While Mill at times argued that a good society needed a balance of “Progress” and “Custom,” in the main, he saw custom as the enemy of human liberty, and progress as a basic aim of modern society. To follow custom was to be fundamentally unreflective and mentally stagnant. “The human faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is a custom, makes no choice.”
