On Being a Great Thinker

(John Stuart Mill)

       "No one can be a great thinker who does not realize that as a thinker, it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.   Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.   Not that it solely or chiefly to form great thinkers that freedom of thinking is required.   On the contrary, it is as much or even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature of which they are capable.  There have been, and may again be great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery.  But there never has been nor ever will be in that atmosphere an intellectually active people.  Where any people have made even a temporary approach to such a character, it has been because the dread of heterodox speculation was—for a time suspended.  Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed, where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, one cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable!   Never when controversy avoided the subjects which are large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm, were the minds of people stirred up from their foundations and the impulse given which raised even persons of the most ordinary intellect to something of the dignity of thinking beings."

        "He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that.  His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them.  But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.  The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment and unless he contends himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts—like the generality of the world—the side to which he feels the most inclination!  Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations.  That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or to bring them into real contact with his own mind.  He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and who do their very utmost for them.  He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of the truth which meets and removes that difficulty!   99 in a 100 of what are ‘educated’ men are in this condition—even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions.  Their conclusions may be true, but they might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them and considered what such persons may have to say.  Consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrines which they themselves profess—they do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred!"