DR. STOCKMANN. Yes, yes, you can shout me down, but you cannot gainsay me. The majority has _might_—unhappily—but _right_ it has not. It is I, and the few, the individuals, that are in the right. The minority is always right. _Renewed uproar._ HOVSTAD. Ha ha! Dr. Stockmann has turned aristocrat since the day before yesterday! DR. STOCKMANN. I have said that I have no words to waste on the little, narrow-chested, short-winded crew that lie in our wake. Pulsating life has nothing more to do with them. I am speaking of the few, the individuals among us, who have made all the new, germinating truths their own. These men stand, as it were, at the outposts, so far in the van that the compact majority has not yet reached them—and _there_ they fight for truths that are too lately born into the world’s consciousness to have won over the majority. HOVSTAD. So the Doctor’s a revolutionist now! DR. STOCKMANN. Yes, by Heaven, I am, Mr. Hovstad! I am going to revolt against the lie that truth belongs exclusively to the majority. What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths so stricken in years that they are sinking into decrepitude. When a truth is so old as that, gentlemen, it’s in a fair way to become a lie. [_Laughter and jeers._ DR. STOCKMANN. Yes, yes, you may believe me or not, as you please; but truths are by no means the wiry Methusalehs some people think them. A normally-constituted truth lives—let us say—as a rule, seventeen or eighteen years; at the outside twenty; very seldom more. And truths so patriarchal as that are always shockingly emaciated; yet it’s not till then that the majority takes them up and recommends them to society as wholesome food. I can assure you there’s not much nutriment in that sort of fare; you may take my word as a doctor for that. All these majority-truths are like last year’s salt pork; they’re like rancid, mouldy ham, producing all the moral scurvy that devastates society. ASLAKSEN. It seems to me that the honourable speaker is wandering rather far from the subject. BURGOMASTER. I beg to endorse the Chairman’s remark. DR. STOCKMANN. Why you’re surely mad, Peter! I'm keeping as closely to my text as I possibly can; for my text is precisely this—that the masses, the majority, this devil’s own compact majority—it’s that, I say, that’s poisoning the sources of our spiritual life, and making a plague-spot of the ground beneath our feet. HOVSTAD. And you make this charge against the great, independent majority, just because they have the sense to accept only certain and acknowledged truths? DR. STOCKMANN.