persons who want to
see things, that they must necessarily use _both_ their eyes, and rely on
them. But there are cases in which that rule is wrong. If a man wants to
see things too distant for the eyes, as the satellites of Jupiter and the
ring of Saturn, you must tell him, on the contrary, to shut one eye and
look through a telescope with the other. The ordinary mode of using the
common instruments may, in exceptional cases, interfere with the right
use of the supplementary instruments.’ And I quite admit that there are
such exceptional cases and such additional means; but I say that their
existence introduces no new difficulty into the subject, and that it is
no reason for prohibiting discussion except in the cases in which we have
seen already that it was advisable to prohibit it.
Putting the matter in the most favourable way for these objectors, and
making all possible concessions to them, I believe the exceptions which
they contend for must come at last to three.