Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”
- Source
- On Liberty
- Date
- 1859
Meaning of “He who does anything because it is the…”
Mill argues that genuine individuality requires active judgment rather than automatic conformity: a person develops the faculties of choice only by deciding for reasons he has actually examined.
Where does it come from?
On Liberty, Chapter III, “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being”; Project Gutenberg #34901. The sentence follows Mill's list of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity and moral preference as faculties exercised through making a choice.
