[1] An Address delivered on the 20th October, before the Birmingham and
Midland Institute.
[2] Mill tells us that his Essay "On Liberty" was planned and written
down in 1854. It was in mounting the steps of the Capitol in January,
1855, that the thought first arose of converting it into a volume, and
it was not published till 1859. The author, who in his Autobiography
speaks with exquisite modesty of all his literary performances, allows
himself one single exception when speaking of his Essay "On Liberty."
"None of my writings," he says, "have been either so carefully composed
or so sedulously corrected as this." Its final revision was to have been
the work of the winter of 1858 to 1859 which he and his wife had
arranged to pass in the South of Europe, a hope which was frustrated by
his wife's death. "The 'Liberty,'" he writes, "is likely to survive
longer than anything else that I have written (with the possible
exception of the 'Logic'), because the conjunction of her mind with mine
has rendered it a kind of philosophic textbook of a single truth, which
the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring
out into stronger relief: the importance, to man and society, of a large
variety of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to
expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions."
[3] Herzen defined Nihilism as "the most perfect freedom from all
settled concepts, from all inherited restraints and impediments which
hamper the progress of the Occidental intellect with the historical drag
tied to its foot."
[4] Ueber die Akademische Freiheit der Deutschen Universitaten, Rede
beim Antritt des Rectorats an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in
Berlin, am 15 October 1877, gehalten von Dr. H. Helmholtz.
[5] Ueber eine Akademie der Deutschen Sprache, p. 34. Another keen
observer of English life, Dr. K. Hillebrand, in an article in the
October number of the _Nineteenth Century_, remarks: "Nowhere is there
greater individual liberty than in England, and nowhere do people
renounce it more readily of their own accord."
[6] Spencer Hardy, "Manual of Buddhism," p. 391.
[7] _Ibid._, p. 39.
[8] "As one generation dies and gives way to another, the heir of the
consequences of all its virtues and all its vices, the exact result of
pre-existent causes, so each individual, in the long chain of life,
inherits all, of good or evil, which all its predecessors have done or
been; and takes up the struggle towards enlightenment precisely there
where they left it."--Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 104.
[9] Bunsen, "Egypt," ii., pp. 77, 150.
[10] Memoire sur l'Origine Egyptienne de l'Alphabet Phenicien, par E. de
Rouge, Paris, 1874.
[11] See Brandis, "Das Munzwesen."
[12] "Is it not almost a self-evident axiom, that the State should
require and compel the education, up to a certain standard, of every
human being who is born its citizen? Yet who is there that is not afraid
to recognize and assert this truth?"--_On Liberty_, p. 188.
[13] _Times_, January 25, 1879.
[14] "Sacred Books of the East," edited by M. M., vols. i., ii., iii.;
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1879.
[15] "Computation or Logic," t. iii., viii., p. 36.
[16] Lectures on Mr. Darwin's "Philosophy of Language," _Fraser's
Magazine_, June, 1873, p. 26.
[17] Prantl, "Geschichte der Logik," vol. i. p. 121.
[18] L. Noire, "Padagogisches Skizzenbuch," p. 157; "Todtes Wissen."
[19] Mill, "On Liberty," p. 193.
[20] Zeller, "Ueber den wissenschaftlichen Unterricht bei den Griechen,"
1878, p. 9.