and masculine notion of true tolerance. James
Mill's 'aversion to many intellectual errors, or what he regarded as
such, partook in a certain sense of the character of a moral feeling....
None but those who do not care about opinions will confound this with
intolerance. Those, who having opinions which they hold to be immensely
important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have any
deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a class
and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right, and
right what they think wrong: though they need not be, nor was my father,
insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in their
estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of by the
whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person, being no more
infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people on account of
opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither himself does
them any ill office, nor connives at its being done by others, he is not
intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a conscientious sense
of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom of all opinions is the
only tolerance which is commendable, or to the highest moral order of
minds, possible' (p. 51). This is another side of the co-ordination of
Criticism and Belief, of Liberty and Duty, which attained in Mr. Mill
himself a completeness that other men, less favoured in education and
with less active power of self-control, are not likely to reach, but to
reach it ought to be one of the prime objects of their mental
discipline. The inculcation of this peculiar morality of the
intelligence is one of the most urgently needed processes of our time.
For the circumstance of our being in the very depths of a period of
transition from one spiritual basis of thought to another, leads men not
only to be content with holding a quantity of vague, confused, and
contradictory opinions, but also to invest with the honourable name of
candour a weak reluctance to hold any one of them earnestly.

Mr. Mill experienced in the four or five last years of his life the
disadvantage of trying to unite fairness towards the opinions from which
he differed, with loyalty to the positive opinions which he accepted.
'As I had showed in my political writings,' he says, 'that I was aware
of the weak points in democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems,
had not been without hopes of finding me a