I take this view on three grounds. I believe, first, that it is socially most important to leave the individual as uninhibited as possible in forming his own way of life, granted, of course, that he is adult and mature. To shelter him at every point from experience which, if carried to excess, may harm him is not only impossible, but also dangerous. It makes him pass his life under the aegis of a system of fear-sanctions which, for the most part, he will be quite unable to sublimate, and the result will be that sense of continuous frustration which is fatal to freedom. I must, in general, learn my own limitations by experimentation with myself. I cannot pass my life adjusting my conduct to standards and habits which represent the experiments of other people. For the reasons which make the results of particular experiments seem to them convincing, I may in my own case regard as completely unsuccessful. To insist that their rule of life is to be mine is, normally, to destroy my personality. It is to compel me to live at the behest of others even where I can discover no ground for the behest. Most people would agree that a statute compelling an atheist to go to church was utterly foolish. His absence does not affect the salvation of any other person. His presence there does him no good because his mood is inevitably one of gnawing indignation at being compelled to participate in ceremonies that have no meaning for him. Either he will invent excuses which enable him to stay away, or he will adopt an aggressive disbelief which makes him a source of offence to the faithful. He loses, that is, the habit of truth, on the one hand, or the capacity to give and take which makes for decent citizenship, on the other. Both forms of behaviour do real injury to him; neither produces an attitude of conviction. From the angle of character, the only rules of conduct in this realm that work, are those that are self-imposed. And these, so far as I know, are the invariable outcome of experiment made by oneself with one’s own personality.