Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-being

Having defended liberty of thought, Mill defends liberty of life. He argues that individuality — the freedom to choose one's own plan of living, according to one's own judgment and character — is not merely tolerated but actively valuable. A person who lets custom choose for him exercises no faculty higher than the ape-like one of imitation. The faculties — observation, reasoning, judgment, discrimination, even moral preference — are exercised only in making a choice, and they atrophy for want of exercise.

Mill does not celebrate mere eccentricity. He admits that genius is rare and most lives will not be original in any large sense. But society needs the soil in which originality can grow when it does appear, and the same soil — room to be different, freedom to experiment with one's own life — is what allows ordinary character to develop at all. Where eccentricity is feared, the average has already been flattened by the weight of respectable conformity.

Against the pressure of custom, Mill asks for nothing dramatic — only that different experiments in living be permitted to show what they can produce. The eccentric is not the goal but the proof that the space for self-determination remains open. The freedom he defends is not freedom to be like oneself once and for all, but freedom to become someone in the first place. A society that closes that space, however gradually and however reasonably, diminishes every person within it.