What his wife really was to Mill, we shall, perhaps, never know. But that she was an actual and vivid force, which roused the latent enthusiasm of his nature, we have abundant evidence. And when she died at Avignon, though his friends may have regained an almost estranged companionship, Mill was, personally, the poorer. Into the sorrow of that bereavement we cannot enter: we have no right or power to draw the veil. It is enough to quote the simple words, so eloquent of an unspoken grief--"I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest manner, what that loss was and is. But because I know that she would have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of what life I have left, and to work for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived from thoughts of her, and communion with her memory." W. L. COURTNEY. LONDON, _July 5th, 1901_. FOOTNOTES: [1] _Life of John Stuart Mill_, chapter vi. (Walter Scott.) [2] _Autobiography_, p. 190. [3] _Ibid._, p. 242. [4] _Autobiography_, pp. 246, 247. [5] Cf. an instructive page in the _Autobiography_, p. 252. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE INTRODUCTORY 1 CHAPTER II. OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 28 CHAPTER III. OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING 103 CHAPTER IV. OF THE LIMITS TO THE AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL 140 CHAPTER V. APPLICATIONS 177 The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.--WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT: _Sphere and Duties of Government_. ON LIBERTY. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilised portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires a different and more fundamental treatment.