As a utilitarian, Mill cannot appeal to any rights of the individual that can be set in opposition to the public welfare. His method is to show that the permanent welfare of the public is bound up with the rights of the individual. Of course, there are occasions on which the immediate expediency of the public would be met by ignoring personal rights. But if the rule of expediency were followed there would be neither right nor law at all. There would be no fixed rules in social life, and nothing to which men could trust in guiding their conduct. For the utilitarian, then, the question of right resolves itself into the question: What claim is it, in general and as a matter of principle, advisable for society to recognize? What in any given relation are the permanent conditions of social health? In regard to liberty Mill's reply turns on the moral or spiritual forces which determine the life of society. First, particularly as regards freedom of thought and discussion, society needs light. Truth has a social value, and we are never to suppose that we are in the possession of complete and final truth. But truth is only to be sought by experience in the world of thought, and of action as well. In the process of experimentation there are endless opportunities of error, and the free search for truth therefore involves friction and waste. The promulgation of error will do harm, a harm that might be averted if error were suppressed. But suppression by any other means than those of rational suasion is one of those remedies which cure the disease by killing the patient. It paralyzes the free search for truth. Not only so, but there is an element of positive value in honest error which places it above mechanically accepted truth. So far as it is honest it springs from the spontaneous operation of the mind on the basis of some partial and incomplete experience. It is, so far as it goes, an interpretation of experience, though a faulty one, whereas the belief imposed by authority is no interpretation of experience at all. It involves no personal effort. Its blind acceptance seals the resignation of the will and the intellect to effacement and stultification.