THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALITY IN OPINION. There have been many notable documents in support of the belief that society is the gainer and not the loser by permitting and encouraging individuality in thought and belief. The following, taken from one of the most famous of these, John Stuart Mill's _Essay on Liberty_, was written to illustrate the fatal results of prohibiting dissenting opinions merely because most people think or call them immoral: Mankind can hardly be too often reminded that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time there took place a memorable collision. 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: