




                       CHIPS FROM A GERMAN WORKSHOP

                                    BY

                          F. MAX MUeLLER, M. A.,

               FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE, ETC.

                                VOLUME V.

                       MISCELLANEOUS LATER ESSAYS.

                                NEW YORK:

                         CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

                                  1881.





CONTENTS


I. On Freedom
II. On The Philosophy Of Mythology.
III. On False Analogies In Comparative Theology.
IV. On Spelling.
V. On Sanskrit Texts Discovered In Japan.
Index.
Footnotes






                                    I.


ON FREEDOM.


 Presidential Address Delivered Before The Birmingham Midland Institute,
                            October 20, 1879.

Not more than twenty years have passed since John Stuart Mill sent forth
his plea for Liberty.(1)

If there is one among the leaders of thought in England who, by the
elevation of his character and the calm composure of his mind, deserved
the so often misplaced title of Serene Highness, it was, I think, John
Stuart Mill.

But in his Essay "On Liberty," Mill for once becomes passionate. In
presenting his Bill of Rights, in stepping forward as the champion of
individual liberty, he seems to be possessed by a new spirit. He speaks
like a martyr, or the defender of martyrs. The individual human soul, with
its unfathomable endowments, and its capacity of growing to something
undreamt of in our philosophy, becomes in his eyes a sacred thing, and
every encroachment on its world-wide domain is treated as sacrilege.
Society, the arch-enemy of the rights of individuality, is represented
like an evil spirit, whom it behooves every true man to resist with might
and main, and whose demands, as they cannot be altogether ignored, must be
reduced at all hazards to the lowest level.

I doubt whether any of the principles for which Mill pleaded so warmly and
strenuously in his Essay "On Liberty" would at the present day be
challenged or resisted, even by the most illiberal of philosophers, or the
most conservative of politicians. Mill's demands sound very humble to
_our_ ears. They amount to no more than this, "that the individual is not
accountable to society for his actions so far as they concern the
interests of no person but himself, and that he may be subjected to social
or legal punishments for such actions only as are prejudicial to the
interests of others."

Is there any one here present who doubts the justice of that principle, or
who would wish to reduce the freedom of the individual to a smaller
measure? Whatever social tyranny may have existed twenty years ago, when
it wrung that fiery protest from the lips of John Stuart Mill, can we
imagine a state of society, not totally Utopian, in which the individual
man need be less ashamed of his social fetters, in which he could more
freely utter all his honest convictions, more boldly propound all his
theories, more fearlessly agitate for their speedy realization; in which,
in fact, each man can be so entirely himself as the society of England,
such as it now is, such as generations of hard-thinking and hard-working
Englishmen have made it, and left it as the most sacred inheritance to
their sons and daughters?

Look through the whole of history, not excepting the brightest days of
republican freedom at Athens and Rome, and you will not find one single
period in which the measure of liberty accorded to each individual was
larger than it is at present, at least in England. And if you wish to
realize the full blessings of the time in which we live, compare Mill's
plea for Liberty with another written not much more than two hundred years
ago, and by a thinker not inferior either in power or boldness to Mill
himself. According