Passage (John Stuart Mill, *On Liberty*, 1859, Ch. II): "But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error." The function of the sentence beginning "Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner…" is best described as:
Aintroducing a concession that Mill ultimately accepts.
Bresponding to an anticipated objection from a religious authority.
Cillustrating Mill's main thesis with a concrete example.
Dsetting up a hypothetical that Mill then rejects in order to advance his main claim.
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: D. setting up a hypothetical that Mill then rejects in order to advance his main claim.
The sentence has the classic shape of a **conditional concession** that the author plans to overturn: *if* opinions were merely private possessions, *then* numbers would matter. The very next sentence — beginning "**But** the peculiar evil…" — denies the antecedent and re-anchors the argument on the wider injury to humanity.
- **A** is wrong because Mill rejects the hypothetical ("But…"), he does not accept it.
- **C** is wrong because the sentence is not an *illustration* of his thesis; it is a *contrary* hypothetical introduced to be defeated.
- **D** is unsupported — religion is not mentioned, and the imagined interlocutor of this paragraph is the general reader who might suppose numbers count.
Identifying this rhetorical move (the *concessive feint*) is a recurring GRE RC pattern: a sentence whose function only becomes clear from what follows it.
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