They will not, because they cannot, modify my beliefs in the
matter by a single iota. One result therefore of intolerance is to make
hypocrites. On this, as on the rest of the grounds which vindicate the
doctrine of liberty, a man who thought himself infallible either in
particular or in general, from the Pope of Rome down to the editor of
the daily newspaper, might still be inclined to abstain from any form of
compulsion. The only reason to the contrary is that a man who is so
silly as to think himself incapable of going wrong, is very likely to be
too silly to perceive that coercion may be one way of going wrong.

The currency of the notion that earnest sincerity about one's opinions
and ideals of conduct is inseparably connected with intolerance, is
indirectly due to the predominance of legal or juristic analogies in
social discussion. For one thing, the lawyer has to deal mainly with
acts, and to deal with them by way of repression. His attention is
primarily fixed on the deed, and only secondarily on the mind of the
doer. And so a habit of thought is created, which treats opinion as
something equally in the sphere of coercion with actions. At the same
time it favours coercive ways of affecting opinion. Then, what is still
more important, the jurist's conception of society has its root in the
relation between sovereign and subject, between lawmaker and those whom
law restrains. Exertion of power on one hand, and compliance on the
other--this is his type of the conditions of the social union. The
fertility and advance of discussion on social issues depends on the
substitution of the evolutional for the legal conception. The lawyer's
type of proposition is absolute. It is also, for various reasons which
need not be given here, inspired by involuntary reference to the lower,
rather than to the more highly developed, social states. In the lower
states law, penalties, coercion, compulsion, the strong hand, a sternly
repressive public opinion, were the conditions on which the community
was united and held together. But the line of thought which these
analogies suggest, becomes less and less generally appropriate in social
discussion, in proportion as the community becomes more complex, more
various in resource, more special in its organisation, in a word, more
elaborately civilised. The evolutionist's idea of society concedes to
law its historic place and its actual part. But then this idea leads
directly to a way of look