John Stuart Mill once said, referring to the different sides in intellectual controversies, they tend to be “in the right in what they affirmed, though in the wrong in what they denied.”
for - quote - right in what is affirmed, wrong in what is denied - John Stuart Mill - adjacency - worldviews - metaphor - blind men and the elephant
Archived version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130825044646/http://www.historytoday.com/frank-prochaska/mills-and-emerson-sense-and-nonsense
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Ryan Holiday</span> in How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book” | Thought Catalog (<time class='dt-published'>08/05/2022 10:19:13</time>)</cite></small>
The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing at about the same time as Hawthorne, made a similar argument. Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by “the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.”
"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable." John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
UTILITARIANISM
Via Stanford Encyclopedia - History of Utilitarianism: "Though there are many varieties of the view discussed, utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences. On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the good of others as well as one's own good."
Système de Politique Positive
A work by Auguste Comte (System of Positive Polity in English) published in 1851-54, which emphasized morality and moral progress as the central preoccupation of human knowledge and effort.
This speculative flourish recalled the famous question that John Stuart Mill said he asked himself as a young man: If all the political and social reforms you believe in came to pass, would it make you a happier human being? That is always an interesting question.
Name /yal05/27282_u00 01/27/06 10:25AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 6 # 6 1 0 1 “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” “Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of plea- sure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of differ- ent physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding di- versity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.” JohnStuartMill, On Liberty (1859