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 the Cornell University Library. 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029045933 
 
"Great Writers." 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 PROFESSOR ERIC S. ROBERTSON, M.A. 
 
 LIFE OF MILL. 
 
LIFE 
 
 OF 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL 
 
 Wy'LV COURTNEY 
 
 LONDON 
 
 WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE 
 
 NEW YORK : THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 TORONTO : W. J. GAGE AND CO. 
 
 188a 
 
 (All rights reserved?) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Character of James Mill ; different estimates by friends and 
 foes ; external events of James Mill's life ; inner life ; his 
 friends ; unamiability in domestic life ; intellectual work ; 
 chief characteristic of James Mill a. certain hardness of 
 fibre ; the eighteenth-century spirit ; James Mill's logical 
 precision and analytic ingenuity equally unfortunate ; cold 
 rationalism and its effects ; important influence of James 
 Mill, both in the political and in the intellectual world . 1 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 A disquisitive youth ; early education given by his father to 
 J. S. Mill ; Greek, Latin, and mathematics ; estimate of 
 the value of this early education ; unsympathetic character 
 of the father ; effects on Mill's demeanour; foreign visit to 
 the family of Sir Samuel Bentham ; incidents of the visit ; 
 interest taken in the French nation ; return to England 
 and commencement of public life as a clerk in India 
 House ... . ... 29 
 
CONTENTS. 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 -EAIflE 
 
 Importance of the fifteen years which succeeded Mill's entry 
 into public life ; sketch of Mill's position at the outset of 
 his career; Democrat, Empiricist, Benthamite, Utilitarian ; 
 Utilitarian Society and Speculative Debating Society ; 
 ■ youthful intolerance of Mill and his friends ; crisis in 
 mental history, its causes and its nature ; friendship with 
 Maurice and Sterling ; reality of the changewhich had 
 come over Mill ; artic le on Bentham, and depreciatory 
 estimate of his character ; appreciation of Wordsworth's 
 poetry ; article on Coleridge ; change in views of the 
 method of political study ; advocacy of Female Suffrage 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Illness ; preparation for Logic ; Mill at Falmouth with the Fox 
 family ; description of Mill by Dr. Bain ; Mill as 
 described by Caroline Fox ; death of Henry Mill ; Mill as 
 a botanist ; publication of Mill's Logic ; its reception and 
 its general character ; outline of its contents ; value as a 
 handbook of scientific method ; criticism of Mill's 
 position ; his theory of inference ; treatment of the belief 
 in natural uniformity ; of geometrical axioms ; of cause 
 and effect ; of the science of sociology, as dependent on I 
 a science of character. ....... — 6g 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Literary work intervening between the Logic and the Political 
 Economy ; friendship and correspondence with Auguste 
 Comte ; Political Economy published in 1848 ; Mill's 
 Essays on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy ; brief 
 sketch of development of economic doctrine ;| the 
 mercantile system ; the physiocrats ; Adam Smith ; 
 
CONTENTS. 7 
 
 principles of Ricardo and Malthus in Mill ; otheif 
 influences acting on Mill ; criticism of Mill's views ; 
 relation of political economy to sociology ; method of 
 the science ; tendencies to socialism ; importance of the 
 moral element in future economic study 90 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Temporary failure of energy after 1848 ; illness ; petition to 
 Parliament on behalf of East India Company ; introduction 
 to Mrs. Taylor and its results ; exaggerated language of 
 Mill ; different verdicts on Mrs. Taylor ; marriage with 
 Mill, and death ; attempted explanation of Mill's estimate 
 of his wife's genius ; actual contributions on her part to his 
 works ; grief of Mill at her death no 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Second harvest of intellectual toil ; Mill's Liberty ; its perma- 
 nent and its relative value ; presuppositions under which 
 the book is written ; Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform 
 and Representative Government published ; Utilitarianism, 
 Mill's ethical treatise ; dif ference in character of Mill's 
 utilitarian yiewsjmd Benthani!s_i_criticism of the book ; 
 Examination of Sir William Hamilton published ; its 
 general character ; dislike of Mansel's views ; Mill at 
 Avignon 123 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Plato on philosophers ; Mr. Gladstone's judgment of Mill as a 
 politician; " saint of rationalism ; " history of candidature 
 at Westminster, and election to parliament ; Mill's first 
 
8 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 session (1866), and his early speeches; the attempted pro- 
 secution of Governor Eyre ; Mill's attitude on the question 
 of the Jamaica insurrection ; charge of Chief-Justice 
 Cockburn; attempted Reform meeting at Hyde Park; 
 destruction of railings ; Mill dissuades the Reformers from 
 a second meeting ; session of 1867 ; the right of women to 
 vote ; Mill's views on the Irish question ; pamphlet on 
 England and Ireland ; Mill at St. James's Hall ; other 
 speeches of Mill ; election of 1868 ; defeat of Mill at West- 
 minster ; reasons for defeat ; Mill in the House ; Mill as 
 an orator 14° 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Mill's work during recess ; address to the students at St. 
 Andrews ; Mill's edition of the Analysis of the Human 
 Mind published ; Subjection of Women published ; the _ 
 argument of the book ; Mill in his cottage-life^at 
 Avignon ; he attends Grote's funeral ; dies May 8th, 
 1873 ; the Autobiography and the Essays on Religion 
 published after his death ; the first essay on Nature j 
 the second essay on The Utility of Religion ; the third 
 essay on Tlieism ; importance of the third essay ; 
 summary of chief points in Mill's character ; his receptivity 
 of diverse influences ; destructive and constructive side ; 
 his disinterestedness, courage, and zeal for mankind ; a 
 visit of Mill to Mr. John Morley 160 
 
 INDEX 179 
 
 APPENDIX (I.) 189 
 
 (II.) 191 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
NOTE 
 
 IT is needless to say that the following pages are 
 largely indebted to J. S. Mill's Autobiography, and 
 to Dr. Bain's two works, James Mill: a Biography, 
 and J. S. Mill : a Criticism. Besides these, I have 
 found much that was valuable for my purpose in 
 Caroline Fox's Journals and Letters ; Professor Minto's 
 article in the Encyclopedia Britannica ; and occasional 
 articles by Mr. Morley in the Fortnightly Review. I 
 ought also especially to acknowledge the courtesy of 
 the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, who was good enough 
 to write a letter to me on Mill's career in Parliament. 
 To friends who have helped me here and there in the 
 following pages by kindly criticism, I need not offer any 
 public recognition of my gratitude. 
 
 Oxford, November 1888. 
 
John Stuart Mill. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE FATHER. 
 
 THERE are many points of similarity, as well as of 
 contrast, between the two Mills — father and son 
 — both in character, circumstances, and life. But 
 while in the one case the parentage is an important 
 element, in the other it has, apparently, no appreciable 
 influence. Without James Mill the career of John 
 Stuart Mill is almost inexplicable ; but though we know 
 that the father of James Mill was a shoemaker, and that 
 his mother, Isabella Fenton, was a farmer's daughter, 
 it is doubtful whether any stress can be laid on such 
 historical data. There is, as yet, no science of the 
 genesis of greatness. Which of the two men was the 
 more original, and whether both were not men rather of 
 talent than genius, may be considered open questions. 
 James Mill, at all events, was the more consistent 
 thinker. One of the first features in the self-education 
 of John Stuart Mill was the commencement of a revolt 
 against some of the sterner mental discipline which he 
 
12 LIFE OF 
 
 had imbibed from the teaching and practice of the 
 historian of British India. 
 
 It is not easy to rescue the character of James Mill 
 from the depreciation of his enemies, or the laudations 
 of his friends. The more favourable estimate can be 
 perused in the preface which his son wrote to the new 
 edition of the Analysis of the Human Mind. "When 
 the literary and philosophical history of this century 
 comes to be written as it deserves to be, very few are the 
 names figuring in it to whom as high a place will be 
 awarded as to James Mill. In the vigour and penetra- 
 tion of his intellect he has had few superiors in the 
 history of thought : in the wide compass of the human 
 interests which he cared for and served, he was almost 
 equally remarkable : and the energy and determination of 
 his character, giving effect to as single-minded an ardour 
 for the improvement of mankind and of human life as I 
 believe has ever existed, make his life a memorable 
 example. All his work as a thinker was devoted to the 
 service of mankind, either by the direct improvement of 
 their beliefs and sentiments, or by warring against the 
 various influences which he regarded as obstacles to their 
 progress ; and while he put as much conscientious 
 thought and labour into everything he did, as if he had 
 never done anything else, the subjects on which he 
 wrote took as wide a range as if he had written without 
 any labour at all."* Here, at least, is ungrudging praise; 
 but the censure, if not equally precise, is, at all events, 
 equally unsparing. " We have been for some time 
 inclined to suspect," says Macaulay in his essay on 
 Mill's article on Government, " that these people [the 
 * Mill's Analysis. New Edition (1869). Preface, p. xiii. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 13 
 
 Utilitarians], whom some regard as the lights of the 
 world, and others as incarnate demons, are, in general, 
 ordinary men, with narrow understandings and little 
 information. The contempt which they express for 
 elegant literature is evidently the contempt of ignorance. 
 We apprehend that many of them are persons who, 
 having read little or nothing, are delighted to be rescued 
 from the sense of their own inferiority by some teacher, 
 who assures them that the studies which they have 
 neglected are of no value, puts five or six phrases into 
 their mouths, lends them an odd number of the West- 
 minster Review, and in a month transforms them into 
 philosophers. Mingled with these smatterers, whose 
 attainments just suffice to elevate them from the insig- 
 nificance of dunces to the dignity of bores, and to spread 
 dismay among their pious aunts and grandmothers, 
 there are, we well know, many well-meaning men, who 
 have really read and thought much, but whose reading 
 and meditation have been almost exclusively confined to 
 one class of subjects, and who, consequently, though 
 they possess much valuable knowledge respecting those 
 subjects, are by no means so well qualified to judge of a 
 great system as if they had taken a more enlarged view 
 of literature and society."* It is difficult to realise 
 that these are two delineations of the same person. 
 Macaulay, of course, held a brief in this matter, and 
 therefore, if we were compelled to choose between the 
 two verdicts, we should have to accept the less rhetorical 
 estimate ; yet much must be said on the other side, 
 if only to explain the fact that Macaulay's article was 
 one among the other criticisms which induced John 
 * Edinburgh Review. No. 97. March, 1829. 
 
14 
 
 LIFE OF 
 
 Stuart Mill to reconsider and transform the political 
 speculations of his father. 
 
 The external events of James Mill's life can be readily 
 summarised. Born in 1773, at Northwater Bridge, in 
 the parish of Logie Pert, county of Forfar or Angus, he 
 was first educated in Montrose Academy, and formed a 
 valuable and life-long acquaintance with Sir John Stuart, 
 of Fettercairn, who eventually gave a name to his eldest 
 son, John Stuart Mill. In 1790 he went to the University 
 of Edinburgh, at the age of seventeen and a half years, 
 and eight years afterwards was licensed as a preacher. It 
 was in 1802 that he, as is not unusual with Scotchmen, 
 turned his back on his native country, and, in the com- 
 pany of Sir John Stuart, entered London. His London 
 life may be divided into three periods. The period of 
 struggle lasts from 1802 to 1819, when he gained an 
 appointment at the India House. From 1819 to 1829 
 is the time of his greatest and most successful literary 
 activity, the culmination of his career having been 
 reached in 1830. From that time to his death, in 1836, 
 is the period of comparative affluence, when he was not 
 only enjoying the fame of his intellectual work, but had 
 also been made Head Examiner in the India House. 
 But the same period is also one of decreasing energy, 
 due to the gradual decay of his physical powers ; and 
 his death, at the early age of sixty-three, was in large 
 measure caused by the increasing demands which a life 
 of laborious industry had made on his constitution. 
 
 The inner life is more important, and requires a longer 
 notice. We have seen that he was originally trained for 
 the ministry, and that he was actually licensed as a 
 preacher. It is not quite clear when he first adopted 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 15 
 
 the negativist attitude towards religion which he im- 
 parted to his son ; but the change seems to have been 
 due to some of the friendships which he formed at an 
 early period of his life in London, especially the friend- 
 ship with the South American patriot, General Miranda.* 
 His chief friends from 1810 onwards were Jeremy 
 Bentham, Ricardo, Brougham, George Grote, Joseph 
 Hume, William Allen, the Quaker and philanthropist, 
 and the radical tailor of Charing Cross, Francis Place. 
 With all of these he worked in common ; most of all, 
 perhaps, with Bentham. With Bentham he lived in 
 closest intimacy : he stayed with him both at Barrow 
 Green and at Ford Abbey, and consoled himself in 18 12 
 with the reflection that if he died, his son would be left 
 in Bentham's hands. Doubtless he gained from, as well 
 as imparted to, Bentham's circle of intimate friends 
 many of those ruling conceptions, both in morals and in 
 practical life, which were held by the so-called Utilitarian 
 school ; and freedom of thought on religious subjects 
 would, of course, be included in the intellectual pro- 
 gramme. Yet there were discords even in the generally 
 harmonious relationship with Bentham. We know that 
 on one occasion Mill had to write a dignified letter to 
 Bentham, suggesting that it would be better for both 
 parties if they saw each other less frequently; and though 
 the breach was temporarily closed, Bentham appears to 
 have made remarks about his friend in private conversa- 
 tions which, if they were not actually inaccurate, were 
 certainly ill-natured. He made, for instance, the charge 
 against Mill's political opinions that they resulted less 
 
 * So Mill himself told an intimate friend, Walter Coulson. Cf. 
 Bain's James Mill, p. 89. 
 
1 6 LIFE OF 
 
 from love for the many than from hatred of the few — an 
 opinion which John Stuart Mill indignantly repudiated 
 on behalf of his father. Another criticism on his social 
 demeanour is curious. " He will never," says Bentham, 
 "willingly enter into discourse with me. When he 
 differs, he is silent. He is a character. He expects to 
 subdue everybody by his domineering tone, to convince 
 everybody by his positiveness. His manner of speaking 
 is oppressive and overbearing. He comes to me as if 
 he wore a mask on his faee."* Some of this criticism 
 is transparently false, for on all sides it was allowed 
 that Mill was a brilliant conversationalist. But Lord 
 Brougham, in the introduction to his speech on Law 
 Reform (February 7, 1828), in the midst of a general 
 eulogy on his friend, remarks that " he had something of 
 the dogmatism of his school ; " and the ' mask on his 
 face' receives a pathetic illustration in the comments 
 which his son afterwards made on his diligent conceal- 
 ment of a real warmth of feeling towards his children. 
 There can be no doubt that there was a certain asperity 
 of manner in his ordinary demeanour, and it served to 
 mar much of the domestic happiness of his family. In 
 1805 he married Harriet Burrow, a girl of unusual 
 beauty, from whom John Stuart derived his aquihne 
 type of face ; but, according to Dr. Bain, the union was 
 never happy, and there was disappointment on both 
 sides. A glimpse of the domestic life at Queen's 
 Square, in 1830, when there was a family of nine, the 
 eldest twenty-four and the youngest six years of age, fails 
 to give a pleasing impression. After John, we are told, 
 
 * Quoted from Bowrmg's Life of Bentham, by Bain : James 
 Mill, Appendix, 463. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 17 
 
 the next elder children seem to have disappointed their 
 father, and he never looked upon them with com- 
 placency. The son speaks of his father as " the most 
 impatient of men," and it is clear that though he could 
 exercise perfect self-control in his intercourse with 
 the world, he did not care to restrain the irritability 
 of his temper at home. The following sentences 
 from Dr. Bain's biography need no comment. " In 
 his advancing years, as often happens, he courted 
 the affection of the younger children, but their 
 love to him was never wholly unmingled with fear, 
 for, even in his most amiable moods, he was not 
 to be trifled with. His entering ' the room where 
 the family was assembled was observed by strangers 
 to operate as an immediate damper. This was not 
 the worst. The one really disagreeable trait in Mill's 
 character, and the thing that has left the most painful 
 memories, was the way that he allowed himself to speak 
 and behave to his wife and children before visitors. 
 When we read his letters to friends, we see him acting 
 the family man with the utmost propriety, putting 
 forward his wife and children into their due place ; 
 but he seemed unable to observe this part in daily 
 intercourse."* 
 
 It is pleasant to turn from this side of his character to 
 his intellectual work. His great work, carried out in the 
 midst of pecuniary difficulties and manifold interruptions, 
 was the History of India, which was published in 1817, 
 and seems to have secured for him a post in the 
 India House two years afterwards. This was succeeded 
 by the Elements of Political Economy in 1821, and a 
 
 * Bain's James Mill, p. 334. 
 2 
 
1 8 LIFE OF 
 
 series of most important articles in the supplement to the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica, of which the most famous was 
 the one on "Government." It is not too much to say 
 that the essay on Government became the text-book of 
 philosophic radicalism for the whole school of Ben- 
 thamites and Utilitarians, and was in large measure 
 instrumental in that formation of progressive opinion 
 which culminated with the Reform Bill. In 1822 Mill 
 began his chief philosophical treatise, The Analysis of the 
 Human Mind, which was not published till 1829. It is 
 an enquiry into mental phenomena on the lines of the 
 English school of Locke and Hume, and is especially 
 remarkable for the use made of Hartley's principle of the 
 Association of Ideas. The next few years witnessed a rapid 
 rise in official position at the India House, and a brilliant 
 series of essays, principally published in the Westminster 
 Review. In 1824, he attacked the Edinburgh and the 
 Quarterly in a couple of articles, which signalised the 
 position of the new democratic school as against the 
 Whigs on the one hand and the Tories on the other. 
 The following year was remarkable for the foundation of 
 the University of London, towards which Mill lent a 
 helping hand, and for a destructive criticism on Southey's 
 Book of the Church, in which Mill revealed the width of 
 his divergence from the views of orthodoxy and the eccle- 
 siastical establishment. The Fragment on Mackintosh 
 was published in 1835, and offended even his friends by 
 the violence of its attack on Mackintosh's ethical philo- 
 sophy. An article on the Church and its reform in the 
 London Review was succeeded by one on Law Reform 
 in the same periodical. The last year of his life, 1836, was 
 marked by two essays, one on Aristocracy, the other a 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 19 
 
 dialogue, " Whether Political Economy is Useful," com- 
 posed in the midst of considerable physical suffering, to 
 which he succumbed on June 23rd. His career at the 
 India House had been uniformly successful. Appointed 
 an assistant to the Examiner of Indian Corres- 
 pondence, at a salary of ^800 a-year in 1819, he 
 became second assistant in 182 1 with a salary of ^1000. 
 Two years afterwards he obtained a further rise to 
 ^1200; a vacancy, which was thus created, leading to 
 John's appointment as a junior clerk. In 1830 he was 
 made Examiner, with a salary of ^1900, which was 
 subsequently raised to ^2000 on the 17th February, 
 1836, four months before his death. At their father's 
 death, all his nine children were alive. The second son, 
 James, had gone to India with an appointment in the 
 Civil Service, but the rest were at home, and had been so 
 almost throughout. None of the children, however, seem 
 to have been constitutionally strong. The eldest girl, 
 Wilhelmina, named after Sir John Stuart's daughter, 
 the heroine of the passion of Scott, died in 1861 ; James 
 "died in 1862 ; Henry, the third son, died of consumption 
 at Falmouth in 1840 ; while the fourth son, George, 
 who had entered the India Office, died of disease of the 
 lungs at Madeira in 1853. "It is apparent,'' says Dr. 
 Bain, " that while the father's fine quality of brain was 
 not wanting in the children generally, John, besides 
 other advantages, was single in possessing the physical 
 endurance that was needed for maturing a first-class 
 intellect"* 
 
 The chief characteristic of James Mill is a certain 
 hardness of fibre, which explains at once his intellectual 
 * Bain : James Mill, p. 334. 
 
20 LIFE OF 
 
 success, and the limitations of his character. In his 
 political theories, in his studies in jurisprudence and 
 political economy, in his more abstruse speculations, in 
 his modes of instruction, in his relations to his friends, 
 in the daily commerce of his domestic life, in every 
 sphere and mode of his activity, there is one predominant 
 spirit, one note which is recurrent through all the diverse 
 harmonies — the pervading and unmistakable influence 
 of the eighteenth century. Cold, inquisitive, and critical, 
 there is nothing which such a spirit will not analyse, 
 nothing which it will not dare to comprehend. Hence, 
 its clearness, its rationality, its a priori method ; • hence, 
 too, its unimaginativeness, its want of sympathy, its 
 essential one-sidedness. To it the complex motives of 
 humanity appear simple, because, by an arbitrary 
 hypothesis, it can reduce them to one primary motive, 
 the desire for happiness ; psychology is all explained by 
 the theory of association ; morals by the principle of the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number. It is the 
 victim of phrases, of which it ignores the dominion. It 
 appeals throughout to experience, and yet its method is 
 consciously or unconsciously deductive. The very first 
 principles from which it deduces are so little axiomatic 
 that they are just the ones most abundantly controverted. 
 The reason to which it appeals is that which, because 
 divorced from the sphere of feeling and passion, instead 
 of comprehending it in some initial synthesis, is sure to 
 betray its ultimate impotence. Half of the instincts of 
 humanity, poetry and art, religion and literature, remain 
 for it a sealed book, to be either blindly ignored or 
 fatally discarded. Yet within its own realm it is master- 
 fully lucid and self-sufficient. It will brook no sophisms, 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 21 
 
 it will clear away all fallacies, it will admit of no 
 superiors, and if it is not omnipotent, it is because it has 
 undertaken with a single reagent to detect all the elements 
 of a complex universe. 
 
 Abundant evidence can be found in James Mill's career 
 of the existence of many of these traits. He was only, 
 perhaps, in some respects an original thinker ; in other 
 respects he faithfully reproduced the lineaments of his two 
 great teachers, Hartley and Bentham. Indeed, he some- 
 what improved on his examples ; it was his task to cut the 
 edges more clearly and sharply. Those who have read 
 Hartley's Observations on Man, know that he somewhat 
 encumbers his main principle of Associationism by a 
 number of collateral considerations, and enfeebles it by 
 connecting it with a delusive physiological hypothesis of 
 vibrations. In Mill's Analysis, the association principle 
 appears in simple and decisive form ; he will even " better 
 his instruction," for all modes of association are to be 
 reduced to the single one of contiguity. In Bentham, 
 the utility principle is the key to explain both ethics and 
 politics ; it is left to Mill to apply it rigorously to all 
 constitutional forms, and to make a rigidly deductive 
 theory of the one possible government of democracy. In 
 both cases, the logical precision and the analytic excess 
 are equally unfortunate. His attempted simplification of 
 the associative principles in the mind of man to the one 
 case of association by contiguity, is regarded by John 
 Stuart Mill as "perhaps the least successful attempt at 
 a generalisation and simplification of the laws of mental 
 phenomena to be found in the work." Room must, at 
 least, be found for association by means of resemblance, 
 as well as that by means of contiguity. " The attempt 
 
22 LIFE OF 
 
 to resolve association by resemblance into association by 
 contiguity must, perforce, be unsuccessful, inasmuch as 
 there never could have been association by contiguity 
 without a previous association by resemblance. There 
 is a law of association anterior to and presupposed 
 by the law of contiguity — namely, that the sensa- 
 tion tends to recall what is called the idea of itself, 
 that is, the remembrance of a sensation like itself, if such 
 has previously been experienced."* This is, perhaps, a 
 merely technical point, and, as such, one which could only 
 be significant to the psychologist. Shall we look then at 
 the wider issues involved in Mill's essay on Govern- 
 ment ? The whole is an & priori piece of reasoning, 
 which depends on the following principles. The end of 
 government is the securing of the greatest well-being to 
 the people at large. Now, no one acts against his own 
 interest ; therefore, the ends of government are best 
 secured by the people (by means of adequate repre- 
 sentation) governing themselves. Monarchy, aristocracy, 
 oligarchy, are necessarily to be condemned. Why ? 
 Because in each case the governing body will act for its 
 own interest alone, and this interest in the supposed 
 cases is by no means identical with the interest of 
 the people, but rather opposed and antithetical to it. 
 Such is the rigidly logical framework of Mill's political 
 views. Unfortunately, objection can be made both to 
 its method and some of its practical conclusions. Is the 
 method of political inquiry to be thus strictly deductive ? 
 Can we deduce the science of government from the laws 
 of human nature ? Can the teaching of actual experience 
 
 * Mill's Analysis. Edition of 1869, pp. in, 112. Note by 
 J. S. Mill. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 23 
 
 be ignored ? One of the most successful parts of 
 Macaulay's criticism on the essay deals with this point. 
 " How," Macaulay asks, " are we to arrive at just 
 conclusions on a subject so important to the happiness 
 of mankind ? Surely, by that method which, in every 
 experimental science to which it has been applied, has 
 signally increased the power and knowledge of our 
 species ; by that method for which our new philosophers 
 would substitute quibbles scarcely worthy of the bar- 
 barous respondents and opponents of the middle ages, 
 by the one method of induction ; by observing the 
 present state of the world, by assiduously studying the 
 history of past ages, by sifting the evidence of facts, by 
 carefully combining and contrasting those which are 
 authentic, by generalising with judgment and diffidence, 
 by perpetually bringing the theory which we have 
 constructed to the test of new facts, by correcting or 
 altogether abandoning it, according as these new facts 
 prove it to be partially or fundamentally unsound."* Is 
 this merely the facile rhetoric of a professed opponent ? 
 Not so, for when J. S. Mill, in the sixth book of 
 his Logic, came to the construction of his science 
 of Sociology, he adopted the same line of criticism 
 in his chapter on the abstract or geometrical method 
 of the interest philosophy of Bentham's school. The 
 cold rationalism of the father has to be corrected by a 
 return to that experience on which his school professed 
 to rely in their logic and metaphysics. Perhaps a more 
 decisive instance can be found in James Mill's essay 
 on Education, which was published, together with 
 the essay on Government, in the supplement to the 
 * Edinburgh Review, March 1829. 
 
24 LIFE OF 
 
 Encyclopedia Britannica. And here we cannot do better 
 than quote the opinion of Dr. Bain, who, in most points, 
 sympathises with James Mill. " The a priori or deduc- 
 tive handling is here exclusively carried out. The author 
 hardly ever cites an actual experience in education ; far 
 less has he a body of experience summed up in empirical 
 laws to confront and compare with the deductions from 
 the theory of the human mind. One would think that 
 he had never been either a learner or a teacher, so little 
 does he avail himself of the facts or maxims of the work 
 of the school."* In such points we can see how the 
 logical mind of the eighteenth-century rationalist failed 
 to correspond to the many-hued panorama of human life, 
 how it produced a picture with clear, hard, positive 
 outlines, which was untouched with the grace of flowing 
 contours, and unsoftened by the changing effects of mist 
 and cloud. 
 
 The same hardness of fibre can be seen both in his 
 personal demeanour and in his literary tastes. In his 
 relations to his children and his friends he carefully 
 deprecated all feeling and emotion, as we know by the 
 express declaration of his son. Especially in his attitude 
 to his elder son he seems to have been a hard taskmaster, 
 frequently requiring the infant prodigy to produce bricks 
 without straw. The failure in social relations was, above 
 all, due to the defect of imagination and sympathy — a 
 defect which was exaggerated by his careful avoidance of 
 the lighter literature in his private reading. In his 
 commonplace book, which was presented to the London 
 Library by his son, we find numerous citations from 
 historians, from philosophers, from statesmen, from legal 
 * Bain : James Mill, p. 247. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 2 5 
 
 writers, from theologians ; but his reading does not appear 
 to have been extensive in the Belles Lettres, and the few 
 poets to which he does refer he cites for purposes other 
 than the purely literary. We can never imagine him 
 tormenting himself, as his son did during a crisis in 
 his career, with the possible exhaustibility of musical 
 combinations. Still less would he have taken the 
 trouble to write down "Thoughts upon Poetry and 
 its variations," or have appreciated the rising genius of 
 Tennyson, or have attempted to sympathise with Carlyle 
 and Coleridge. His very scepticism is different from ours. 
 He attacks ecclesiastical establishments, and rails against 
 the Church, singling out Laud for an onslaught which 
 equals in fury the subsequent attack on Mackintosh. He 
 began, apparently, by being a Deist, and then, troubled 
 by the moral difficulties of the Divine rule, he became a 
 negationist, pure and simple. But his scepticism was 
 clear and logical, and limited to intellectual issues. It 
 had none of that emotional accompaniment which comes 
 out here and there in J. S. Mill's essay on Theism. It 
 was absolutely devoid of that sense of mystery, and that 
 moral feeling and sympathy for men, which makes so 
 much of the current scepticism of our day sceptical even 
 of itself. 
 
 There were other effects, however, of such a tempera- 
 ment as James Mill's on which it would be unjust not to 
 insist. The same hardness of fibre which made him 
 educate his son according to the principles of pure logic, 
 made him also a valuable instrument in the cause of 
 political reform, and a real source of intellectual inspira- 
 tion among his friends and associates. There can be no 
 question that Mill's writings, both in the Encyclopedia 
 
26 LIFE OF 
 
 and the Westminster Review, gave direction and impetus 
 to the Reform movement, which culminated in 1832. It 
 is doubtful whether any other man at this period could 
 have done so great and so valuable service. Macaulay, 
 it must be remembered, had passed through Mill's 
 school, and had been in close contact with Mill's 
 disciples at Cambridge before he advocated the Reform 
 Bill. Moreover, Mill's logical acuteness and practical 
 ability stood him in good stead. He was neither so 
 crotchetty as Cobbett, nor so violent as Orator Hunt, 
 nor did he so wantonly affront his country's feelings 
 as Richard Carlile. Even Bentham could not have 
 sufficed for the crisis without him. In Bentham's 
 Reform Catechism, which was published in 181 7, there 
 was an outspoken advocacy of Universal Suffrage. Mill's 
 principles also pointed in the same direction, but he was 
 wise enough to see that there were certain preliminary 
 steps which were indispensable, such as a National 
 Education and the enfranchisement of the middle 
 classes. It is an honourable trait in both the Mills, 
 that though they sympathised to the full with the 
 working classes, they refused to hold out to them 
 delusive hopes — such as the raising of wages by legis- 
 lation. To the industrial middle class Mill especially 
 appealed, and it was Birmingham and Manchester which 
 secured the passing of the Reform Bill. 
 
 Nor had Mill inferior influence in the intellectual than 
 he had in the political world. Here the chief agency was 
 the truly Socratic engine of conversation. Let us listen to 
 Grote's testimony in the article he subsequently wrote on 
 J. S. Mill's Examination of Sir W. Hamilton: — "His 
 unpremeditated oral exposition was hardly less effective 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 27 
 
 than his prepared work with the pen; his colloquial 
 fertility on philosophic subjects, his power of dis- 
 cussing and of stimulating others to discuss, his ready 
 responsive inspirations through all the shifts and wind- 
 ings of a sort of Platonic dialogue — all these accom- 
 plishments were, to those who knew him, even more 
 impressive than what he composed for the press. 
 Conversation with him was not merely instructive, but 
 provocative to the dormant intelligence. Of all persons 
 whom we have known, Mr. James Mill was the one who 
 stood least remote from the Platonic ideal of Dialectic — 
 tov 8t86vcu Kai Sexecrdai Xoyov — (the giving and receiving 
 of reasons), competent alike to examine others, or be 
 examined by them in philosophy." The son's tribute is 
 equally impressive : — " My father," he says in the Auto- 
 biography, " exercised a far greater personal ascendency 
 than Bentham. He was sought for the vigour and 
 instructiveness of his conversation, and used it largely 
 as an instrument for the diffusion of his opinions. I 
 have never known any man who could do such ample 
 justice to his best thoughts in colloquial discussion. 
 His perfect command over his great mental resources, 
 the terseness and expressiveness of his language, and the 
 moral earnestness, as well as intellectual force of his 
 delivery, made him one of the most striking of all 
 argumentative conversers. ... It was not solely, or 
 even chiefly, in diffusing his merely intellectual convic- 
 tions that his power showed itself: it was still more 
 through the influence of a quality, of which I have only 
 since learnt tqjippreciate the extreme rarity, that exalted 
 public spirit and regard above all things to the good of 
 the whole, which warmed into life and activity every 
 
28 LIFE OF JOHN STUART MILL. ', 
 
 germ of similar virtue that existed in the minds he came 
 in contact with." The latter lesson was assuredly not 
 lost on the son, and though he was never a conver- 
 sationalist like his father, no man ever displayed a graver 
 or more sustained devotion to the public good. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 "a disquisitive youth" — (1806-1823). 
 
 WHEN Mr. Roebuck came over from America, 
 about 1824 or 1825, to enter the English bar, 
 he called on a relative of his, Thomas Love 
 Peacock, at the India House, where the latter was 
 Examiner of India Correspondence. Mr. Peacock, the 
 friend of Shelley, and himself a poet as well as a novelist, 
 introduced Roebuck to a young man of eighteen, who 
 had but lately become a clerk in the office, and whom he 
 described as "a disquisitive youth." The young man 
 was John Stuart Mill. It is possible to trace some 
 likeness either to Mill, or more probably to his father, 
 in the personage of Mr. MacQuedy, described as a 
 political economist, whom Peacock introduces in his 
 amusing tale of Crotchet Castle. For Mr. MacQuedy's 
 name is derived from the letters Q.E.D., and the 
 economist himself would thus figure — with an unmis- 
 takable reference to his logical attainments — as " the son 
 of a demonstration."* 
 
 * According to a note in an article in the Quarterly Review for 
 October 1888 (p. 357), even the incident of Mr. MacQuedy pro- 
 posing to read his paper after dinner is founded on Peacock's 
 experiences of a dinner with Mill. 
 
3 o LIFE OF 
 
 Be this as it may, the "disquisitive youth" undoubtedly 
 deserved the description which his senior at the India 
 House gave of him. He had, despite his youth, inquired 
 very widely in different subjects, and had already 
 attained a very considerable reputation as a writer, a 
 thinker, and a reformer. He had begun the study of 
 Psychology in the School of Condillac, and continued it 
 in the writings of Locke and Hartley, Hume and Reid. 
 He had perused the history of the French Revolution ; 
 he had studied Law with Austin ; above all, he had a 
 profound acquaintance with the works of Bentham, 
 through the medium especially of Dumont's Traites de 
 Legislation. He had written in the Traveller and in the 
 Chronicle, as well as in the Westminster Review. He 
 had been much exercised with regard to the Richard 
 Carlile prosecutions for heresy, and had formed an 
 Utilitarian Society at Bentham's house. Above all, he 
 was known as the son of James Mill, the celebrated 
 historian of India, and the author of that Essay on 
 Government against which Macaulay was afterwards to 
 bring the battery of his rhetoric ; and in his own person 
 he was talked about as having been subjected to one 
 of the most extraordinary experiments in education 
 which had probably ever been attempted. 
 
 The early education of John Stuart Mill has not yet 
 ceased to be the marvel which it appeared to his own 
 and his father's contemporaries. In the first place, as he 
 himself remarks in his Autobiography, he is " one of the 
 very few examples in this country of one who has not 
 thrown off religious belief, but never had it : I grew up 
 in a negative state with regard to it. I looked upon 
 the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 31 
 
 as something which in no way concerned me. It did 
 not seem to me more strange that English people should 
 believe what I did not, than that the men I read of in 
 Herodotus should have done so. History had made 
 the variety of opinions among mankind a fact familiar to 
 me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact."* But 
 the Agnostic who is not made but born is not, perhaps, 
 so noteworthy as the youth who acquires the secondary 
 education before he gets the primary. A simple enumer- 
 ation of Mill's studies in his earlier years is enough to 
 startle the youngest and most ardent of schoolmasters. 
 Some discussion has lately taken place between the 
 Head-Masters of our Public Schools as to the age at 
 which the learning of Greek should begin, and the 
 reformers seem inclined to fix it somewhat later in the 
 school curriculum than has been hitherto the custom. 
 Mill began Greek at the age of three. From his third 
 to his eighth year (at which time Latin was commenced) 
 he principally studied Greek, English, and Arithmetic, 
 and the Greek came first. " My earliest recollection on 
 the subject is that of committing to memory what my 
 father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek 
 words, with their significations in English, which he 
 wrote out for me on cards. Of Grammar, until some 
 years later, I learnt no more than the inflexions of the 
 nouns and verbs, but after a course of vocables, pro- 
 ceeded at once to translation ; and I faintly remember 
 going through ^Esop's Fables, the first Greek book which 
 I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was 
 the second,"! The following is the list of authors read 
 between 1809 and 1814 — that is, between the years of 
 
 * Atdobiography , p. 43. t Ibid, p. 5- 
 
32 LIFE OF 
 
 three and eight. In Greek : ^sop's Fables, Xenophon's 
 Anabasis, Cyropcedia, and Memorabilia, Herodotus, parts 
 of Diogenes Laertius, part of Lucian, two speeches of 
 Isocrates, and the first six Dialogues of Plato (in the 
 common arrangement), from Euthyphro to Thesetetus. 
 In English we have principally histories : Robertson, 
 Hume, Gibbon, Watson's Philip the Second and Third 
 (his greatest favourite), Hooke's History of Rome (his 
 favourite after Watson), Rollin in English, Langhorne's 
 Plutarch, Burnet's Own Time, the history in the Annual 
 Register. To these, on general subjects, must be added : 
 Millar on the English Government, Mosheim, M'Cree's 
 Knox, the voyages and travels of Anson and Cook, 
 Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Miss 
 Edgeworth's Tales, and Brooke's Fool of Quality. The 
 Arithmetic was the task of the evenings, and Mill admits 
 that he found it disagreeable. 
 
 In his eighth year he began, as has been already said, 
 Latin, and learnt it in conjunction with a younger sister, 
 to whom he taught it as he went on. Other brothers 
 and sisters were successively added to his list of pupils, 
 though the task of instruction seems to have been 
 especially irksome. From 1814 to 18 18 his chief 
 studies were in Latin, in Greek, and in Mathematics. 
 He mentions, amongst others, the following authors : — 
 Virgil, Horace, Phfedrus, Livy, Sallust, Ovid, Terence, 
 Lucretius, Cicero, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Aris- 
 tophanes, Thucydides, Demosthenes, yEschines, Theo- 
 critus, Anacreon, Polybius, and, strangest book of all 
 to read at the age of eleven, Aristotle's Rhetoric, which 
 his father made him analyse and throw into synoptic 
 tables. In Mathematics he learnt elementary geometry 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 33 
 
 and algebra thoroughly, and the differential calculus, and 
 other portions of the higher mathematics, "far from 
 thoroughly." In private work, he especially studied 
 Mitford's Greece, having been warned by his father 
 against its Tory prejudices, and tried to compose a 
 history of the Roman Government, compiled with the 
 assistance of Hooke, from Livy and Dionysius. The 
 last is a significant feature, for what especially interested 
 him was the struggle between the patricians and 
 plebeians, in which he enlisted himself as a champion 
 of the growing democracy. But of other compositions 
 he does not appear to have been fond. He never 
 composed at all in Greek, even in prose, and but little 
 in Latin. He wrote, however, some poetry in the style 
 of Pope's Homer, a book which first revealed to him the 
 beauty of the Greek epic, and translated into English 
 metre some of Horace's shorter poems. In English 
 poetry as such he had no regular education, for his 
 father disliked the English idolatry paid to Shakespeare, 
 and only admired Milton, Goldsmith, Burns, and, to 
 some extent, Spenser. The son added to the meagre 
 list the poems of Sir Walter Scott, Dryden, Cowper, and 
 Campbell. The absence of so much of the humaner 
 studies was compensated for by experimental science. 
 " I never remember being so wrapt up in any book as I 
 was in Joyce's Scientific Dialogues ; — I devoured treatises 
 on Chemistry."* 
 
 From the age of twelve (18 18) a higher course of 
 study begins, especially Logic and Political Economy. 
 In Logic, Mill commences with Aristotle's Organon, and 
 reads it to the Analytica, profiting little, however, by the 
 
 * Autobiography, p. 17. 
 
 3 
 
34 LIFE OF 
 
 Analytica Posterior a, which belong to a branch of 
 speculation for which he was not yet ripe. Latin 
 treatises on the scholastic logic follow, and a work of 
 much higher order of thought, Hobbes' Computatio sive 
 Logica. Mill's practice was to accompany his father in 
 his walks, and to give him a minute account of each 
 day's work, answering his searching questions. The 
 
 v foundations for the first book of his Logic were 
 
 ' undoubtedly laid in these early promenades. " I well 
 
 remember how and in what particular walk, in the 
 
 neighbourhood of Bagshot Heath, [my father] first 
 
 ' attempted by questions to make me think on the 
 subject, and frame some conception of what constituted 
 the utility of the syllogistic logic ; and when I failed in 
 this, to make me understand it by explanations. The 
 explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me 
 at the time ; but they were not, therefore, useless — they 
 remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections 
 to crystallise upon ; the import of his general remarks 
 being interpreted to me by the particular instances which 
 came under my notice afterwards."* Some of the most 
 important dialogues of Plato were read at this time, 
 especially the Gorgias, the Protagoras, and the Republic ; 
 and James Mill's History of India was minutely studied. 
 But in 1819 (age thirteen) the new study is Political 
 Economy. Mill's father took him through a complete 
 course on this subject, beginning with daily lectures in 
 his walks, and then introducing his son to the works of 
 Ricardo and Adam Smith. 
 
 What judgment are we to form of this remarkable 
 education ? It is obvious that we cannot estimate it as 
 
 * Autobiography, pp. iS, 19. 
 
JOHN S TUA R T MI LI, 3 5 
 
 either bad or good, except in reference to the objects for 
 which it was designed, and the purpose it was intended to 
 fulfil. James Mill wished to educate his son to carry 
 out his own work, to make a thinker after his own 
 likeness, and especially to save his pupil from some of 
 what he deemed the wasteful and unnecessary parts of 
 his own development. The son, therefore, need not go 
 through the same steps as the father, but commence 
 almost at the very point which the older thinker had 
 attained. He must begin by being at once a radical 
 politician, a free-thinker, and a logician. From this 
 point of view, the education was a success ; and Mill 
 may be said, like a second Athene, to have, leapt from 
 the head of his father fully armed. But the cost was 
 not inconsiderable, as can be seen from Mill's own 
 admissions in his Autobiography ; and the father 
 himself must have experienced some disappointment 
 when he discovered later on, in 1826 and onwards, how 
 much his son was destined to differ from himself. It is 
 true that the education at least proved that more can 
 be taught in early years than is commonly thought 
 possible, but there are certain considerations tending to 
 lessen the importance of this result which are worth 
 attention, and which, perhaps, make the experiment a 
 warning rather than an example. In the first place, 
 there does not appear to have been much real affection 
 between the teacher and the pupil, though there was, of 
 course, respectful obedience and loyalty. Mill's own 
 words are decisive on this point. " The element,'' he 
 says, "which was chiefly deficient in his [the father's] 
 moral relation to his children was that of tenderness. I 
 do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own nature. 
 
36 LIFE OF 
 
 He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of 
 the signs of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstra- 
 tion, starving the feelings themselves. If we consider, 
 further, that he was in the trying position of sole teacher, 
 and add to this that his temper was constitutionally 
 irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for a father 
 who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, 
 who would have so valued their affection, yet who must 
 have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying 
 it up at its source. This was no longer the case later 
 in life, and with his younger children. They loved him 
 tenderly ; and if I cannot say so much of myself, I was 
 always loyally devoted to him." This is not otherwise 
 than a sad picture, especially in the case of a man who 
 had such singularly fine and strong feeling as John 
 Stuart Mill himself. An even stronger remark follows, 
 which throws light on the fact that there was not much 
 sympathy in the relationship. " I do not believe thai 
 fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with ; 
 but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element ; 
 and when it predominates so much as to preclude love 
 and confidence on the part of the child to those who 
 should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of after 
 years, and, perhaps, to seal up the fountains of frank and 
 spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it 
 is an evil for which a large abatement must be made 
 from the benefits, moral and intellectual, which may 
 flow from any other part of the education."* Will 
 it be said that Mill is only making a generalisation 
 in this passage? It may be so, but, at least, it is 
 a generalisation which appears to be prompted by 
 * Autobiography, pp. 51-53. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 37 
 
 his own specific experience. For, now and again, he 
 seems to suggest that his father was not very just or 
 reasonable in his demands. When he was trying to 
 learn the higher mathematics, he was continually incur- 
 ring his teacher's displeasure by his inability to solve 
 problems for which that teacher did not see that he had 
 not the necessary previous knowledge. At the age of 
 thirteen the unhappy boy is expected to be able to 
 define the word "idea," and incurs much displeasure 
 when he naturally fails. And when he is unlucky enough 
 to use the common expression that something was true 
 in theory but required correction in practice, his in- 
 structor, trained in Bentham's refutation of Common 
 Fallacies, is highly indignant at what he appeared to 
 think was unparalleled ignorance on the part of a mere 
 child. 
 
 Nor can it be doubted that young Mill had to read a 
 great many things which it was impossible that he should 
 understand, and that, therefore, there was actual loss of 
 time in the educational process. He confesses that to 
 read Plato's Thecetetus at the age of seven was a mistake, 
 which it assuredly was. " But my father, in all his 
 teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I 
 could do, but much that I could by no possibility have 
 done." What are we to think of an analysis of 
 Aristotle's Rhetoric made by a boy of eleven, or the first 
 four books of Aristotle's Organon tabulated in synoptic 
 tables a year later? Can it be imagined that the boy 
 could get any real, rememberable knowledge of so 
 difficult an author at so early a period ? It would have 
 been interesting to see the synoptic tables before coming 
 to a conclusion on this matter, but we may perhaps 
 
38 LIFE OF 
 
 throw some light on it in other ways. At the age of six 
 and a-half, after a considerable course of reading in 
 history, Mill begins to write a history of Rome, which 
 has been, fortunately, preserved by a lady friend of the 
 family. The sketch is very short, equal to about four or 
 five printed pages, but, as Dr. Bain (who quotes from it) 
 remarks,* it shows that his enormous reading had as yet 
 done little for him. In 1820, six years after he had 
 begun Latin, when he was fourteen, he writes a Latin 
 letter to his sisters, which is by no means a fine 
 composition, and which would, perhaps, be surpassed 
 by any clever schoolboy of the same age.t Perhaps 
 a more significant comment on his early education is 
 furnished by his later writings. They do not abound, 
 as we should naturally expect from the enormous 
 mass' of literature which he had absorbed, in either 
 direct quotations or those refined allusions to which men 
 of literary attainments and scholars, as a rule, accustom 
 us. On the contrary, they are somewhat poor in this 
 respect. Yet, if ever any man had a chance of showing 
 
 * Bain :/. .S. Mill, p. 3. 
 
 t The following is the letter in question : — Johannes carissimis 
 sororibus Williaminse atque Clarke salutem. Credo vos ltetaturas 
 epistolse conspectu: Latine scvibo pro vobis in' ea lingua exercendis : 
 Gaudeo a patre audiissevos in historia Graeca vosmetipsas instruere: 
 studium euim illud maxime est necessarium omnibus, seu juvenibus, 
 seu puellis. Mihi condonetis quseso si quern errorem in Latine 
 scribendo feci, quippe semper in nomen Gallicum insido, cum 
 quseram Latinum. Ricardo Doaneo dicatis me non locum in 
 litteris his habuisse, ut illi scriberem ; itaque mihi non irascatur. 
 Scribatis mihi precor, si possitis, Latine, sin minus Anglice. 
 Forte hanc epistolam difficilem ad legendum et traducendum 
 invenietis ; sed vos exercebit. Valeatis. xiii. Kal. Aug. 1820. 
 Vesperi ad hora. — 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 39 
 
 extensive reading and wide acquaintance with literature, 
 it was John Stuart Mill. But the fact seems to be that 
 memory and culture depend largely on the practice of 
 the imagination in early years. The youthful mind is 
 not very receptive of facts, but is always alive to the 
 imaginative treatment of facts. Plato, in his Republic, 
 gives utterance to a striking paradox on this matter. 
 When he is discussing the primary education, he says 
 that instruction must first begin with falsehoods, by 
 which he means mythical tales. Now, the culture of the 
 imagination was a necessity which Mill only recognised 
 later, at the time of his so-called crisis. He makes 
 the remark about his father that he had never sufficiently 
 cared for the concrete illustration of the truths'whfiih he 
 desired to instil. " A defect running through his other- 
 wise admirable modes of instruction, as it did through all 
 his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much 
 to the intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied 
 in the concrete." If that was so, have we not here an 
 important commentary on the difference between study 
 and knowledge? Of Mill's study we have enough 
 evidence, but of its results we can not be so sure. 
 There is, at all events, some reason for thinking that less 
 application and a larger imaginative exercise might not, 
 perhaps, have produced so precocious a logician, but 
 would possibly have formed a deeper and more con- 
 sistent thinker. He was aware of this himself when he 
 was talking to Caroline Fox at Falmouth. "This 
 method of early, intense application he would not 
 recommend to others; in most cases it would net 
 answer, and where it does, the buoyancy of youth is 
 entirely superseded by the maturity of manhood, and 
 
40 LIFE OF 
 
 action is very likely to be merged in reflection. . ' I 
 never was a boy,' he said, ' never played at cricket ; it is 
 better to let Nature have her own way.'"* "I never 
 was a boy " is the most pathetic reproach that a son can 
 ever address to his father on the management of his 
 youthful years. 
 
 But James Mill was too much in earnest with his 
 scheme to care much for letting Nature have her own 
 way. If, as has been said, he wished to make his son a 
 logician and a reformer, he certainly succeeded. The 
 early studies in Aristotle and the school-logic, the early 
 acquaintance with the Socratic method of inquiry, gained 
 by a perusal of the Platonic dialogues, the diligent work 
 of comparing Ricardo with Adam Smith — all bore 
 abundant fruit. The first intellectual operation in which 
 the young Mill arrived at any proficiency was, as he 
 himself says, dissecting a bad argument, and finding in 
 what part the fallacy lay. The Socratic " elenchus,'' as 
 an education for precise thinking, took such hold of him 
 that it became part of his own mind. " I do not 
 believe,'' he says, "that any scientific teaching ever was 
 more thorough or better fitted for training the faculties 
 than the mode in which logic and political economy 
 were taught to me by my father. Striving, even in an 
 exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my 
 faculties, by making me find out everything for myself, 
 he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt 
 the full force of the difficulties ; and not only gave me 
 an accurate knowledge of these two great subjects, as far 
 as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on 
 both.'' The worst of early proficiency, however, is its 
 * Journals of Caroline Fox, i., 163, 164. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 41 
 
 effects on manners and behaviour. Mill is so entirely 
 truthful about himself that he himself notices this defect. 
 He says that various persons who saw him in his childhood 
 thought him " greatly and disagreeably self-conceited," 
 though he does not believe that this was really the case. 
 He traces the effect on other people to the fact that 
 he was disputatious, and did not scruple to give direct 
 contradictions to things which had been said in his 
 hearing. Doubtless he acquired this bad habit from 
 having been encouraged in an unusual degree to talk on 
 matters beyond his age, and with grown persons, while 
 the usual respect had never been inculcated on him. 
 It should, however, be added that when he was abroad 
 with Lady Bentham, she took some pains with his 
 manners, and that he took her criticisms very well. In 
 his diary, he remarks that the family of Sir Samuel 
 Bentham were very kind in constantly, without ill- 
 humour, explaining to him the defects in his way of 
 conducting himself in society ; for this, he says, " I 
 ought to be very thankful." But he never was a boy ; 
 no holidays were aHowed him as long as he was under 
 his father ; he could do no feats of skill in physical 
 strength, and knew none of the ordinary bodily exercises. 
 His father saved him, it may be,' from the demoralising 
 effects of school -life, but made no effort to provide him with 
 any sufficient substitute for its practicalising influences. 
 
 The external history of the years up to 1820 was 
 almost entirely uneventful. Born on May 20th, 1806, in 
 the house now No. 13 Rodney Street, Pentonville, Mill 
 lived with his father and his father's friends, Ricardo, 
 Joseph Hume, and Bentham. At the age of three he 
 paid his first visit to Bentham at Barrow Green. When 
 
42 LIFE OF 
 
 five years old he was taken to see Lady Spencer, 
 whose husband, Lord Spencer, was at the head of the 
 Admiralty, and is said to have kept up an animated con- 
 versation with his hostess on the comparative merits of 
 Marlborough and Wellington. In 1814 his family went 
 to stay with Bentham at his new residence, Ford Abbey, 
 in Somersetshire, and just before this date the two 
 Mills and Bentham made an .excursion, which included 
 visits to Oxford, Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and 
 Portsmouth. The tour had an important result for 
 Mill, for at Gosport he made the acquaintance of 
 Bentham's brother, General Sir Samuel Bentham, at 
 that time superintendent of the Portsmouth Dockyard. 
 Mill was, in consequence, in 1820, invited to visit him 
 and his family (consisting of Lady Bentham, one son, 
 George, and three daughters, all older than Mill) for 
 six months in the south of France, a visit which was 
 ultimately prolonged to nearly a twelvemonth. 
 
 Mill wrote a diary of this important event in his early 
 career. He left London on the 15th May 1820, when 
 he was nearly fourteen, travelled to Paris, where he pre- 
 sented an introduction to M. Say, the political economist, 
 and, as it is pleasant to note any childish incident 
 in so grave a youth-time, played on a hot Sunday (May 
 21) at battledore and shuttlecock with Alfred Say, the 
 youngest son of the house. After nine days' stay at 
 Paris, he started by himself to join the Benthams, 
 who were living at a chateau belonging to the Marquis 
 de Pompignan, a few miles from Toulouse. Of the 
 journey, which took four days, Dr. Bain gives the 
 following account.* " Mill makes a blunder in choosing 
 * Bain : /. 5. Mill, p. 12. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 43 
 
 the cabriolet of the diligence, and finds himself in low 
 company. At Orleans, a butcher, with the largest belly 
 he had ever seen, came in and kept incessantly smoking. 
 On the third day he is at Limoges, and breakfasts in 
 company with a good-natured gentleman from the 
 interior ; but his own company does not much improve ; 
 the butcher leaves, but a very dirty fille, with an eruption 
 in her face, keeps up his annoyance. The following day 
 a vacancy occurs in the interior, and he claims it as the 
 passenger of longest standing ; a lady contests it with 
 him, and it has to be referred to the maire, the retiring 
 passenger, a young avocat pleading his case. He is now 
 in good company, and his account of the successive 
 localities is minute and cheerful. He arrives at his 
 destination at two a.m. the 2nd of June, is received 
 by Mr. George Bentham, and meets the family at 
 breakfast." __ 
 
 The daily record of his life contains his items of work 
 and his experiences in the neighbourhood. He appears 
 to have risen early, worked hard at French, Greek, Latin, 
 and the higher Mathematics"; attempted to learn to 
 dance, sing, fence, and ride, but, as he himself says, 
 without obtaining any proficiency in the latter exercises ; 
 and taken every opportunity of extending his acquaint- 
 ance with France, the country, the people, and the 
 institutions. One day reads very much like another in 
 the diary of this studious youth. "July 7 th. Rose 5^ ; 
 five chapters Voltaire till 7 ; till 7^, 46 lines of Virgil ; 
 till 8, Lucian's Jitpiter Confutatus ; goes on a family 
 errand ; music lesson till 9 ; Lucian continued till 9^, 
 and finished after breakfast at 10^ ; a call required him 
 to dress ; read Thomson and made Tables till 1 2% ; 
 
44 LIFE OF 
 
 seven propositions of Legendre ; has him over the 
 coals for his confusion in regard to ratio, — 'takes away 
 a good deal of my opinion of the merit of the work 
 as an elementary work ; ' till i% wrote exercises and 
 various miscellanies ; till 2j^, the treatise on Adverbs; 
 till 3^, Thomson; Livre Geographique and Miscellanies 
 till 5 ; eats a little, dinner being uncertain, owing to a 
 family event ; goes for first lesson to music-mistress, a 
 lady reduced by the Revolution, and living by her 
 musical talents ; henceforth to practise at her house 
 daily from 1 1 to 12, and take a lesson in the evening ; 
 dined on -return, then dancing lesson." The day will 
 serve as a sample for the rest. Mill accompanied the 
 Benthams in an excursion to the Pyrenees, stayed for 
 some time at Bagneres de Bigorre, made a journey to 
 Pau, Bayonne, and Bagneres de Luchon, and ascended 
 the Pic du Midi de Bigorre. He notices himself the 
 impression which this introduction to mountain scenery 
 made upon his receptive mind : " Mais jamais je 
 n'oublierai la vue du cote" meridional ! " He further 
 went to Montpelier, where Sir Samuel had bought 
 the estate of Restincliere. 
 
 Apart from the wider experience gained from this visit 
 to another country, Mill derived other lessons from his 
 stay with the Benthams. He was struck by the differ- 
 ence between the English and French nations, and 
 contrasted their characteristics much to the advantage 
 of the latter. On the one side there ■ was the frank 
 sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse ; 
 on the other, there was the English mode of existence, 
 in which everybody else was either an enemy or a bore. 
 He found, it is true, that in France the bad as well as 
 
JOHN S TUA R T MILL. 45 
 
 the good points, both of individual and of national 
 character, came more to the surface, and broke out more 
 fearlessly in ordinary intercourse, than in England. But 
 while in France the general habit of the people is to 
 show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one 
 towards every other, wherever there is not some positive 
 cause for the opposite ; in England, it is only of the best 
 bred people in the upper or upper-middle ranks that 
 anything like this can be said. From the French society 
 which he saw in Paris in the company of men like M. 
 Say and M. Saint-Simon (the latter of whom he saw but 
 once), he derived his interest in foreign politics, which 
 came out conspicuously in after years. " The chief fruit 
 which I carried away was a strong and permanent 
 interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever after- 
 wards kept myself au courant, as much as of English 
 politics — a thing not at all usual in those days with 
 Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence oh 
 my development, keeping me free from the error always 
 prevalent in England, and from which even my father, 
 with all his superiority to prejudice, was not exempt, 
 of judging universal questions by a merely English 
 standard."* 
 
 Mill returned to England in July 1821, and com- 
 menced with ardour the life of a young man of promise, 
 whom his father was understood to have trained after 
 his own model. The two years before his official life 
 was commenced as a clerk in the India House were 
 spent in numerous studies in history and philosophy, 
 and in literary composition. In 1822, for instance, he 
 read up the history of the French Revolution, studied law 
 
 * Miffs Autobiography, p. 61. 
 
46 LIFE OF 
 
 with John Austin (for he was then intended for the 
 bar), perused and deeply admired Dumont on Bentham, 
 worked through much English philosophy, began his 
 intimacy with Grote, and entered the arena of literary 
 life by writing in the Traveller newspaper. In the same 
 year, having made acquaintance with many young men 
 resident in Cambridge, who afterwards came to London 
 — such as Macaulay, Hyde and Charles Villiers, Strutt 
 (Lord Belper), and Romilly — he went to Cambridge on 
 a visit to Charles Austin, the younger brother of John 
 Austin. This visit is not alluded to in the Autobiography, 
 but Dr. Bain assures us that " the contrast of his boyish 
 figure and thin voice with his immense conversational 
 power, left a deep impression on the undergraduates of 
 the time, notwithstanding their being familiar with 
 Macaulay and Austin." Indeed, Professor Townshend 
 was very anxious to get Mill entered at Trinity College, 
 Cambridge ; but it is equally doubtful whether the father 
 would have consented to this course, or whether the 
 son would have consented to subscribe to the Thirty- 
 Nine Articles. On the 21st of May 1823, however, 
 he was appointed junior clerk in the Examiner's Office 
 at the India House, which effectually precluded other 
 plans for his career. + 
 
 * Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 28. 
 
 t I subjoin some details as to Mill's employment in the India 
 House, taken from Bain's Life of Mill, The clerks in those days 
 had no salary, only a gratuity. For three years Mill had ^30 
 a-year ; at the end of that time he received a salary of ^100, with 
 an annual rise of £10. In 1828 he was put over the heads of all 
 the clerks, and made an Assistant at ^'6oo a-year, being sixth in 
 rank. In 1830 he stood fifth, his father being at the top. Early 
 in 1836 he gained a step, and on his father's death the same year, 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 47 
 
 another. He was then third, but David Hill was made second over 
 his head, Peacock being chief. His salary was now ^1200 a-year, 
 to which, in 1854, a special and personal addition was made of 
 £200 a-year. On March 28, 1856, Peacock and Hill retired 
 together, and Mill was made Examiner, with a salary of £2000 
 a-year. At Christmas 1858, on the transfer of the Company's 
 government to the Crown, he was superannuated on a pension of 
 £1500 a-year. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 CRISIS — (1823-1840). 
 
 THE interest attaching to Mill, not only as a thinker, 
 but as a man, is centred in the fifteen years 
 which succeeded his first entry of the India 
 House. At the commencement of this period he is his 
 father's own son ; at the end of it he has written an 
 article on Bentham, which, by his early friends, was 
 looked upon as almost an apostasy. Amongst the many 
 gifts of Mill's disposition, the greatest, perhaps, was a 
 rare candour and honesty of mind, to which he owes his 
 own somewhat independent position in the ranks of the 
 school to which by inheritance and taste, he belonged. 
 In 1823 he might have been a dogmatist and a bigot ; he 
 seems to suggest, in his Autobiography, that such was 
 the case ; but this was the inevitable intolerance of a 
 precocious youth. He speedily showed himself keenly 
 receptive of influences which came from quarters with 
 which his father could not sympathise, while at the same 
 time he had the moral courage to publish his changing 
 opinions to the world. It is easy, of course, for the 
 critic to point out some of the inconsistencies, begotten 
 of this change, which are to be observed in different 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 49 
 
 parts of his work. It should be no less easy for a 
 biographer to admire that higher inconsistency which is 
 but the synonym of a mental growth — continuous, 
 conscientious, and in the best sense, progressive. 
 
 It is necessary to attempt to sketch the position of Mill 
 at the outset of his public career. Democrat, Empiricist, 
 Benthamite, Utilitarian — -such terms were, doubtless, the 
 current description of him in the mouth of his con- 
 temporaries. We can trace the various features of his 
 character in the successive mental influences which at 
 this time he underwent. In 1822 he first reads the 
 history of the French Revolution. He learns with 
 astonishment that the principles of democracy which 
 in 1822 were in so hopeless a minority everywhere in 
 Europe, had borne all before them in France some thirty 
 years earlier, and had been the creed of the nation. 
 From this time, he tells us, the subject took an immense 
 hold of his feelings. Under the careful training of his 
 father, he had learnt to sympathise with the democracy 
 in Grecian history, and with the struggles of plebeians 
 against the patricians in the] annals of Rome ; but here, 
 close to his own era, he found a triumphant vindication 
 of those very principles with 'which] he felt himself allied. 
 The result was a careful study of the French Revolution, 
 and a design to write something on the subject. The 
 literary harvest was not, however, reaped by Mill himself, 
 but by Carlyle, into whose ^hands Mill seems to have 
 placed a considerable mass of materials. But Mill's own 
 aspirations were now fixed. " Whatjhad happened so 
 lately seemed as if it might easily happen again; and 
 the most transcendent glory I was capable of conceiving 
 was that of figuring, successful or unsuccessful, as a 
 
 4 
 
5 o LIFE OF 
 
 Girondist in an English Convention." The democratic 
 champion was now in the field. 
 
 The same year is the real commencement of his 
 philosophic studies. The choice of works bears the 
 unmistakable imprint of the father's guidance. Locke's 
 Essay on the Human Understanding is succeeded by 
 Helvetius' de l' Esprit, and Hartley's Observations on Man 
 is read side by side with James Mill's Analysis of the 
 Mind, which at this time is on the stocks. These 
 works are all on that side of philosophic thought which 
 is called Empirical, and contain the main principles of 
 the inductive and experiential scheme. There are no 
 such things as innate ideas ; the mind of man before 
 experience comes is a tabula rasa, a blank and character- 
 less piece of paper. How, then, do the successive and 
 fragmentary experiences which come in upon us, through 
 the medium of the senses, crystallise into those abiding 
 thoughts and ideas which we term knowledge? By 
 means of the great mental law of Association, which 
 helps us at once to remember and to reason. Intuition, 
 innate conceptions, a native and a priori reason — all 
 these are meaningless terms. There is no innate sense 
 of Duty, or innate idea of God. But such data have 
 been slowly acquired by successive infiltration of ex- 
 perience, and made compact and solid by means of 
 Association. To these principles Mill swore allegiance, 
 and to most of them he remained constant throughout 
 his philosophic career. The method of study was 
 twofold. In private there was the composition of careful 
 abstracts taken from each chapter as he read ; in public 
 there was discussion carried on among friends, either 
 at the house of Bentham or of Grote. The Utilitarian 
 
JOHN S TUAR T MILL. 5 1 
 
 Society and the Speculative Debating Society were both 
 set on foot at this period, the first in 1823, the second in 
 1825. 
 
 The Utilitarian Society introduces us to a third great 
 influence, perhaps the greatest which Mill recognised, the 
 influence of Bentham. The name itself was a happy 
 piece of nomenclature, which Mill borrowed not from a 
 friend, but an enemy. In one of Gait's novels, The 
 Annals of the Parish, a Scotch clergyman, of which the 
 book purports to be an autobiography, warns his 
 parishioners not to leave the Gospel and become Utili- 
 tarians. With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner, 
 Mill tells us, he seized on the word, and for some years 
 called himself and others by it as a sectarian application. 
 But the idea which the term was meant to convey was 
 entirely due to Bentham. When Mill was reading Law 
 with Austin his father put in his hands Dumont's Traite 
 de Legislation, which interpreted Bentham's principal spec- 
 ulations to the Continent. The effect is best described 
 in Mill's own words.* " The reading of this book was an 
 epoch in my life ; one of the turning points in my mental 
 history. My previous education had been, in 'a certain 
 sense, already a course of Benthamism. The Benthamic 
 standard of 'the greatest happiness' was that which I 
 had always been taught to apply — yet in the first pages of 
 Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. 
 What thus impressed me was the chapter in which 
 Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of 
 reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases 
 like 'law of nature,' 'right reason,' 'the moral sense,' 
 ' natural rectitude,' and the like ; and characterised them 
 * Autobiography, pp. 64-67. 
 
52 LIFE OF 
 
 as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon 
 others under cover of sounding expressions which convey 
 no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as 
 its own reason. It had not struck me before that 
 Bentham's principle put an end to all this. The feeling 
 rushed upon me that all previous moralists were super- 
 seded, and that here, indeed, was the commencement of 
 a new era in thought. The impression was strengthened 
 by the manner in which Bentham put into scientific form 
 the application of the happiness principle to the morality 
 of actions, by analysing the various classes and orders 
 of their consequences. . . . When I laid down the last 
 volume of the Traite, I had become a different being. 
 The ' principle of utility,' understood as Bentham 
 understood it, and applied in the manner in which he 
 applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into 
 its place as the keystone which held together the 
 detached and fragmentary component parts of my know- 
 ledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of 
 things. I now had opinions ; a creed, a doctrine, a 
 philosophy ; in one among the best senses of the word, 
 a religion ; the inculcation and diffusion of which could 
 be made the principal outward purpose of a life." There 
 is no lack here of generous enthusiasm. Nineteen years 
 later we shall find him almost equally enthusiastic on the 
 subject of Comte's Philosophic Positive. 
 
 Mill himself attributes a very large effect to another 
 influence, which is only so far of interest as it seems 
 to throw light either by way of contrast or similarity 
 on his posthumous essays on Religion. He read, at 
 the suggestion of the elder Mill, a book which was 
 avowedly written on the lines of Bentham, entitled The 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 53 
 
 Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness 
 of Mankind, bearing on its title-page the pseudonym of 
 Philip Beauchamp. It was a discussion of the useful- 
 ness of religion rather than of its truth, an inquiry into 
 the effects of belief on the general character and thoughts 
 of mankind at large, without particular reference to any 
 special form of belief except that which might be included 
 under the head of Natural Religion. The conclusion 
 aimed at was an exposure of the hollowness of such 
 Deism as depended on ideas like the course of Pro- 
 vidence in history and the physical world. The result 
 on Mill's mind was simply the deepening of what in the 
 fashionable language of the present day would be called 
 his Agnosticism. It was not merely that any form of 
 revealed Religion failed to satisfy him, but that he 
 acquired a conviction that no religion could be founded 
 on what was vaguely termed the teaching of Nature. 
 Some of the elements of so negativist a creed apparently 
 did not appeal to him in later years, for the tone of his 
 last essay on Religion was, as we know, a surprise, and 
 almost a painful surprise, to his friends. 
 
 With such influences as we have detailed acting on his 
 mind, and with all the advantages of having as his 
 friends Grote and Austin, to say nothing of a man with 
 so assured a reputation as his father now enjoyed, the 
 young Mill was launched into London society as the 
 champion of the new and philosophical Radicalism. He 
 is known as a trenchant writer in literary organs of 
 advanced thought ; he is almost the principal contributor 
 to the new Westminster Review, which was started in 
 declared opposition both to the Quarterly and the 
 Edinburgh ; above all, he is the founder and upholder 
 
54 LIFE OF 
 
 of societies which aim at the regeneration of the social 
 fabric by means of Malthus's population principle and 
 Bentham's greatest happiness of the greatest number. 
 He is the inspiring spirit of the Utilitarian Society and 
 the Speculative Debating Society ; while in moments of 
 leisure he reads and discusses prominent philosophical 
 works with his friends, and in moments of occupation 
 attends to the complicated business of the India House. 
 Such a young man we can readily imagine to figure as a 
 logical reformer among his associates, and as a revolu- 
 tionary firebrand among his opponents. Nor is it hard 
 to estimate the general character of the youthful band 
 which surrounded him, either as personal friends or 
 as satellites. Anyone who has had any personal 
 experience of academic debating societies, or of youthful 
 clubs for the propagation of advanced opinion, can 
 readily produce in imagination the features of these 
 reunions. It may be true that middle-aged men are 
 cynics ; it is abundantly true that young men are 
 doctrinaires. All the good side of adolescent energy 
 goes to the production of such societies — its warmth of 
 feeling, its confident logic, its boundless self-reliance, 
 together with that serene indifference as to the relation 
 of extreme theory to ordinary practice which constitutes 
 at once the charm and the prodigal wastefulness of 
 juvenile speculation. We can imagine the perfervid zeal 
 of Charles Austin, on whose shoulders even Mill places 
 the blame for such poor estimate as Benthamism enjoyed 
 in the world ; and we can sympathise with, though Mill 
 invites us to smile at, that determination to ouirer 
 whatever was by anyone considered offensive in philo- 
 sophical radicalism, which was the badge and emblem of 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 55 
 
 the members of the coterie. Meanwhile there was 
 abundant cleverness in the ranks, though perhaps not so 
 much identity of principles as the world gave them credit 
 for. But it was not long before Mill discovered that 
 sectarianism was foolish. Indeed, he records the usual 
 fate of such societies when he remarks of the one which 
 he championed, that all who had anything in them 
 quickly outgrew their boyish vanity, and those who had 
 not, became tired of differing from other people, and 
 gave up alike the good and the bad of the heterodox 
 opinions they had professed.* 
 
 Carlyle spoke of Mill to Caroline Fox with that 
 magisterial scorn mixed with shrewd penetrative insight 
 which he generally employed in his judgments : " Ah, 
 poor fellow ! he has had to get himself out of 
 Benthamism ; and all the emotions and sufferings he 
 has endured have helped him to thoughts that never 
 entered Bentham's head. However," he continues, " he 
 is still too fond of demonstrating everything. If John 
 Mill were to get up to heaven, he would be hardly 
 content till he had made out how it all was. For my 
 part, I don't much trouble myself about the machinery 
 of the place ; whether there is an operative set of angels, 
 or an industrial class, I'm willing to leave all that"! This 
 was a far better criticism than a previous judgment of 
 Carlyle, when he exclaimed, on reading some of Mill's 
 earlier writings, " Here is a new mystic ! " For it serves 
 to illustrate from the outside those touching self- 
 revelations which Mill has put in the fifth chapter of his 
 Autobiography. What Mill calls " a crisis in my mental 
 
 * Autobiography, p. 79. 
 
 t Journals of Caroline Fox, i. 309. 
 
56 LIFE OF 
 
 history" began in 1826. The year before, when he was 
 only nineteen, had been passed in remarkably laborious 
 industry. His principal occupation had been the editing 
 of Bentham's book on Evidence. His subsidiary work, 
 quite apart from his official duties as clerk, runs as 
 follows : — Parliamentary History and Review started. 
 Writes the following articles — on Catholic Disabilities, 
 on the Commercial Crisis, on Currency, and on the Reci- 
 procity Principle in Commerce. Learns German. Begins 
 morning readings in the Utilitarian Society at Grote's 
 house in Threadneedle Street. Goes with some others 
 to the debates of the Owenites' Co-operative Society. 
 Founding of the Speculative Debating Society. Writes 
 in the Westminster on the Political Economy of the 
 Quarterly, on the Law of Libel (?), and on the Game 
 Laws (?) [number for January 1826]. Here was a list 
 which was enough to tax even so untiring a brain as 
 Mill's. Yet, perhaps, it is a prosaic opinion to attribute 
 the mental crisis, as Dr. Bain does, principally to 
 physical causes and to the overworking of the brain. 
 Mill treats his malady almost entirely on the subjective 
 side, and that he passed through some kind of a spiritual 
 crisis can hardly be doubted by anyone who studies its 
 sequel in the altered tone of his later writings. Carlyle 
 was undoubtedly right, he had to get himself out of Ben- 
 thamism ; and the process was rendered doubly difficult 
 and painful owing to the respect, and admiration he 
 entertained for the Benthamism of his father. When 
 the light of newer thoughts breaks upon cherished' 
 opinions, a mental tragedy, which is by no means the 
 less real because it is subdued, makes havoc of a man's 
 peace and self-control. 
 
JOHN S TUA R T MILL. 5 7 
 
 Mill's own graphic account of himself at this period 
 has often been quoted, but will bear quoting again as 
 a most interesting piece of psychological analysis: — "I 
 was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is 
 occasionally liable to, unsusceptible to enjoyment or 
 pleasurable excitement : one of those moods when 
 what is pleasure at other times becomes insipid or 
 indifferent ; the state I should think in which converts 
 to Methodism usually are when smitten by their first 
 ' conviction of sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred 
 to me to put the question directly to myself : — 
 ' Suppose that all your objects in life were realised, 
 that all the changes in institutions and opinions 
 which you are looking forward to could be completely 
 effected at this very instant, would this be a great 
 joy and happiness to you ? ' And an irrepressible 
 self-consciousness distinctly answered, ' No ! ' At this 
 my heart sank within ; the whole foundation on which 
 my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness 
 was to have been found in the continual pursuit of 
 this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how 
 could there ever again be any interest in the means ? I 
 seemed to have nothing left to live for." 
 
 This is the shipwreck of Rationalism, at least of that 
 narrow- and poverty-stricken Rationalism which was the 
 boast of the eighteenth century. The end of life, both* 
 for the individual and for the community, is happiness. 
 Everything, whether health, or money, or virtue itself, 
 exists as a means to this sovereign end. The office of 
 reason, then, is to adapt these means, to work them out 
 by chains of calculation and argument, to make them 
 fall into their proper subordination and value, as viewed 
 
58 LIFE OF 
 
 in the light of this universal end. But happiness is the 
 gift of emotional, expansive characters, and not of cal- 
 culating machines ; to aim at happiness in every act or 
 project is, as common experience shows, the very way 
 to lose it. A man is not a logical engine ; he is a 
 complex of feeling and reason, and the emotional 
 elements within him will not be mulcted of their rights. 
 Dwarf the feelings, starve the artistic instincts, eradicate 
 the moral sentiment, and the result will be a barren 
 sacrifice, a suicidal victory, which is only fortunate when 
 it does not mean an anarchic revolt. The teaching of 
 the older Mill had been throughout the suppression 
 of feeling ; the watchword of the Utilitarian Society had 
 been the continual outcry against innate sentiment. 
 Bentham had not hesitated to malign all poetry as 
 misrepresentation, and vindicate the claim of pushpin 
 as a quantitative equivalent to Milton and Shakespeare ; 
 and the issue is seen in John Mill sitting down in 
 despair, with all his schemes of life and human regener- 
 ation lying in ruins around him. 
 
 Such a crisis is not wholly uncommon, but its issues 
 will differ with different men. In one man's case it will 
 lead to the resignation of earlier ideals, as when Plato, 
 after writing the Republic, is led by his actual experiences 
 in Sicily to write Tlie Laws. In the case of another 
 man, it will issue in an unworthy cynicism, as when 
 Tourguenef, after his dream in Feres et Fils had gained 
 a realisation in the emancipation of the serfs in i860, sat 
 down to write those sallies of a disappointed idealist 
 which we find in Fume'e in 1868. Rarely enough do we 
 find the crisis issuing in an enlargement of view, as was 
 the case with Mill. There can be no doubt how the 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 59 
 
 larger lessons were first brought home to his mind. In 
 the Speculative Debating Society he had come across 
 Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, and the new 
 impression seems to have effaced the influence of 
 Charles Austin. Here were men who had themselves 
 a Radicalism of their own, but it was not the Radicalism 
 of Bentham. What was the secret of their lives ? How 
 had they preserved their souls alive amid the arid fields 
 of utility and selfishness ? By what course of study or 
 sympathetic communing with alien minds had they 
 refused to bow the knee to the greatest happiness 
 principle ? And the answer seemed clear. They would 
 have nothing to say to sectarianism ; they thought self- 
 culture a duty, and they read Wordsworth and Coleridge. 
 They were not fond of analytic habits, they were 
 sceptical of the enormous value of Hartley's Association 
 principle, and they did not believe that happiness was 
 the sole end. " Analytic habits," says Mill, with 
 plaintive emphasis, " are a perpetual worm at the root 
 both of the passions and of the virtues.'' It was a 
 notable discovery, for it cast some doubt on his own and 
 his father's metaphysics, and suggested that we must take 
 happiness by the way, by pursuing some given end 
 without reference to this so-called universal standard. 
 And so Mill, in the autumn of 1828, begins for the first 
 time to read Wordsworth, and turns his thoughts in the 
 direction of Carlyle, Goethe, and Coleridge. 
 
 The articles which Mill wrote in the ensuing years 
 are the best evidence of the reality of his change. As 
 is the case with all cautious men, the change worked \ 
 slowly. But it was unmistakable to his friends. When 
 Mill became editor of the London Review, Mrs. Grote 
 
60 LIFE OF 
 
 wrote to Roebuck (April 1837) — "I am quite persuaded 
 the Review will cease to be the engine of propagating 
 sound and sane doctrines on Ethics and Politics under 
 J. M. Whether, by getting hooks baited with carrion, 
 he attracts other sorts of fish than those we angle for, 
 and thus render it a better investment, I really am not in 
 a condition to judge. But, on the other hand, it is a 
 matter of entire indifference to me so viewed. For my 
 part, I only wonder how the people contrive to keep 
 improving under the purveyance of the stuff and 
 nonsense they are subjected to."* Mrs. Grote is, no 
 doubt, unnecessarily venomous here, but Dr. Bain 
 admits that there was, for some time, an alienation 
 between Mill and his old friends. Mill was still a 
 reformer and an Utilitarian, but he wore his rue with a 
 difference. The chief points in his change of attitude 
 we have now to see. 
 
 Characteristic materials are to be found in some of the 
 essays which were deemed worthy of being preserved 
 in the Dissertations and Discussions — especially the 
 articles on Bentham and Coleridge contributed to The 
 London and Westminster, ' Thoughts on Poetry,' and 
 
 'Alfred de Vigny,' the first of which was published in 
 the Monthly Repository, the second in The London Mid 
 
 Westminster, and the paper on De Tocqueville, by means 
 of which Mill made his debut in the pages of the once 
 hotly-attacked Edinburgh. It was the Bentham article 
 which seems to have given offence, for it revealed an 
 attitude towards the oracle which was rather that of the 
 critic than of the disciple. Such sentences as the 
 following, for instance, were not calculated to propitiate 
 * Quoted by Bain. /. ^. Mill, p. 56, note. 
 
JOHN S TUA R T MILL. 6 1 
 
 his friends : — " Bentham's lot was cast in a generation of 
 the leanest and barrenest men whom England has as yet 
 produced, and he was an old man when a better race 
 came in with the present century." " He saw in man 
 little but what the vulgarest eye can see ; recognised no 
 diversities of character but such as he who runs may 
 read." "No one, probably, who in an instructed age 
 ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct, set 
 out with a more limited conception either of the agencies 
 by which human conduct is, or of those by which it 
 should he, influenced."* If the merit of Bentham is that 
 he was the father of innovation, the great subversive and 
 critical thinker of his age, and the founder of a method 
 which has many of the best elements of inductive 
 science, his defects are equally obvious and striking. He 
 failed principally in that he was unable to derive light 
 from other minds ; and the inability was rendered the 
 more striking owing to the singular incompleteness of his 
 own mind. The two defects hang together, for the power 
 of learning from others is due to an assimilative faculty, 
 be it sympathy, or imagination, in which Bentham was 
 curiously deficient. The result is that his picture of 
 humanity, like that drawn by an earlier thinker with 
 whom he has some affinity, Thomas Hobbes, is wanting 
 in some of the chief elements which are characteristic of 
 the species. To describe a man as a being moved by self- 
 love, and susceptible only of the stings of pain or pleasure, 
 is to leave out all the higher motives, to narrow down' 
 sympathy to its simplest and barest form, and to translate 
 disinterestedness into the calculating desire for general 
 happiness. All, therefore, that Bentham's philosophy 
 * Mill : Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i., p. 355, etc. 
 
62 LIFE OF 
 
 can do for the individual is to prescribe some of the 
 more obvious dictates of prudence, or outward probity, or 
 beneficence. It can not help him in what Mill had now 
 discovered to be one of the chief agencies, not only of 
 personal happiness, but of success in the highest sense 
 of the word ; it can not help him in the formation of his 
 
 Sown character ; it can suggest no consistent mode of 
 self-culture. Nor can it do much more for society at 
 large. It can, indeed, teach the means of organising and 
 regulating the merely business part of the social arrange- 
 ments ; and, hence, we can understand Bentham's success 
 in the reform of Law. But national character, its import- 
 ance, and the width of its range, the key it furnishes for 
 the solution of historical problems, and the necessity for 
 its recognition by the political reformer — all this is for it 
 a sealed book, owing to the poverty of its psychological 
 and historical groundwork. Is his theory of Government 
 more successful ? According to Bentham, government 
 is the authority of the numerical majority; to give more 
 political power to the majority is the essence of so-called 
 Radicalism, whether professed by Bentham himself, or 
 illustrated in James Mill's essay on Government. But 
 there are limits to the authority of the majority. It 
 should always respect the personal liberty of the 
 individual, and it should always show deference to the 
 superiority of cultivated intelligence. To Mill, at all 
 events, these were cardinal maxims, enforced in his 
 later years, not only by his essay on Liberty, but also 
 by his efforts in Parliament to secure some sort of 
 representation for minorities. Perhaps, too, with respect 
 to the utility principle, Bentham was wrong in empha- 
 sising it out of all regard to those secondary principles 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 63 
 
 and ends which move the greater portion of mankind. It ] 
 might, indeed, be urged that this only proved an excess 
 of logical and rational principle, without which there 
 could be no rational philosophy. Yet it must also be 
 admitted that there are other modes of regarding actions 
 than their purely moral aspect. There is the aesthetic 
 aspect, for example, which finds such abundant illustra- 
 tion in the creations of art — in music, in poetry, in 
 the drama. On this side, Bentham's limitations are 
 notorious. Nor could he see how the artistic and 
 emotional instincts enter even into the sphere of morals. 
 " His ignorance of the deeper springs of human 
 character prevented him (as it prevents most English- 
 men) from suspecting how profoundly such things enter 
 into the moral nature of man, and into the education both 
 of the individual and of the race."* If Mill could utter 
 such criticisms, we can understand the humaner, if less 
 consistent, version which he propounded some years 
 later, of the doctrines of Utilitarianism. This discovery/ 
 of Bentham's limitations in the aesthetic department was 
 closely connected with Mill's newer studies in poetry. 
 In the midst of his own desolation, when he found thai! 
 life contained for him no objects to live for, Mill turned,! 
 as he tells us, to Wordsworth, and found in his poems a\ 
 real medicine for his mind. The reason was that these ■ 
 poems expressed states of feeling, and of thought coloured 
 by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They 
 seemed to be the very culture of the feelings of which he 
 was in quest. It was true that Wordsworth, compared 
 with the greatest poets, " might be said to be the poet of 
 unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative 
 
 * Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i. , p. 389. 
 
64 LIFE OF 
 
 tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which 
 require poetic cultivation ; and this cultivation Words- 
 worth is much more fitted to give than poets who are 
 intrinsically far more poets than he." From Wordsworth 
 Mill went on to Shelley, and, struggling as he was against 
 a nature essentially logical, he was able to^appreciate a 
 nature which was so diametrically opposed to his own. 
 Indeed, in his Thoughts on Poetry, he even exaggerates 
 the importance of the emotional element as entering more 
 exclusively into the character of the true poet than the 
 intellectual. The highest form of poetry appeared to him 
 to be the lyrical, where the musing of the poet is not so 
 much heard as overheard. He draws a distinction between 
 the poet of culture, like Wordsworth, and the poet of 
 emotion, like Shelley ; and, carried to the farthest point 
 by the reaction against his previous forms of thought, 
 he estimates Shelley as much the finer poet of the two. 
 " The state of [poetic] feeling may be either of soul 'or 
 of sense, or oftener (might we not say invariably ?) of 
 both ; for the poetic temperament is usually, perhaps 
 always, accompanied by exquisite senses. Whatever of 
 sensation enters into the feeling must not be local or 
 consciously organic ; it is a condition of the whole frame, 
 not of a part only. States of feeling, whether sensuous 
 or spiritual, which thus possess the]whole being, are the 
 fountains of that which we have called the poetry of 
 poets."* Poetry is found to emanate from a mental and 
 physical constitution, peculiar, not in the kind, but in 
 the degree of its susceptibility; a constitution which 
 makes its possessor capable of greater happiness] than 
 mankind in general, and also of greater unhappiness ; 
 * Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i. , p. 87. 
 
JOHN STUART MJLL. 65 
 
 and, because greater, so also more various. " Such 
 poetry, to all who know enough of nature to own it as 
 being in nature, is much more poetry, is poetry in a far 
 higher sense than any other." Assuredly such senti- 
 ments as these are far enough removed from the 
 Benthamic stand-point. Nor will Mill refuse to adopt 
 as his own the views which Alfred de Vigny puts in the 
 mouth of his hero, Stello. If asked why he felt himself 
 to be a poet, the answer he gives is one which Mill is 
 prepared to endorse — -" Because there is in nature no 
 beauty, nor grandeur, nor harmony, which does not 
 cause in me a prophetic thrill — -which does not fill me 
 with a deep emotion, and swell my eyelids with tears 
 divine and inexplicable. Because of the infinite pity I 
 feel for mankind, my companions in suffering, and the 
 eager desire I feel to hold out my hand to them and 
 raise them incessantly by words of commiseration and of 
 love."* It was by sympathy with such emotional ardours 
 as these that Mill's own nature was becoming exalted 
 and enlarged. 
 
 We can now understand why Mill could feel an 
 interest even in the reactionary and conservative 
 elements to be found in Coleridge. Nothing is more 
 remarkable in Mill than his sudden awakening to the 
 fact that there must be a party of order as well as a 
 party of progress. Theoretically, he discovered that the 
 line of advance in history was spiral rather than recti- 
 lineal ; in practice he from this time was fond of main- 
 taining that the truth lay somewhere between the views 
 of two counterbalancing and antagonistic parties. The 
 French philosophes had made a great error in thinking that 
 * Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i., p. 323. 
 
 5 
 
66 LIFE OF 
 
 they could make a clean sweep of society and of the 
 Church. The historical and philosophic views of Coleridge 
 and the Germans were much truer. For the ' stability of 
 society depends not only on a large system of national 
 education, but also on a feeling of allegiance or loyalty 
 to some principle or set of principles. A necessary con- 
 dition is that there must be something which is settled, 
 and not to be called in question. " Grote never ceased 
 to convert this remark into an expression for the standing 
 intolerance of society towards unpopular opinions," says 
 Bain ;* a comment which shows clearly enough how far 
 Mill had drifted from his old anchorage. But Sectar- 
 ianism in its narrower forms was henceforth impossible 
 for Mill. "J'ai trouve que la plupart des sectes ont 
 raison dans une bonne partie de ce qu'elles avancent, 
 mais non pas tant en ce qu'elles nient."t The more he 
 studied Continental thought, the more he was disposed 
 to qualify that absolute value of Democracy for which 
 his father contended. This comes out very clearly in 
 his essay on De Tocqueville's Democracy in America. 
 There is such a thing as a tyranny of the majority, and 
 manhood suffrage might conceivably fasten its fetters 
 more closely. There ought to be a learned class, there 
 ought to be even a leisured class. " The sure, and now 
 no longer slow, advance by which the classes hitherto in 
 the ascendant are merging into the common mass, and 
 all other forces giving way before the power of mere 
 numbers, is well calculated to inspire uneasiness even in 
 
 * Bain : J. S. Mill, p. 57. 
 
 t Dissertations and Discussions, i., 458. " I have found that 
 most sects are right in a good part of what they advance, but not so 
 right in what they deny." 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 67 
 
 those to whom democracy per se presents nothing alarm- 
 ing. It is not the uncontrolled ascendency of popular 
 power, but of any power, which is formidable. There is 
 no one power in society, or capable of being constituted 
 in it, of which the influences do not become mischievous 
 as soon as it reigns uncontrolled — as soon as it becomes 
 exempted from any necessity of being in the right by 
 being able to make its mere will prevail without the con- 
 dition of a previous struggle. To render its ascendency 
 safe, it must be fitted with correctives and counteractives, 
 possessing the qualities opposite to its characteristic 
 defects.* The general result of these considerations on 
 Mill's political theories may be seen partly in the sixth 
 book of his Logic, partly in the pages in the Autobiography, 
 where he sums up his newer stand-point. In the Logic 
 he has much to say on the proper method of political 
 science. It must not be empirical, as though its subject- 
 matter was like the data with which Chemistry deals,t 
 nor yet geometrical, or abstract, as though it could all be 
 deduced from some general principle, such as the utility 
 principle of Bentham. But it must be either deductive 
 like the method of physical science in its discovery of 
 causes, or deductive in the sense in which Comte pro- 
 pounded his historical method in the Philosophie Positive. 
 In the Autobiography he speaks of the influence on 
 himself of the St. Simonians, Bazard and Enfantin, and 
 discovers that their criticisms on the common doctrines 
 of Liberalism are full of important truth. He was, 
 
 * Dissertations and Discussions, vol. ii. , p. 80. 
 
 + Macaulay's attack on his father's " Government " article, 
 declared that the only method of Political Science was experimental 
 and inductive. 
 
 * 
 
68 LIFE OF JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 indeed, still a Radical and a Democrat for Europe, and 
 especially for England. What he altered was the premises 
 of his political philosophy. He learnt to look upon the 
 device of political institutions as a moral and educational 
 question more than one of material interests. He ceased 
 to consider representative democracy as an absolute 
 principle ; and took the truer view that it was a question 
 of time, place, and circumstance. But, on one point, he 
 went further than the Liberals and Democrats of his age. 
 In 1 83 1 Mill was first introduced to Mrs. Taylor. Per- 
 haps it is not fanciful to trace to this acquaintance the 
 commencement or, at anyrate, the deepening of his con- 
 victions as to the justice of Female Suffrage, and the 
 absolute equality of men and women. Speaking of the 
 St. Simonians, he says, " I honoured them most of all for 
 what they have been most cried down for — the boldness 
 and freedom from prejudice with which they treated the 
 subject of family, the most important of any, and needing 
 more fundamental alterations than remain to be made in 
 any other great social institution, but on which scarcely 
 any reformer has the courage to touch. In proclaiming 
 the perfect equality of men and women, and an entirely 
 new order of things in regard to their relations with 
 one another, the St. Simonians, in common with Owen 
 and Fourier, have entitled themselves to the grateful 
 remembrance of future generations."* 
 
 * Autobiography, pp. 167, 168. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 "a system of logic" — (1840-1843). 
 
 THE ten years between 1830 and 1840 were for 
 Mill full of numerous incidents and toils. A visit 
 to Paris after the Revolution of July in 1830 
 renewed his keen interest in French politics, and made 
 him for several years a diligent student of French affairs. 
 Of his writings from 1832 to 1834 he made the remark, 
 that even if the newspaper articles were left out, they 
 would make a large volume. His father's death in 1836 
 was succeeded by an illness, which caused a three 
 months' absence in Switzerland and Italy. Another 
 illness followed in 1839, and a second and a longer 
 absence of six months in Italy. He recovered slowly 
 from both attacks, but the first, which seems to have 
 been an affection of the brain, left its mark on him in an 
 almost ceaseless twitching over one eye. The main 
 work, however, for which he was slowly preparing him- 
 self during these years, was The System of Logic, which 
 was not published till 1843. The first foundation was, 
 perhaps, laid in the readings on logical subjects, which 
 took place in Grote's house when he was twenty-one 
 years of age. At the same date he composed an article 
 
70 LIFE OF 
 
 on Whateley's Logic, which was published in the West- 
 minster Review. Then, in 1830, we find him putting on 
 paper some ideas on Logical Distinctions among Terms, 
 and the import of Propositions, followed in 1831 by a 
 consideration of Logical Axioms and the Theory of the 
 Syllogism. A long interval ensues, in which he is 
 grappling with the problems of Induction, and the pro- 
 cedure of Science, which are to occupy the third book of 
 his Logic, and of which he seems to have made a rough 
 draft in 1838. Further problems, dealing with Sociology 
 and the Logic of the Moral Sciences, are discussed and 
 solved in 1840, when the work is temporarily completed 
 by what afterwards is called the sixth book. 
 
 It was in 1840 that his brother Henry was dying of 
 consumption at Falmouth, nursed by Mrs. Mill and her 
 two daughters, Harriet and Clara ; and on March 16th he 
 was visited by John, who stayed with him till his death 
 on April 4th. It was at Falmouth that Miss Caroline 
 Fox first made the acquaintance with Mill which she 
 has so charmingly related in her Journals* As we have 
 here several noticeable passages of description, we may 
 well linger for a little over her sympathetic pages, 
 especially as fortune had thrown her in the way of many 
 of the eminent men of her time, and thus furnished her 
 with a standard of judgment admirably acute and valu- 
 able. The way is prepared for her reception of Mill by 
 an enthusiastic account of him by John Sterling, who 
 was one of the firmest friends of the Fox family. Nor is 
 she disappointed when she sees him. He is a very 
 uncommon-looking person, she remarks ; such acuteness 
 and sensibility marked in his exquisitely chiselled 
 * Journals of Caroline Fox, Edited by Horace N. Pym. 2 vols. 
 
JOHN S TV A R T MILL. 7 1 
 
 countenance, more resembling a portrait of Lavater than 
 any other that she remembers. His voice is refinement 
 itself, and his mode of expressing himself tallies with 
 voice and countenance. She also notices his " wonder- 
 fully keen, quiet eyes." With this we may compare a 
 somewhat cooler picture drawn of him by Dr. Bain, 
 when he saw him at the India House two years later, in 
 1842. "The day after arriving (in London), I walked 
 down to the India House, and realised my dream of 
 meeting Mill in person. I am not likely to forget the 
 impression which he made upon me as he stood by his 
 desk, with his face turned to the door as we entered. His 
 tall, slim figure, his youthful face and bald head, fair hair 
 and ruddy complexion, and the twitching of his eyebrow 
 when he spoke, first arrested the attention ; then the 
 vivacity of his manner, his thin voice approaching to 
 sharpness, but with nothing shrill or painful about it, his 
 comely features and sweet expression, would have all 
 remained in my memory, though I had never seen him 
 again. To complete the picture, I should add his dress, 
 which was constant, a black dress-suit, with silk necktie. 
 Many years after that he changed his dress-coat for a 
 surtout ; but black cloth was his choice to the end."* 
 That he had made a pleasant impression on the little 
 Falmouth circle Mill was quite aware, for he was the 
 recipient of many acts of kindness ; but he made a 
 characteristic remark in a letter to Caroline's brother, 
 R. Barclay Fox — " You have not, nor have even those of 
 your family, whom I have been so fortunate as to see 
 more of, as yet seen me, as I really and naturally am, 
 but a me artificially made, self-conscious, egotistical, and 
 * Bain : /. 5. Mill, p. 64. 
 
72 LIFE OF 
 
 noisily demonstrative, by having much feeling to show, 
 and very little time to show it in." Perhaps Mill, like so 
 many other men of talent, was deficient in (and deplored 
 the deficiency of) the winning gift of naturalness. 
 
 There are many points of interest brought out in 
 Caroline F 'ox' 's Journals. Not the least interesting is the 
 light thrown on the friendship between Mill and John 
 Sterling. Sterling was himself the intimate friend of 
 Coleridge, Maurice, and others who, like Dr. Calvert 
 (to whom there are many allusions in the Journals), 
 represented a very different side of thought and life from 
 that with which Mill was in early years familiar. The 
 first acquaintance is alluded to, — a hard fight at the 
 Debating Society at Cambridge, when Mill appeared as 
 a Benthamite and Sterling as a Mystic ; since that time 
 the two antagonists approximated to one another more 
 and more. It is not difficult to understand in what way 
 they supplemented each the other's gifts and defects. 
 To Sterling, Mill appeared " the most scientific thinker 
 extant, more than Coleridge was, more continuous and 
 severe ; " on the other hand, he was deficient in the range 
 of poetical feeling, because he had " singularly little sense 
 of the concrete." To Mill, on the contrary, Sterling was 
 the man who had taught him to read Wordsworth, and 
 who had first suggested to him the necessity of a 
 culture of the emotions. He is, therefore, pleased to 
 make Sterling and the Fox family known to each other, 
 because he is sure they will be full of mutual appreciation : 
 and Miss Caroline Fox adds, " he talked enthusiastically 
 about him." Nor is the change which is going on within 
 Mill unknown to his sympathetic critics at Falmouth. 
 " No one," said Mill to Miss Fox, " should attempt 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 73 
 
 anything intended to benefit his age without at first 
 making a stern resolution to take up his cross and to 
 bear it. If he does not begin by counting the cost, all 
 his schemes must end in disappointment ; either he will 
 sink under it as Chatterton, or yield to the counter- 
 current like Erasmus, or pass his life in disappointment 
 and vexation as Luther did." Miss Fox quite understood 
 that these words contained a personal allusion. It was 
 evidently a process through which the speaker himself 
 had passed, as was sufficiently attested by his care- 
 worn and anxious, though most beautiful and refined, 
 countenance. Sterling supplies the explanation. He 
 had been trained by his father in the strictest sect of 
 Bentham, and was slowly emancipating himself by 
 turning to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Sterling spoke 
 of the gradual development which he had watched 
 in him. " He has made the sacrifice of being the 
 undoubted leader of a powerful party for the higher 
 glory of being a private in the army of Truth, ready to 
 storm any of the strong places of Falsehood, even if 
 defended by his late adherents. He was brought up 
 in the belief that politics and social institutions were 
 everything, but he has been gradually delivered from 
 this outwardness, and feels now clearly that individual 
 reform must be the groundwork of social progress." 
 Caroline Fox learns the same facts in a negative 
 fashion from the lips of Dr. Bowring, Bentham's literary 
 executor. In a visit which Bowring paid to Falmouth, 
 on August 7th, 1840, he spoke of Mill "with evident 
 contempt as a renegade from philosophy, Anglic}, a 
 renouncer of Bentham's creed and an expounder of 
 Coleridge's. S. T. Coleridge's mysticism Dr. Bowring 
 
74 LIFE OF 
 
 never could understand, and characterises much of his 
 teaching as a great flow of empty eloquence, to which 
 no meaning was attachable. Mill's newly-developed 
 ' Imagination ' puzzles him not a little ; he was most 
 emphatically a philosopher, but then he read Words- 
 worth, and that muddled him, and he has been in a 
 strange confusion ever since, endeavouring to unite 
 poetry and philosophy." 
 
 Indeed, many softer touches appear in Mill's char- 
 acter, as seen by the kindly glance of Caroline Fox and 
 her Falmouth friends. Death, the great leveller, had 
 brought the philosophic and the religious mind into 
 nearer relationship, and Henry's las^t hours inspired 
 many new and strange interests. It is a new thing, said 
 Sterling, for John Mill to sympathise with religious 
 characters, for some years ago his father had made him 
 quite a bigot against religion. And there is a pleasant 
 picture of Dr. Calvert and John Mill standing one on 
 one side, the other on the other of Henry's death-bed. 
 Dr. Calvert remarked, "This sort of scene puts an end 
 to Reason, and Faith begins ; " the other emphatically 
 answered " Yes," and a conversation ensued " which 
 displayed much humility and deep feeling." The fol- 
 lowing sentences from a letter which Mill wrote to 
 Barclay Fox are not the language we might have 
 expected from the man who was regarded as one of the 
 sceptics of his age. " I know not how dangerous may 
 be the ground on which I am treading — but surely 
 a more Christian-like interpretation of the mystery of the 
 Atonement is that which, believing that divine wisdom 
 punishes the sinner for the sinner's sake, and not from 
 an inherent necessity more heathen than the heathen 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 75 
 
 Nemesis, holds, as Coleridge did, that the sufferings of 
 the Redeemer were (in accordance with the eternal laws 
 on which this system of things is built) an indispensable 
 means of bringing about that change in the hearts of 
 sinners, the want of which is the real and sole hindrance 
 to the universal salvation of mankind." Perhaps, too, 
 no apology is needed for reproducing in a foot-note the 
 Calendar of Odours which Mill made for Caroline Fox. 
 We are so soon to regard Mill in the colder aspect of 
 logician, that we may be pardoned for lingering on that 
 sunnier aspect which he wore for his young Quaker 
 friend.* Mill was throughout his life an enthusiastic 
 botanist; and three days before his death he walked 
 fifteen miles on a botanical excursion. 
 
 Meanwhile, during all these years, despite his literary 
 labours as editor of the London Review (of which Sir W. 
 Molesworth was proprietor), despite his two illnesses, 
 
 * "A Calendar of Odours, being an imitation of the various 
 Calendars of Flora by Linnaeus and others. 
 
 " The brilliant colouring of Nature is prolonged with incessant 
 changes from March till October ; but the fragrance of her breath 
 is spent before the summer is half ended. From March to July an 
 uninterrupted succession of sweet odours fills the air by day, and still 
 more by night ; but the gentler perfumes of autumn, like many of 
 the earlier ones here for that reason omitted, must be sought ere 
 they can be found. The Calendar of Odours, therefore, begins with 
 the laurel and ends with the lime. 
 "March. — Common laurel. 
 ''April. — Violets, furze, wall-flower, common broad-leaved willow, 
 
 apple-blossom. 
 "May. — Lilac, night-flowering stocks and rockets, laburnum, 
 
 hawthorn, seringa, sweet-briar. 
 "June. — Mignonette, bean-fields, the whole tribe of summer roses, 
 hay, Portugal laurel, various species of pinks. 
 
76 LIFE OF 
 
 and his increasing work as he rose in the employ of the 
 India House, the Logic was growing apace. Dr. Bain 
 helped him with instances of induction in the third book, 
 and Auguste Comte, the founder of the Positivist school, 
 exercised no little influence over his mind in his con- 
 ception of Sociology in the sixth book. In the Auto- 
 biography he tells us that he was long depressed by the 
 old-world problems of Liberty and Necessity, till he found 
 the solution in a stricter definition of what is meant by 
 Determinism, and expounded it in his Logic. He 
 also consulted various German books on Logic, though, 
 indeed, they do not seem to have left much impress 
 on his mind. " Here is Sterling," he says in a letter to 
 Barclay Fox, " persuading me that I must read all 
 manner of German logic, which, though it goes much 
 against the grain with me, I can in no sort gainsay.'' 
 He is going to give the book to his Cornish friends, but 
 he warns them that they will find it more intelligible than 
 interesting. He forbids them to read it through, except 
 some chapters which he will point out. " It would be 
 like my reading a book on mining because you live in 
 Cornwall — it would be making friendship a burden ! " 
 The chapters he singled out were the fifth book on 
 Fallacies, and the chapter in the sixth book on Liberty 
 and Necessity, " which is short, and in my judgment the 
 
 " July. — Common acacia, meadow-sweet, honeysuckle, sweet gale 
 or double myrtle, Spanish broom, lime. 
 "In latest autumn, one stray odour, forgotten by its companions, 
 follows at a modest distance, — the creeping clematis which adorns 
 the cottage walls ; but the thread of continuity being broken, this 
 solitary straggler is not included in the Calendar of Odours. 
 " To Miss Caroline Fox, from her grateful friend, 
 
 "J. S. MILL." 
 
JOHN S TUA R T MILL. 77 
 
 best in the two volumes." He is not very sanguine 
 about the early portion of it. " I don't suppose many 
 people will read anything so scholastic, especially as I 
 do not profess to upset the schools, but to rebuild them, 
 and, unluckily, everybody who cares about such subjects 
 nowadays is of a different school from me. But that is 
 the concern of a higher power than mine ; my concern is 
 to bring out of me what is in me, although the world 
 should not find, even after many days, that what is cast 
 on the waters is wholesome bread ; nay, even although 
 (worst of all) it may happen to be, in reality, only 
 bread made of sawdust." Carlyle, indeed, says in his 
 Reminiscences that he found Mill's talk "rather wintry 
 and sawdustish ; " but Mill's real consciousness of what 
 he had done came out in his remark to Miss Fox, 
 " My family have no idea how great a man I am ! " 
 
 The System of Logic was published, after fruitless 
 negotiations with Murray, by Parker, in March 1S43, 
 and at once met with a great and well-deserved success. 
 Being almost entirely a scientific work, it could not rouse 
 the susceptibilities of those whom his recent criticism of 
 Bentham and his partial alienation from his father had 
 surprised and dismayed. It was in certain questions of 
 morals and political philosophy that the suspicion had 
 been raised that Mill was not a true Benthamite in every 
 detail of that somewhat unlovable character. No doubt 
 could be felt as to Mill's general position in logic, 
 psychology, and metaphysics. Nor could such a doubt 
 be for his contemporaries justified by the issue for Mill 
 is careful to avow his acceptance of the principles of the 
 English school — the school which, starting from Hobbes 
 and continued in illustrious descent by such thinkers 
 
78 LIFE OF 
 
 as Locke and Hume and Hartley, held fast to experience 
 as their sheet-anchor, Locke's criticism of Innate Ideas 
 as their confession of faith, and Hartley and James 
 Mill's Associationism as their fighting orders. But 
 where Mill surpassed all that had been done heretofore 
 was in the clear and patient analysis of the procedure 
 of science, especially the careful exposition of those 
 great methods of experimental inquiry which fills 
 the larger portion of his third book. In this Mill's 
 only rival was Whewell, and Whewell belonged to a 
 different camp. No wonder, then, that Mill's Logic 
 became the text-book of the Empirical school, and was 
 quoted with respectful admiration by all the " Radical " 
 thinkers of the day. Grote, above all others, was 
 enthusiastic in its praise. Much as his general admira- 
 tion of the author might be, as he said, " mixed with 
 fear," no man " conned and thumbed the book " as he 
 did. "John Mill's Logic is the best book in my library," 
 were, according to Dr. Bain, his emphatic words. Bain 
 himself published an appreciative article on it in the 
 Westminster Review, more laudatory than Mill liked. 
 When an adverse criticism appeared in the British Critic, 
 written by Mr. W. G. Ward, Mill was by no means 
 displeased. Mill knew that Mr. Ward was the ally of 
 Newman and Pusey, and that he should be considered 
 worthy of so extensive a review (the article was nearly 
 ioo pages) by thinkers who were diametrically opposed 
 to his tenets, gave him unbounded pleasure. " I always 
 hailed Puseyism," he cried, " and predicted that 
 Thought would sympathise with Thought, though I did 
 not expect to find in my own case so striking an 
 example." 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 79 
 
 If, however, we ask whether the System of Logic 
 is destined to live as a classic on the subject, we open 
 a question of wider issue. Clearly, it is a work which 
 no student of the subject can possibly forego ; it has 
 been extensively used as an instrument of education 
 both at the Universities and elsewhere, though at 
 Oxford, at all events, a reaction on the lines of German 
 thought has for some time been in progress. The work 
 is divided into six books, of which the first two, headed 
 respectively " Names and Propositions " and " Reason- 
 ing," represent the formal aspect of Logic, and are mainly 
 concerned with the process of Deduction. The main 
 contention is, that the syllogism is a petitio principii, the 
 conclusion being contained in the premisses, and that 
 the real process of inference is from particular case 
 to adjacent particular case. The second book contains 
 Mill's attack on one of the strongholds of the a priori 
 school, the belief, namely, that necessary truth is distinct 
 in kind, and not only in degree, from contingent truth. 
 The battle is usually fought out over the case of geomet- 
 rical axioms, which Mill declares to be empirical 
 in their origin. It is the third book, however, which 
 is the striking feature of Mill's Logic, where, in twenty- 
 five chapters, he gives an exhaustive analysis of Induction 
 and the processes of Science. The possibility of 
 Induction rests on the Uniformity of Nature ; but this 
 itself is only an empirical generalisation, which merely 
 differs from other and less trustworthy generalisations 
 in the enormous number of observations on which it 
 is based, and the width and variety of its scope. 
 Laws of Nature are then explained, and we are intro- 
 duced to the methods of Experimental Inquiry by 
 
80 LIFE OF 
 
 which they are attained. It may be noticed in pas- 
 sing that we are here exchanging the narrower view of 
 Induction as a purely logical process for the wider aspect 
 of it as a process of scientific investigation. As a logical 
 process, Induction may be defined as the inverse of 
 Deduction, or as the mode in which we establish a 
 general proposition: as a scientific process it becomes 
 the means by which we attain to Laws of Nature. 
 Consequently Mill holds that Logic should include 
 the procedure of Science, which other writers on the 
 subject had taken pains to exclude. The methods 
 of Experimental Inquiry are four in number; the 
 method of Agreement, the method of Difference, the 
 method of Residues, and the method of Concomitant 
 Variations — methods which suggest some points of 
 comparison with the Tabula? which Francis Bacon 
 had detailed in the second book of his Novum 
 Organum, though they form, of course, a considerable 
 improvement on the cruder methods of the earliest of 
 inductive logicians. Mill found considerable difficulty 
 in getting scientific examples of purely Inductive 
 methods, and gained much assistance in this respect 
 from Dr. Bain, who suggested many of Liebig's theories, 
 and (in a subsequent edition) M. Brown-Se'quard's 
 theory of cadaveric rigidity. But it was not easy to 
 find so good an example as the famous research on Dew 
 adduced by Herschel. As a matter of fact, most of the 
 discoveries of Science are made by what Mill called 
 the Deductive method — a combination of induction 
 and deduction, or sometimes a hypothetico-deductive 
 method. For instance, when Professor Huxley desired 
 to show in his Lay Sermons that the Darwinian 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 81 
 
 hypothesis is a scientific one, he explained the method 
 which Darwin had pursued by reference to Mill's 
 chapter on the deductive method. Purely inductive 
 methods, as Mill had to allow, were rather of use in a 
 Logic of Proof than a Logic of Discovery. The fourth 
 book of Mill's Logic, called " Operations subsidiary to 
 Deduction,'' is a general receptacle for a number of 
 subjects which Mill did not know where to place, 
 and Dr. Bain* suggests that it contains the materials 
 for a Logic of Definition and Classification. The 
 fifth and sixth books require no particular analysis 
 for our purpose, one being concerned with a classi- 
 fication of Fallacies, and the other with the Logic 
 of Moral Sciences, in which Mill made considerable 
 use of Comte's speculations on Sociology. 
 
 If we regard the work as a whole, we are forced 
 to distinguish its scientific character from its meta- 
 physical groundwork. Probably no other work on 
 Logic can give the reader so clear an idea of what 
 Science is and what it is doing ; and its merits in this 
 respect have received emphatic testimony from scientists 
 themselves. On the other hand, it might be urged that 
 Logic somewhat unduly extends its boundaries when 
 it covers all that Mill makes it cover ; and especially 
 that it ought to rest on sounder metaphysical foundations 
 than can be discovered in the work of Mill. If it be 
 true that these foundations include irreconcilable dogmas, 
 then the shiftiness of the groundwork must in time make 
 itself felt in every department of the superstructure. 
 
 We begin with the title. Mill describes his work 
 as "The Principles of Evidence and the Methods 
 
 * Bain : /. £. Mill, p. 67. 
 6 
 
82 LIFE OF 
 
 of Scientific Investigation." Now, every writer has to 
 formulate his own definition of Logic, and Mill is not 
 slow to explain that he understands by Logic the Science 
 of Proof or Evidence. If that be so, we have his 
 position as contrasted with those who make Logic 
 consist in an exhibition of the Formal Laws of Thought ; 
 and also with those who, like Herschel and Whewell, 
 make Logic essentially the Science of Discovery. But 
 if we return to the title, we are not quite sure of the last 
 contrast. Mill very clearly enrols himself as a disciple 
 of Material Logic, rather than of Formal ; but if Logic 
 is merely the Science of Proof, how is it also concerned 
 (as the general title states) with Scientific Investigation ? 
 According to the stricter definition of Mill, Logic is the 
 organon of Science ; according to the looser title of his 
 book, it is a part of Science. Perhaps this is not an 
 important point in itself; but it becomes important 
 when we come to the third book, the book which deals 
 with the methods of Induction. Are these, we ask, 
 methods of Discovery or methods of Proof? At first 
 Mill seemed to treat them as methods of Discovery; 
 then, in answer to a criticism of Whewell, he treats them 
 as methods of Proof only, though the first of the 
 methods, that of agreement, could never establish its 
 title to this character. 
 
 It was, perhaps, an unjustifiable confidence which led 
 us to class Mill among the Material Logicians, and 
 not among the Formal. For if Logic be concerned 
 with the Matter of our Thought, and not with its 
 Form, it is not quite clear why in the earlier books 
 we should have, amongst other topics, a system of 
 Categories (i. 3), and an enquiry into the validity 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 83 
 
 of the Major Premiss in a Syllogism (ii. 3). In this 
 matter, the explanation is mainly historical, and only 
 partially logical. We know that Mill was made, at 
 an early age, to study Greek Logic and the -scholastic 
 writers on Aristotle. We know that at a subsequent 
 period he felt it to be his task to put fresh life into some 
 of the older logical forms, to pour the new wine of 
 Empiricism into the old bottles of Aristotelianism. 
 Hence his desire to substitute for the old ten Categories 
 some Categories of his own, which were neither parts of 
 the Logical judgment, nor due to a grammatical analysis 
 of the sentence, but actual divisions of Nameable things. 
 So, too, he wishes to replace the Syllogistic mode of 
 inference by a scientific mode, and he labours to prove 
 that the conclusion does not depend on the major 
 premiss (in which case it would be proved by it), but 
 is only proved in accordance with it, the major premiss 
 being a register, memorandum, or shorthand note of 
 experience up to a given date. The whole controversy 
 about the petitio principii involved in the Syllogism is a 
 curious instance of the confusion caused by mixing up 
 two different views of Logic. The Syllogism is an 
 important, or rather, an archetypal process of thought, 
 viewed in its formal aspect ; for Concept, Judgment, and 
 Syllogism represent the initial grades into which thought 
 can be analysed. If we are not concerned with this 
 point of view, if we are only going to regard thought as 
 the mere correspondence of our apprehension with fact, 
 then the Logic which is to be a Logic of Evidence 
 should not concern itself with the formal validity of the 
 Syllogism at all. 
 
 The peculiar weakness of Mill's theory of inference, 
 
84 LIFE OF 
 
 viz., that it proceeds from particular instance to particular 
 instance without deducing from an universal proposition, 
 becomes manifest in his treatment of the question of the 
 Uniformity of Nature. For in our belief in the Uniformity 
 of Nature we have an universal truth, which does, as 
 a matter of fact, serve as major premiss in all our 
 reasoning about Nature's operations. Indeed, Induction 
 itself is dependent on the truth of this major premiss, 
 or principle. For how are we to argue that what has 
 held good in a set of instances already observed will also 
 hold good in another set of instances resembling the 
 former, except on the supposition that Nature is uniform ? 
 Mill himself admits that Induction depends on the 
 Uniformity of Nature, and yet is forced, by his general 
 theory of inference, to prove that Induction must somehow 
 prove the Uniformity of Nature. We need not follow 
 him through all the twists and windings of the attempted 
 justification of so strange a position ; it will be enough 
 to point out that the question practically reduces itself 
 to the following dilemma : — Either the possibility of 
 Induction rests upon the Uniformity of Nature, in which 
 case our process of inference is clearly from a general or 
 universal truth down to its particular exemplifications, or 
 else we can only argue from particular instance to par- 
 ticular instance ; and in that case our belief in Nature's 
 uniformity is strictly limited to our experience ; it becomes 
 a merely empirical generalisation, and as such is apparently 
 {Logic iii., xvi.) inferior in validity to " Laws of Nature." 
 It is not possible for Mill to escape this dilemma by the 
 device which recommends itself to his successors — to Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer, for instance, and to the philosophic 
 believers in Evolution. For with them the experience 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 85 
 
 which is to prove these and similar truths is the 
 accumulated experience of the human race through all 
 the ages of its development, from which our own and 
 limited individual experience can take its start as an 
 assured and incontrovertible body of truths. But Mill's 
 " experience " is not like Mr. Herbert Spencer's ; it is not 
 " race-experience," but "individual-experience." He is, 
 therefore, always open to the charge of trying to get wide- 
 reaching truths out of the changing and fragmentary 
 experiences of our three-score years and ten. The 
 solution is paradoxically inadequate to the problem. 
 
 Mill's metaphysical system may be described as tran- 
 sitional, and we can now more precisely indicate the 
 principles between which he oscillates. He comes half- 
 way between Hume and Herbert Spencer in certain 
 doctrines, while in others he apparently tries to mediate 
 between the school of Descartes and the school of 
 Locke. To Hume all truth depended on individual 
 experiences ; to Herbert Spencer some truths are h priori 
 to the individual, but a posteriori to the race. In Mill's 
 case we have (to refer back to the example we have been 
 just considering) the desire to make Induction rest as a 
 process on some large principle which individual exper- 
 ience could never substantiate, while all the time his 
 professed belief is that, apart from individual experience, 
 there can be no origin for truth. So, too, with some of 
 the theories which are expounded at the end of the 
 second book of the Logic and the beginning of the third. 
 One of these is the nature of geometrical axioms as a 
 part of so-called necessary truth. Mill's desire is to 
 explode the d priori view which the Cartesian school 
 held of the origin of knowledge. There can not be for 
 
86 LIFE OF 
 
 Mill, any more than for Locke, a priori or innate 
 principles. Consequently, geometrical axioms are said 
 to be experimental. But the elements with which they 
 deal are for Mill not experimental, but ideal. They deal 
 with straight lines and perfect circles. Lines perfectly 
 straight, and circles perfectly round are not found in 
 actual experience, but are ideal. Hence Mill takes up 
 the curious position that though experience alone proves 
 that two straight lines can not enclose a space, yet 
 experience can not seemingly present us with lines 
 perfectly straight. As, however, unless the lines are 
 perfectly straight, two of them might enclose a space, 
 we are only confused by this apparent attempt to 
 combine two opposite points of view, the idealistic and 
 the experimental. The same oscillation, the same desire 
 to combine antagonistic positions, meet us in Mill's 
 discussion of the relation between Cause and Effect. 
 The idealistic school — the school which descended from 
 Descartes — laid stress on the invariable and unconditional 
 character of the relation between Cause and Effect as a 
 proof that it was mental, hpriori, and therefore not derived 
 from Experience. Mill, in accordance with his general 
 acceptance of the doctrines of Locke and Hume, thinks 
 that the relation of Cause and Effect is purely experi- 
 mental, depending on an observed series of experiences. 
 Yet he goes on to assert that this experimental relation 
 can and must be invariable and unconditional. But 
 how can experience give rise to an invariable and 
 unconditional relation? Even Mill himself, despite his 
 definitions, can not admit such a possibility. For so 
 clearly is our notion of Cause and Effect derived from 
 our experience that we are, he thinks, forced to admit 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 87 
 
 that in distant parts of the stellar regions, where our 
 experience has not penetrated, events may follow without 
 being caused. What, then, becomes of the invariable 
 and unconditional sequence of Effect on Cause? We 
 might go on multiplying instances of the same oscillation 
 between different theories. It will perhaps, however, be 
 better to connect this peculiarity in Mill's logical position 
 with a view which seems to have taken even stronger 
 hold of him in later years. So receptive was he of other 
 men's views, so much did he — after his own experiences 
 in his mental crisis — dislike dogmatic and intolerant 
 statements, that it was a favourite belief of his that the 
 truth lay somewhere between two opposite theories. 
 This comes out very strongly in his Liberty, written 
 some years after his Logic. One of the reasons why all 
 opinions should be published in perfect freedom from 
 legal restraint is just this doctrine about Truth, as being 
 placed half-way between two opposites. Another reason 
 is connected with his Individualism. All progress, all 
 variety, depend on individual efforts. Just as thought 
 can not progress unless different individuals in different 
 spheres are allowed to bring their quota to the general 
 store, so, too, national welfare is held [by Mill in his 
 Political Economy to depend on the principle of laisser 
 /aire, untrammelled by positive legislation. And this 
 point, too, connects itself with his Logic. For individual 
 effort is naturally enough the source of all welfare, if 
 individual experience is actually the source of all our 
 knowledge. Thus Individualism involves Liberty of 
 Dissent, and Liberty of Dissent is justified by the 
 assumption that Truth, in the majority of cases, forms a 
 sort of boundary line between opposing factions. 
 
88 LIFE OF 
 
 Whether such a doctrine is to be accepted or not, it is 
 obvious enough that it acts disastrously on the clearness 
 and consistency of philosophical doctrines. Receptivity 
 of mind is valuable only so far as in exposition it is 
 balanced by certain fixed and unalterable points of view. 
 But if the expounder of a system of Logic is at the same 
 time always absorbing theories, even from his enemies, 
 we may admire his character, but we cannot always 
 understand his position. Let us take one final instance 
 from the sixth book of the Logic. In writing on 
 Sociology Mill is very much under the influence of 
 Auguste Comte and Positivism. He takes from him his 
 general conception of the Science, and, to a large extent, 
 his views on its method. But in Comte Sociology was 
 deduced directly from Biology : from the physical 
 organism we are to advance to the social organism. A 
 consequence is that Psychology as an introspective 
 science is by Comte discarded, and Cerebral Physiology 
 is put in its place. This Mill will by no means admit. 
 He belongs to a school of English psychologists, and he 
 cannot set his seal to the incompetence of his teachers. 
 Psychology, in consequence, must be made the founda- 
 tion of Sociology. The discovery is then made that 
 there is yet a link missing. We cannot at once advance 
 from the laws of mind to the laws which govern society. 
 We must introduce a science which shall deal with the 
 laws of character, the science which Mill terms 
 Ethology. Without Ethology he maintains Sociology to 
 be impossible. But can there be a science of Character ? 
 Mill, at all events, has to give it up. For some time 
 after the Logic came out he was busy with an attempt 
 to sketch such a science. But he had to confess his 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 89 
 
 failure, and his failure with Ethology fatally interfered 
 with the larger project, which he entertained, of 
 executing a work on Sociology. That he despaired of 
 making anything out of Ethology is proved, acccording 
 to Dr. Bain, by his betaking himself to the composition 
 of his Political Economy <.* 
 
 * Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 79. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 RICARDO'S DISCIPLE — (1843-1849). 
 
 'T—'HE publication of the Logic brought no relaxation 
 X. of activity to Mill. We are now in the period of 
 his life which marks the highest tide, not, indeed, 
 of his industry, which was always continuous and exces- 
 sive, but of that literary achievement by which a man 
 secures his place in the history of his country. One 
 great claim to remembrance he had already put forth in 
 1843 : he was now preparing his second great contribu- 
 tion to the best thought of the age — the Political 
 Economy, which was published in 1848. The intervening 
 years were not wholly occupied with this project. 
 In 1842 he wrote a masterly review of Bailey's Theory 
 of Vision in the Westminster Review, which con- 
 tained a vindication of Berkeley's metaphysical essay 
 on Sight as against the strictures of his critic. In 
 the same year he seems to have had a slight attack 
 of illness, perhaps in consequence of his severe loss 
 in the American Repudiation, and was unable to take 
 his usual walk home from the India House to Ken- 
 sington Square ; but on October 3rd he writes, " I 
 am quite well and strong, and now walk the whole 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 91 
 
 way to and from Kensington without the self-indul- 
 gence of omnibi." In 1843, besides the publication 
 of his Logic, he wrote an article on " Michelet " for the 
 Edinburgh Review, which he forecasts " will make some 
 of its readers stare." It contained a defence of the 
 papacy and the celibacy of the clergy, argued on philo- 
 sophical grounds, as a means of preserving the world from 
 barbarism ; but it does not seem to have produced the 
 consequences which Mill anticipated. The article came 
 out in 1844, and was followed by "The Claims of Labour" 
 and " Guizot," both contributed to the Edinburgh Re- 
 view in the succeeding year. Then, in 1846, there was 
 a labour of love in the review of the first two volumes of 
 Grote's Greek History in the same periodical ; while, in 
 1847, he wrote articles on Irish affairs in the Chronicle. 
 It is one evidence of the thoroughness with which this 
 occasional writing was performed, that he read through 
 the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey in the original before 
 his article on Grote's History. It illustrates, also, Mill's 
 dislike of the idea of any generic difference between 
 men and women that he prevailed upon Grote to alter, in 
 a second edition, the words "masculine" and "feminine," 
 which the historian had applied to the difference 
 between the scientific and artistic activity of the 
 Greeks.* His articles in the Morning Chronicle were 
 principally devoted to an urgent recommendation to 
 reclaim the waste lands in Ireland, and convert them 
 into peasant proprietorships — a topic appearing again 
 in the Political Economy, which was, perhaps, sug- 
 gested to his mind by his friend, Mr. Thornton. 
 
 Perhaps, however, the most important incident in these 
 * Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 86. 
 
92 LIFE OF 
 
 years was his friendship and correspondence with the 
 French Positivist philosopher, Auguste Comte. " Have 
 you ever looked into Comte's Cours de Philosophie Posi- 
 tive ?" he writes to Dr. Bain on October 15, 1841. "He 
 makes some mistakes, but, on the whole, I think it very 
 near the grandest work of this age.'' His correspondence 
 with Comte began in 1841 and lasted to 1846. The 
 greatest warmth of feeling between the two is shown in 
 the letters of 1842 and 1843. After that it somewhat 
 cools, though as late as 1846, when Comte had lost his 
 Clotilde, he received an affectionate letter of condolence 
 from Mill. But it was impossible for a man of the high 
 and generous feeling which Mill so uniformly displayed 
 to be on intimate terms with one who was so utterly 
 different to himself both in tone of character and habitual 
 range of thoughts. Comte, more perhaps than any 
 other philosopher, except Francis Bacon, demands from 
 his critics a clear severance between the character of his 
 life and the character of his intellect. One of the most 
 comprehensive and synthetic thinkers of his age was, in 
 domestic affairs, perhaps one of the meanest and smallest. 
 When he was turned out from the position of Examiner 
 at the Polytechnic School at Paris, he did not scruple] 
 to demand subsidies from his friends, nor to revile themi 
 if they refused to contribute. Mill, who, despite hisl 
 losses through the American Repudiation, had been( 
 forward in offers of pecuniary help, first found a topic of 
 disagreement in the position of women ; and then had 
 finally to convey to Comte that Grote and Molesworth, 
 whom he had interested in the case of the disappointed 
 Examiner, were disinclined to give any further assistance. 
 Comte, who in his correspondence shows much of the 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 93 
 
 airs of a literary parvenu of course, could not understand 
 such a refusal, and wrote to Mill a long lecture on the 
 relations between rich men and philosophers. Grote 
 was, however, obdurate, having conceived a strong dis- 
 like to Comte's sociological theories; indeed, it became 
 almost impossible for Mill to continue the correspondence 
 with a writer so wanting in ordinary taste. A final letter 
 was written on the occasion of the death of Comte's 
 Clotilde. Perhaps Mill was glad to be able to finish the 
 correspondence with a subject in which there was no 
 opportunity for controversy or angry retort. 
 
 The Principles of Political Economy was published, as 
 we have already seen, in the beginning of 1848. Many 
 circumstances made its publication a notable event 
 amidst the higher circles of the literary world. Mill had 
 been known to be a student of the subject since his 
 earlier years. In boyish walks with his father eco- 
 nomic topics had been discussed, and it was principally 
 owing to these conversations that James Mill's Elements 
 of Political Econofny was produced. Moreover, -the 
 friendship between the elder Mill and Ricardo was 
 notorious, as was also the fact that, had it not been for 
 his friend's solicitations, Ricardo's theories would never 
 hav e seenjhe light of day. John Mill himself had made 
 some preliminary contributions to the subject, which he 
 had written as early as 1830 and 1831, but which had 
 only been published in 1844, under the title of Essays 
 on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy. The first 
 of these dealt with the laws of interchange between 
 nations, and was sufficient to prove how close a study he 
 had made of Ricardo's theory of foreign exchanges. 
 The second and third dealt respectively with the 
 
94 LIFE OF 
 
 influence of consumption on production, and the mean- 
 ing of the words "productive" and "unproductive,' 
 as applied to labour, consumption, and expenditure. 
 The fourth showed still more decisively the influence ol 
 Ricardo, as it was concerned with the justification oi 
 the theorem, that "profits depend on wages, rising as 
 wages fall, and falling as wages rise." The fifth essay 
 was on the method of political economy, a subject 
 treated also in the subsequent work, which forms a 
 point of some importance in the estimation of Mill's 
 position. There was , besides these definite contri- 
 butions on Mill's part to the_literature of the subject, 
 a general expectation that the differences and dis- 
 crepancies between _political_ economists would shortly 
 disappear, and that Mill's exposition would be the great 
 instrumen t in settling the essential principles. Colonel 
 Torrens declared that in twenty years there would not 
 exist a doubt respecting any of its more fundamental 
 principles. Professor Sidgwick points out the reason for 
 this confidence. " The prosperity, " he says, "that 
 followed on the abolition rjf.the-corn-laws gaye practical 
 men a most impressive and satisfying proof of the 
 soundness of the abstract reasoning by which the 
 expediency of free trade had been inferred." It was, in 
 consequence, generally believed that 'the state of 
 polemical discussion' was passed, and that a really 
 constructive era had dawned. 
 
 We, who live with forty years' additional experience of 
 the changing fortunes of political economy, know how 
 little these sanguine expectations were destined to be 
 realised. Much has been changed in the interval ; to 
 some extent we have gone back to older views ; in some 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 95 
 
 respects we are still looking for that wider synthesis 
 which is to make the unsettled questions fall into their 
 proper place. But the value of Mill's work can only be 
 understood in reference to what came before him as well as 
 to the speculations which succeeded him, and it becomes 
 necessary, however briefly, to trace the development of 
 economical thought in England. For our purposes, we 
 need go no further back than that mercantile system 
 which forms the first phase of the modern thought on 
 the subject. The general position of the mercantilists 
 can be sketched somewhat as follows. They thought 
 that money and wealth were identical, and that a country, 
 therefore, was bound to attract to itself the greatest share 
 of the precious metals. Each country, they argued, 
 must export as much as it can, and import as little as it 
 can, receiving the difference of the two values in gold 
 and silver — a difference which was called " the balance of 
 trade." In order to secure such a balance, Governments 
 must either prohibit, or put high duties on, the importa- 
 tion of foreign wares ; they must resort also to bounties 
 on the export of home manufactures, and restrictions on 
 the export of the precious metals, in pursuit of the same 
 object. It is not difficult to understand where the 
 mistakes of such a theory lay. It is obvious that the 
 mercantilists overestimated the importance of possessing 
 a large amount of the precious metals; and the newer 
 ideas, which were promulgated by Petty and North, 
 about 1 69 1, were concerned with showing that national 
 wealth depended rather on the gifts of nature and the 
 labour of man. Further, it is clear that foreign trade 
 should not be so unduly estimated in relation to 
 domestic, nor should the industry which works up 
 
96 LIFE OF 
 
 materials be considered so superior to that which 
 produces them. " The balance of trade " is a fiction, 
 the real aim for the economist being the attempt to 
 secure for the whole population the necessaries and 
 conveniences of life. Finally, such devices as prohibi- 
 tions, protective duties, bounties, and monopolies, ought 
 to be discarded as being in reality impediments to trade, 
 which only requires as its indispensable condition the 
 freedom of industry. 
 
 The second phase of modern economic thought 
 may, perhaps, be said to begin with the " physiocrats " 
 (Quesnay, Gournay, and Dupont de Nemours), who, 
 amongst many errors, brought into prominence principles 
 which were destined to play a considerable part in sub- 
 sequent speculations. The physiocratic theory begins 
 with the idea of a Jus Natures, a simple, impressive, 
 and beneficial code established by Nature herself. From 
 this conception flowed such principles as the belief that 
 all individuals have the same natural rights, and that 
 Government is a necessary evil. In relation to trade, 
 then, the ideal motto of Governments should be laissez- 
 faire, laissez-passer, — the highest point of negative 
 indifference, in order that labour might be completely 
 unfettered and undisturbed. Immensely more valuable 
 as is the work of Adam Smith, it yet proceeds on 
 much the same lines. It is true that the conception 
 of a code of Nature is put into the background, but 
 the belief in the individual, with his desire for gain 
 and the necessity for his freedom, is the animating spirit 
 of the Wealth of Nations. Where Adam Smith is 
 honourably distinguished^ from his predecessors, and 
 even from some of his successors, lies in his copious 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 97 
 
 illustrations of tenets by actual experience, and his 
 continuous references to historical data in support of 
 his theories. Yet, what the German critics, Roscher 
 and Hildebrand, derisively call " Smithianismus" has 
 defects which have recently become patent to modern 
 eyes. If Smith's conception of the social economy is 
 essentially individualistic, it must further be added that 
 the "economic man," on whom the whole system turns, 
 is a hypothetical being from whom all motives, other 
 than the selfish and the interested, have been carefully 
 abstracted. It results that the economic advantage of 
 society must be held to be identical with the economic 
 advantage of the individual, and that the system of 
 Smith becomes too absolute in character because its 
 regard is exclusively directed to man as an abstract 
 being rather than to man as he has been made by 
 the discipline of history and the courses of civilisa- 
 tion. But whatever be the merits or demerits of 
 Adam Smith, it is certain that the whole tendency 
 of his successor, Ricardo, is to exaggerate the charac- 
 teristic points, and to leave out that saving refer- 
 ence to actual experience which formed the strong 
 point of his predecessor. Ricardo, at all events, moves 
 in a world of abstractions ; the " economic man. " 
 actuated hy a cinglp principle "f grffid, gtalVg .everywhere, 
 through his pages ; nor has custom, apparently, any 
 chance a gainst competition in industry ; nor is combina- 
 tion regarded as a possible expedient in solving the 
 problems of labour. The famous doctrine of Rent is 
 only hypothetically true in the most advanced industrial 
 communities, however much the implied theory that the 
 interests of landlords are permanently in opposition to 
 
 7 
 

 
 98 LIFE OF 
 
 those of other classes may have suited the democratic 
 character of current Benthamism. Comte, indeed, 
 remarks in one of his letters to Mill, * that Benthamism 
 was a derivative from political economy and from the 
 system of natural liberty, and the truth of the remlrk is 
 seen in the attitude of men like McCulloch, James Mill, 
 and others, to the Ricardian principles. Further weak 
 joints in Ricardo himself were his habitual ass umption s 
 Jhat capital could be so easily transferred from one 
 undertaking to another, that labour could also be so 
 _, easily transferred from one industry to another,! and 
 that both capitalists and labourers might be expected to 
 know all about the prospects of industry, not only in 
 their own, but in other countries. To these must be 
 added, as still further demerits, Ricardo's extreme loose- 
 ness of phraseology, % and the want of any explanation of 
 the appropriate method by which political economy 
 should be studied. 
 
 We h ave called Mill Ricardo's disciple^but it must not 
 be su pposed that _he_ was injury, sense a servile, follower 
 pf his master. He^clearly held it his mission to justify 
 Ricardo to the world, and he speaks of Ricardo's 
 "superior lights" in comparison with his predecessors. 
 But his design was much larger than a mere illustration 
 of Ricardian principles. T he object of his book, as he 
 
 * Leltres a" A. Comte a J. S. Mill, p. 4. 
 
 + Adam Smith knew better. " It appears, evidently from exper- 
 ience, that man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be 
 transported." — Wealth of Nations, Book I., c. viii. 
 
 + Senior called him " the most incorrect writer whoever attained 
 philosophical eminence.'' Quoted by Ingram. — History of Folitical 
 Economy, p. 123. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 99 
 
 himself tells us, was to exhibit^econpmic phenomena^in 
 relation to_the most advanced conceptions of^his own 
 time on the general philosophy of.SQciety — to do, in fact. 
 for_the mneteenth_cen^rj_what^djm_Smith had done 
 for the eighteenth. In pursuance of this aim there were 
 many points in his treatise which were not only valuable 
 in themselves, but exhibited a distinct advance on any- 
 thing which had gone before them. He himself used to 
 say that Ricardo had supplied the backbone of the 
 science, but, as Cairnes remarked in a notice of Mill's 
 labours in the Examiner, it is not less certain that the 
 limbs, the joints, and the muscular developments were 
 the work of Mill. We may take, for example, the 
 development which Mill gives of Ricardo's doctrine of 
 foreign trade, where the skeleton is clothed with flesh, 
 and principles of the most abstract kind are translated 
 into concrete language, and brought to explain familiar 
 facts. Or we may look at Mill's doctrine of the 
 economic nature of land, which, though it has been 
 sometimes denied, is clearly, in its views of the peculiar 
 nature of landed property and its doctrines of " the 
 unearned increment," a direct deduction from Ricardo's 
 theory of Rent. More originality is shown by Mill in 
 the introduction of new premisses, which very often 
 largely alter the deductions to be drawn from old prin- 
 ciples. For instance, in reference to the effect which the 
 growth of society has on the minimum point of wages, 
 Mill rema rkri that thin min imum is not J, physical. Jauf. .a 
 moral minim umjaasLJSfc.thfilgfoj^ capable of being,altei£d 
 with the changes of character jn the population at large. 
 Hence, instead of a weary pessimism as to the future 
 condition of the labourer, we have the suggested chance 
 
ioo LIFE OF 
 
 of improvement as his moral character improves ; and 
 the chapter, "the Future of the Industrial Classes," is 
 very different in tone and speculation from anything we 
 find in Ricardo. So, too, Mill s eesjr eadily enough how 
 much the influence of custom serves to modi fy the stress 
 of competition, and how clearly the real reg ulator of rent 
 over the greater part of the habitable gl obe. Js not. 
 competition only, but competition, custom, _and the 
 _absolute will of the owner of the_sqil. " This recogni- 
 tion," says Cairnes, " threw an entirely new light over 
 the whole problem of land-tenure, and plainly furnished 
 grounds for legislative interference in the contracts 
 between landlords and tenants. Its application to 
 Ireland was obvious, and Mill himself did not hesi- 
 tate to urge the application with all the energy and 
 enthusiasm which he invariably threw into every cause 
 that he espoused." On another point Mill also departed 
 from Ricardo. In deference to the arguments of 
 his friend, Mr. Thornton, he finally gave up the 
 "wage-fund" theory, and though here Cairnes thinks him 
 wrong, there are many modern economists who believe 
 that his newer position was entirely in the right. Both 
 Mill and Cairnes, however, are agreed in one important 
 modification of previous doctrine. By both of these 
 writers it is maintained that economic art, or the applica- 
 tion of principles to practice, does not follow straight 
 from economic science. Application to practice 
 demands other considerations than those purely 
 economical — a point the importance of which will 
 come out in the sequel. 
 
 In the discussion of Mill's Logic in the last chapter, 
 it was suggested that Mill represented a transitional 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 101 
 
 state of opinion, between Hume and Herbert Spencer 
 on the one hand, and the school of empiricism and 
 idealism on the other. In this position was found 
 the explanation of many of the inconsistencies which 
 analysis seemed to reveal in the fundamental dogmas 
 of the work. Up to 1843, in point of fact, the tide 
 in Mill's mind seemed to be strongly setting in the 
 direction of a reform of Benthamism by means of 
 Coleridge, Carlyle, and the Germans, owing especially to 
 the influence of John Sterling. Somewhere about that 
 period it received a check ; and the check was due to 
 Comte, the Socialists, and, perhaps in a lesser degree, 
 Mrs. Taylor. We have now to ask the same question 
 with regard to the Political Economy. _The .syste m 
 which Mill in herited, and in which he was trained, 
 was clearly the doctrine of Ricardp_and_ Malthus. Were 
 there any fr esh_ influences,. , acting, on him, and. if so, was 
 their_charactex.consjsient with the„£arlier .views Z_„ 
 
 One of the earliest critics of the system of Ricardo 
 was a professor at Haileybury, Richard Jones, who lived 
 between the years 1790-1855, and whose Essay on the 
 Distribution of Wealth, and on the Sources of Taxation, 
 was published in 1831, seventeen years before the work 
 of Mill. ' Jones was dissatisfied at once with the method 
 and the results of Ricardo's theories. "If," he said, 
 " we wish to make ourselves acquainted with the 
 economy and arrangements by which the different 
 nations of the earth produce and distribute their 
 revenues, I really know but of one way to attain our 
 object, and that is, to look and see. We must g et 
 co mprehensive views of facts, that we may arrive _at 
 principles that are truly comprehensive. If we take a 
 
102 LIFE OF 
 
 different method, if we snatch at general principles, and 
 content ourselves with confined observations, two things 
 will happen to us. First, what we call general principles 
 will often be found to have no generality — we shall set 
 out with declaring propositions to be universally true, 
 which at every step of our further progress we shall be 
 obliged to confess are frequently false ; and, secondly, 
 we shall miss a great mass of useful knowledge which 
 those who advance to principles by a comprehensive 
 examination of facts necessarily meet with on their 
 road."* It is clear that we here meet with some- 
 thing like a revolt against the a priori, deductive 
 method of Ricardo. Nor was Jones inclined to admit 
 some of Ricardo's conclusions. He animadverts on 
 the theory of Rent, and declares that besides competi- 
 tion, which, under the supposed conditions, might 
 affect " farmers' rents," there was also custom, which 
 indubitably affected "peasant-rents." Here was much 
 the same modification which Mill afterwards brought 
 forward. He further made a classification of peasant- 
 rents into serf, metayer, ryot, and cottier, and the 
 classification reappears in substance in the pages of 
 Mill. In other points of his criticism — such as the 
 denial that the interests of landlords are necessarily 
 opposed to those of other classes, and that wages can 
 rise only at the expense of profits — Mill was not at one 
 with him ; but it is perhaps true, as Mr. Ingram 
 remarks, that Mill, while using Jones' work, gave his 
 merits but faint recognition. 
 
 The Philosophic Positive of Comte — at least the two 
 first volumes — was brought over to England in 1837 
 * Quoted by Ingram in his History of Political Economy, p. 143. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 103 
 
 by Wheatstone, who always claimed the merit of its 
 introduction. Mill read them about the end of 1837, or 
 beginning of 1838, and was profoundly struck with them. 
 The effect was seen in the sixth book of his Logic, as has 
 been already remarked. Now, while Comte thought but 
 meanly ^ofPohtiad^Eajno^nry as it .wasj pursued in E pg- 
 
 which he beli eved was. destined__to. in£ljad£__sj2ejcjijai;ujn£. 
 on economical subjects in a larger framework . With his 
 criticisms of English political economy, Mill, of course, 
 could not agree, and stigmatised them as essentially 
 shallow and superficial. But the new science of Sociology 
 made such an impression on him that for some time he 
 busied himself with the attempt to write a large book on 
 the same subject. In reality, however, Comte's scheme 
 involved principles which were fundamentally different 
 from his own. Comte believed that Sociology was 
 one science which should be studied in its totality, 
 because all social phenomena had a certain solidarity 
 — an idea which made a separate economic science an 
 impossibility. Its method, moreover, was not to be 
 deductive, but to be based on a systematic historical 
 comparison, while the historical spirit was conspicuously 
 absent in the doctrinaires of the eighteenth century. 
 Inasmuch as it was to be studied historically, the science 
 demanded a division between a statical theory of society 
 (the influences acting on a given state at any one time), 
 and a dynamical theory (the steps by which a historical 
 state was evolved out of preceding states). This dis- 
 tinction was eagerly seized on by Mill, though perhaps 
 he never saw how it reacted on his older views of an 
 abstract treatment of economics, and how it necessitated 
 
104 LIFE OF 
 
 the substitution for them of a doctrine of the laws 
 of the economic development of nations. He does, 
 indeed, attempt in Book IV. of his work, a treatment of 
 Economic Dynamics, but his critics do not appear to 
 regard this portion as one of the most successful. 
 
 There were other influences also in the air, besides 
 the influence of the Philosophie Positive. Chief among 
 these was the theory of the Soci alists, the work of men 
 like St. Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, and Lassalle. Two 
 ideas_at_least wer^_Ji^re_p_rominent : on theone hand, 
 the destruction of the negative theory of Government ; 
 on the other, the limitation of the individualistic 
 g reed for w e alth and dis like o f lab our. There was, 
 besides, the German school of economists", men like 
 Wilhelm Roscher, whose work appeared in 1843, and 
 Bruno Hildebrand, whose first volume appeared in 
 1848. In them a prominent view was the necessity 
 of accentuating the moral elements in economic study, 
 and putting the selfish into the background. Even in 
 England the spirit of change was abroad in the writ- 
 ings of Carlyle, with his professed antagonism to the 
 tenets of the Manchester school. 
 
 If we look at Mill as being in the midst of, if not 
 affected by, such influences as these, we shall understand 
 the reason for some of those doubts which are suggested 
 to some minds by his work. The way in which he turns 
 to Political Economy is in itself significant. It will 
 be remembered that, after the publication of his Logic, 
 his thoughts were for some time occupied with Sociology, 
 and that he abandoned the subject because, in the way 
 in which he interpreted the science, it was necessarily 
 dependent on Ethology, and of Ethology he failed to 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. ic 
 
 make any real scheme. It was then that he betoo 
 himself to Political Economy. The consequence wa 
 that the relation in which his newer subject stoo 
 to Sociology was never perspicuously explained. Wa 
 Political Economy a part of the larger science, or wa 
 it only a sort of preparatory study ? If we look at th 
 title of his larger work, Principles of Political Economy 
 with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy 
 the doubt is suggested whether Political Econom 
 is in reality such an integral portion of Sociology tha 
 its separate study cannot be otherwise than abstract an 
 hypothetical. But elsewhere he speak s of it as " carve' 
 out of the_general body of the science of society," 
 sentence which clearly affirms its necessary subordinatior 
 The reason of such hesitation, if it be hesitation, is 
 probably, that he had his own version of what th 
 science of society meant, and that his version did nc 
 in every respect correspond to that of Comte, froi: 
 whom, nevertheless, he derived it. To Comte, Socia 
 Physics were to be studied historically. This was on 
 consequence of the distinction he drew between Socia 
 Statics and Social Dynamics. This, too, was the resul 
 of his general assumption that as we rise in the serie 
 of sciences from simplicity to complexity of data, th 
 general inductive methods are to be aided by specia 
 devices. Thus Biology demands the use of the com 
 parative method, and Social Physics, in its turn, becauS' 
 of the increased complexity of its data, demands th' 
 use of the historical method. But to Mill, S ociolog ; 
 was depend ent on Ethology , the science of humai 
 character, and it in i ts turn was depen dent. ^oi 
 Psychology, the science of the general laws of mind 
 
106 LIFE OF 
 
 Sociology was, therefore, to be studied deductively in 
 great measure, because of this intimate dependence on 
 the sciences of mind. It is true that it must also be 
 studied by the inverse deductive method (which is 
 Mill's name for the historical method), and so far as this 
 reservation went, it became a science apart. JBuL 
 JPolitical^Economy, aj^aU^ events, mjgh,t > Jthate&er frs rp.la- 
 tions to Sociology, be studied deductively, as. dependent 
 on the laws of human nature ; and thus Mill could 
 still keep himself in alliance .with the_yiewA.,of_Ricardo.„ 
 llL_rti e fifth of his Essay s_ on Unsettled Questions. 
 he declares with some dogmatism that the a priori. 
 method is the only one which is applicable, and 
 that the a posteriori method "is altogether inefficacious 
 in those sciences (the social) as a means of arriving 
 at any considerable body of valuable., inith.'' But 
 then came in the later work the reminiscence of 
 Comte's distinction between the Statics and Dynamics 
 of Society, which he in many parts of his book values 
 so highly. He therefore tries to save himself by 
 a distinction between two sorts of economic inquiry, 
 only one of which could be treated by the d, 
 posteriori method. Thg_ chief mer it of h is treatise, he i 
 says, lies in its distinction between the theory of Pro- 
 duction and the theory of Distribution. Production is 
 based on unalterable natural laws, which could therefore 
 only be studied a priori; while the principLss_oJL Dis- 
 tribution, whic h are modified by successive changgs_ in 
 society, could only be gathered d posteriori. Yet even 
 here he is not consistent. For in the treatment of 
 Production, as Mr. Sidgwick has pointed out, he proceeds 
 by analysing our common empirical knowledge of the 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. ic 
 
 facts of industry, and this, if it is not formally inductioi 
 is clearly a sort of induction. The pressure of the ol 
 Ricardian theory on his mind is thus struggling with tr 
 newer lights derived from Comte. 
 
 Other ambiguities are not difficult of detection, especial 
 in relation to Malthusian views and the theories of tt 
 Socialists. It is not easy to be sure of Mill's attituc 
 towards Malthus. On the whole he seems to accept h 
 doctrine, and to incorporate it with the deductions froi 
 Ricardo's theory of rent. He adds, indeed, an idea whic 
 is not found in Malthus. "Malthus himself and some < 
 his followers, such as Thomas Chalmers, regarded la 
 marriages as the proper means of restricting numbers 
 an extension to the lower classes of the same prudeni 
 that maintains the position of the upper and midd 
 classes. Mill prescribes a further pitch of self-denu 
 the continence of married couples. At least such is tl 
 more obvious interpretation to be put upon his languag 
 It was the opinion of many, that while his estimate 
 pure sentimental affection was more than enough, h 
 estimate of the sexual passion was too low."* It is clet 
 at all events, that he believed in the necessity 
 restricting the population. Yet it might perhaps 1 
 maintained that such moral restraints are depende 
 for their working on the individual responsibility f 
 the support of a family ; and this idea might be diffici 
 to preserve in the Socialistic theories to which 
 many parts of his work he gives such weight. Fc 
 especially in the third edition of his Political Econon 
 (after the French Revolution of 1848), he tells us th£ 
 though still believing in individual liberty of action, 1 
 * Bain : /. i - . Mill, p. 89. 
 
108 LIFE OF 
 
 turned his thoughts to "a common ownership in the 
 raw material of the globe, and an equal participation in 
 all the benefits of combined labour." Tempted thus by 
 Socialist schemes, he yet will not give himself up to 
 them. To improve the existing distribution of wealth 
 he looks hopefully in the direction of the Socialistic 
 writers ; but though thus expecting the dawn of a newer 
 order, he will in the meantime be content with the old 
 views of private interest.* 
 
 " His was not a historical head," says Roscher 
 of Mill, and thus, though he surveys "the promised 
 land," he yet will die on some Ricardian Pisgah. 
 Promised land, indeed, the newer political economy 
 may never furnish. But amongst the wildernesses 
 in which the students of the science still seem to 
 be wandering, there is one beacon. The idea, 
 which is of indubitable value in the German 
 historical school, is the necessity of accentuating the 
 moral element in economic study. We have seen that 
 botliA|ill_aiid.Cairnes desire to keep separate_econqmic_ 
 'scien ce and economic art, possibly owing to the con- 
 viction that if the principles of economic science,.withjts^ 
 assumptions of individual greed and selfishness, were 
 immediately applied to practice, the results would be, if 
 not immoral, at least non-moral. But if we ask, 
 how the step can be taken from theory to practice, 
 in what way the abstract laws can be translated into 
 concrete facts, the answer in economy, as well as in other 
 departments, can only be furnished by morals. Morals, 
 in fact, form the stepping-stone between_principle and 
 
 * Cf. "The Chapters on Socialism " contributed (posthumously) 
 
 to the Fortnightly Review in 1879. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. i< 
 
 act, and thus the necessity which the German ec 
 nomists feel is amply justified. For surely the us 
 of wealth are at least as important as the mod 
 in which it can be acquired, and have an enc 
 mous effect on the moral condition of a peopl 
 Whatever else may or may not be required from tl 
 economics of the future — whether the tendency may 1 
 to emphasise the functions of government, or wheth 
 the pendulum may swing back again, as Mr. Herbe 
 Spencer desires, to the doctrine of laisser-faire — r 
 theory can be held to meet the problems of our ag 
 unless it aids in the formation, both in the higher ar 
 lower regions of the industrial world, of profound co 
 victions as to social duties. The theory of individu 
 rights has had its day : that of duty must take its place. 
 
 * Cf. an interesting chapter on the Future in Mr. Ingran 
 History of Political Economy, from which much has been taken 
 the views indicated above. Roscher's works referred to are- 
 Crundriss zu Vorlesungen iiber die Staatswirthschaft notch gesc. 
 ichtlicher Methode, and Zur Geschichte der Englischen Volkswirt, 
 sckaftshhre. Cf., too, Jevons's Future of Political Economy.- 
 Fortnightly Peview, 1876. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 MRS. TAYLOR — (1848-1858). 
 
 FROM the two great literary labours of Mill, the 
 Logic and the Political Economy, we turn to some 
 of the incidents of his domestic life. There is 
 possibly a comparative failure of energy after 1848, due 
 to the enormous strain of the two winters' work in 
 1842-3 and 1846-7. One instance is quoted by Dr. 
 Bain. After the appearance of Ferrier's Institutes — a 
 metaphysical work on the lines of what is known as 
 subjective Idealism — Mill said that he could have 
 dashed off an article much as he did on the publication 
 of Bailey's Theory of Vision. But no article was 
 forthcoming, and his papers in the Westminster Review 
 seem not to have been so frequent as of yore. One 
 cause of this was undoubtedly ill-health. In the summer 
 of 1848 he had a bad fall in Kensington Gardens, which 
 was followed by an affection of the eyes. " Lame and 
 unable to use his eyes," says Dr. Bain, "I never saw him 
 in such a state of despair." Six years later he had the 
 illness to which he makes allusion in the Autobiography. 
 An attack on the chest, ending in the partial destruction 
 of one lung, he did his best to cure by an eight months 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. I 
 
 absence from England, during which he visited Ital 
 Sicily, and Greece. According to Sir James Clark, tl 
 local disease was not so serious as the general debilit 
 which, in the opinion of his medical adviser, wou 
 probably prevent him from doing any other considerab 
 work. Peacock, who was the head of his office in tl 
 India House, told Grote that his absence was much fe 
 and it was no doubt a considerable relief, not only to h 
 friends, but to his official chief, when he returned 
 London with his health tolerably re-established. Tl 
 literary work of this period does not seem to have be< 
 great. He published in the Westminster Review, in 184 
 a vindication of the French Revolution of the precedii 
 year, in answer to the strictures of his father's frien 
 Lord Brougham. This was followed three years later 1 
 an article on Whewell's Elements of Morality, equalling 
 the savageness of its attack his previous diatribe again 
 Professor Sedgwick. Then came a final paper on Grots 
 History of Greece, which he published in the Edinbur^ 
 Review. His official duties became heavy when, 
 1857, the East India Company was threatened wi 
 extinction. He had become head of the office, owing 
 the retirement of Peacock in 1856, and it fell to his 1 
 to draft a petition to Parliament on behalf of h 
 employers. This petition was pronounced by Earl Gn 
 to be the ablest State-paper he had ever read. Despi 
 his -earnest protest, however, the Bill passed for tl 
 transfer of the Indian Government to the Crown, ar 
 Mill retired from official work. He was applied to \ 
 Lord Stanley to serve on the new Indian Council, but 1 
 declined the offer on the plea of failing health. 
 
 The whole of this period is, so far as Mill's domest 
 
112 LIFE OF 
 
 life is concerned, overshadowed by Mrs. Taylor. Intro- 
 duced to her as early as 1831, at a dinner party at Mr. 
 Taylor's house, where were present Roebuck, W. J. Fox, 
 and Harriet Martineau, the acquaintance rapidly ripened 
 into intimacy, and the intimacy into a friendship, which 
 Mill himself was never weary of describing in terms that 
 could not but appear extravagant to others. In some of the 
 presentation copies of his Political Economy he wrote the 
 following dedication : — " To Mrs. John Taylor, who of all 
 persons known to the author is the most highly qualified 
 either to originate or to appreciate speculation on social 
 advancement, this work is, with the highest respect and 
 esteem, dedicated." An article on " the Enfranchise- 
 ment of Women " was made the occasion for another 
 panegyric. The dedication of Mill's work on Liberty 
 is well known.* Finally, the pages of the Autobiography 
 ring with the dithyrambic praise of " his almost 
 infallible counsellor.'' There is a touch of fatuousness 
 in all this, which can be accounted for only on the 
 
 * " To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the 
 inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings — 
 the friend and wife, whose exalted sense of truth and right was my 
 strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward — 
 I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many 
 years, it belongs as much to her as to me ; but the work as it 
 stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable 
 advantage of her revision ; some of the most important portions 
 having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they 
 are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of inter- 
 preting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble 
 feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of 
 a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that 
 I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled 
 wisdom." 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. I 
 
 principle that every man carries a dead poet within 1 
 breast. Mill had, indeed, tried to write verse, at 1 
 father's orders, in the immaturity of his powers, but t 
 companionship with Mrs. Taylor was the poem of r 
 lifetime. Meanwhile Egeria cast an apple of disco 
 among his friends. His father taxed him with being 
 love with another man's wife ; his acquaintance did n 
 dare to mention her name ; while those who were le 
 cautious suffered the penalty of their temerity. Among 
 others, Roebuck, Mrs. Grote, Mrs. Austin, Miss Harri 
 Martineau, and perhaps Lady Harriet Baring, owed the 
 dismissal to allusions to the forbidden subject. Tl 
 husband accepted the situation with all the discomfc 
 it entailed, and Mrs. Taylor lived with her daught 
 in a lodging in the country, until, in 1851, Mi 
 after the death of her husband, made her his wife, 
 seems that no one was asked to call on her. Gro 
 would have liked to do so, yet did not dare ; but an utt 
 estrangement from both mother and sister was one of tl 
 first consequences of the union. Opinions differed as ' 
 her merits. George Mill, one of Mill's younger brother 
 said that she was "a clever and remarkable woman, b 
 nothing like what John took her to be." Carlyle, in h 
 Reminiscences, utters enigmatic sentences about he 
 She was "vivid," or "iridescent;" she was "pale an 
 passionate and sad-looking, a living-romance heroine ( 
 the royallest volition and questionable destiny " — epithe 
 which might have been intended to be complimentar 
 but were certainly ambiguous. Mrs. Carlyle wrol 
 that she might be her friend, but she is deeme 
 dangerous. Carlyle adds, that she was worse tha 
 dangerous — she was patronising. On one occasic 
 
ii4 LIFE OF 
 
 Mill and his wife were brought into close contact 
 with the Carlyles. The MS. of the first volume 
 of the French Revolution was lent to Mill, and was 
 accidentally burnt by Mrs. Mill's servant. Mill and 
 his wife drove up to Carlyle's door — Mrs. Mill speechless, 
 Mill so full of of conversation that he detained Carlyle 
 with desperate attempts at loquacity for two hours. 
 He made, however, a substantial reparation by pre- 
 vailing on his victim to accept half of the two hundred 
 pounds which he offered.* Mrs. Taylor died in 1858, 
 after seven years of happy companionship with Mill, and 
 was buried at Avignon. The inscription which Mill 
 wrote for her grave is too characteristic to be omitted — 
 " Her great and loving heart, her noble soul, her clear, 
 powerful, original, and comprehensive intellect, made her 
 the guide and support, the instructor in wisdom and the 
 example in goodness, as she was the sole earthly delight 
 of those who had the happiness to belong to her. As 
 earnest for all public good as she was generous and 
 devoted to all who surrounded her, her influence has 
 been felt in many of the greatest improvements of the 
 age, and will be in those still to come. Were there even 
 a few hearts and intellects like hers, this earth would 
 already become the hoped-for heaven." These lines' 
 proved the intensity of Mill's feeling, which is not afraid 
 of abundant verbiage ; but they also prove that he 
 could not imagine what the effect would be on others, 
 and, as Grote said, only Mill's reputation could survive 
 these and similar displays. 
 
 It is impossible to omit all reference to this singular 
 page in Mill's history. But it is possible to limit curiosity 
 * See Dr. Garnett's Life of Carlyle, p. 76. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. i: 
 
 to the psychological interest, beyond which all discussic 
 on such a matter is sheer impertinence. We have r 
 desire, as we have no right, to know any of the inciden 
 in detail of the long companionship; the bare outline of tl 
 facts, in the general summary which has just been give 
 is sufficient to show the strange influence to which M 
 was subjected for more than twenty years of his lif 
 The paradox of the situation is that Mill's character h; 
 been generally regarded as somewhat cold and impassiv 
 a character, therefore, in which it was antecedent 
 improbable that we should find anything of the nature < 
 a romance. As a matter of fact, he had a considerab 
 depth of feeling, which was hidden behind a mask of ii 
 reserve ; he was not deficient by any means in sen 
 ments and emotions of a warm and generous characte 
 But if we may judge from his published writings, 1 
 habitually underrated the strength of passion as 
 exists in the majority of men ; and this characteristi 
 while it serves as a useful commentary to such events 
 the foreign tour undertaken in companionship with Mj 
 Taylor, at the same time increases the marvel of Mil 
 infatuation. For infatuation it can only be called wh( 
 a man of Mill's intellectual eminence allows himself 
 describe his friend in terms of such unbounded adul 
 tion — " Were I but capable of interpreting to the wor 
 one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which a 
 buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a great 
 benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from anythii 
 that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by h 
 all but unrivalled wisdom." A man of common sen 
 and worldly judgment would be glad if such Ciceroni; 
 phrases could only be accompanied by the Ciceroni; 
 
u6 LIFE OF 
 
 comment which the Roman orator made in one of his 
 letters to Atticus — "Nosti illas XtjkvOov;."* 
 
 But we must be careful not to exaggerate the paradox. 
 History gives us illustrative examples of philosophic 
 weakness. Auguste Comte had his Clotilde, and Des- 
 cartes his Princess Elizabeth ; and though such instances 
 are not exactly parallel, they may serve to bring out a 
 habitual feature in such relationships. To a man whose 
 range of thought usually lies in the spheres of the 
 abstract and the purely logical, there is a strange fascina- 
 tion in the lively presentation of the concrete and the 
 practical. The latter faculty is so far denied to him 
 that he tends to overestimate its importance. It seems 
 like a revelation from another world if a woman of wit 
 and imagination can clothe with living and palpable flesh 
 some of those arid skeletons among which his mind has 
 had to make its home. If we look at Carlyle's descrip- 
 tive adjectives, "vivid" and "iridescent,'' there maybe 
 some indication conveyed of a picturesque and graphic 
 power in dealing with concrete images, possessed by 
 Mrs. Taylor, which doubtless would be attractive 
 to Mill. He had been, as we have seen, a friend of 
 Sterling, who possessed some of this power : at all events, 
 Sterling's remark is significant, that Mill had singularly 
 little sense of the concrete, and, though possessed of deep 
 feeling, had little poetry. Perhaps Mrs. Taylor supplied 
 him with both necessaries ; perhaps, as Dr. Garnett has 
 suggested, it was due to her that Mill wrote his appre- 
 ciative notice of Tennyson. As to the practical tendency, 
 Mill himself has given evidence that it was exactly in 
 this region that she was of such service to him. If there 
 * Cic. Ait. I., 14. 3. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. I 
 
 was any immediate relation to practice in his Politic 
 Economy, as distinguished from the writings of othi 
 economists, he declared that the praise should be hers. 
 No stress should probably be laid on an explanatic 
 which naturally rises to the lips of a worldly and ha 
 cynical critic, that Mrs. Taylor flattered Mill by servir 
 as an echo to his own opinions. Mill doubtless w; 
 above all coarse forms of flattery ; and his friendshi 
 with and appreciation of such men as Sterling ar 
 Thornton sufficiently prove that his confidence was ni 
 always given to those only who agreed with him. Y 
 there is a common mistake which is made by men : 
 their relation to clever women, which in part may hai 
 been present in this case. When a clever woman givi 
 expression to some of the thoughts which, in the man 
 case, are the result of hard thinking, he is apt to imagir 
 that she, too, must have been through a similar ment 
 discipline, and that there is as much behind her e: 
 pression of the thought as there would be if he ha 
 made use of it. A man habitually underrates tl 
 woman's quickness of apprehension, and her delica 
 and intuitive insight into some of the problems wil 
 which he has been wrestling. He admires her, ther 
 fore, in proportion to the seriousness of his own logi 
 not in reference to her own native powers. Such i 
 explanation, however, would not be accepted by M 
 himself, for he always believed that the characters 
 men and women were identical — an opinion which, be 
 true or false, would itself support some such delusion ; 
 that which has been traced above. It is, at least, a fac 
 that the feminine mind is surprisingly quick in assirr 
 lating and reproducing thoughts and ideas which hai 
 
n8 LIFE OF 
 
 been sympathetically presented to it. It can adapt 
 itself, perhaps, with greater readiness than the average 
 masculine intellect to a new medium. Even if this be 
 only a difference between two classes of mind rather 
 than a difference between the sexes, its value as a 
 possible key to Mill's reverential attitude is not impaired. 
 It may be remembered that Mill had had a training 
 which was, in some respects, one of peculiar sadness. 
 Whatever other effects James Mill's stern methods might 
 be supposed to have produced, they certainly rendered 
 his son an isolated and solitary being. The feeling crops 
 up here and there in many parts of the Autobiography. 
 He was not like other boys, and he could not, therefore, 
 be their friend ; he had thoughts to which average men 
 had no access ; above all, he had views on religion which 
 tended to keep him away from his fellows. His acute 
 and friendly observer at Falmouth, Caroline Fox, guessed 
 that he was much alone. " He is," she wrote, "in many 
 senses isolated, and must sometimes shiver with the 
 cold."* If to this we add the rich endowment of feeling 
 which Mill must have inherited from his mother, just as 
 he inherited from her his aquiline features, and the iron 
 restraint which he had been taught to impose upon all 
 such " weaknesses '' by his father, is his infatuation so 
 strange ? It is the solitary men who surprise their con- 
 temporaries by unexpected outbursts ; it is the repres- 
 sion of feeling which often brings in its train some 
 emotional conflagration. When Mill met Mrs. Taylor, 
 all the hidden fire of affection which smouldered beneath 
 a cold exterior rose to the surface. Is it curious that the 
 lava-stream should have swept away some of the logical 
 * Caroline Fox's Journals, ii. , 270. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. \ 
 
 judgment? Yet, if such explanations do not make 
 clear why- Mill's sentiments should have degenerated ir 
 sentimentality, we can only fall back upon that sub 
 sense of difference in mind, character, and experien 
 which, even in those who are exempt from what ' 
 euphemistically call "romance," serves to make intelk 
 tual companionship between men and women at on 
 so great and so bewildering a stimulus. 
 
 It still remains to estimate the extent to which Mi 
 Taylor, both before and after her marriage with Mi 
 made actual contributions to his thoughts and his pu 
 lished works. And here Mill gives us abundant help 
 the Autobiography. When first he knew her, his though 
 were turning to the subject of Logic. But his publistu 
 work on the subject owed nothing to her, he tells us, 
 its doctrines. It was Mill's custom to write the whole 
 a book so as to get his general scheme complete, ar 
 then laboriously to re-write it in order to perfect tl 
 phrases and the composition. Doubtless Mrs. Tayl< 
 was of considerable help to him as a critic of style. Bi 
 to be a critic of doctrine she was hardly qualified. Mi 
 has some clear admissions on this point. " The on' 
 actual revolution which has ever taken place in m 
 modes of thinking was already complete,"* he say: 
 before her influence became paramount. There is 
 curiously humble estimate of his own powers (to whic 
 Dr. Bain has called attention), which reads at first sigr 
 as if it contradicted this. " During the greater part c 
 my literary life I have performed the office in relation t 
 her, which, from a rather early period, I had considere 
 as the most useful part that I was qualified to take in th 
 * Autobiography, p. 190. 
 
120 LIFE OF 
 
 domain of thought, that of an interpreter of original 
 thinkers and mediator between them and the public." 
 So far it would seem that Mill had sat at the feet of his 
 oracle; but observe the highly remarkable exception which 
 is made in the following sentence : — " For I had always a 
 humble opinion of my own powers as an original thinker, 
 except in abstract science {logic, metaphysics, and the tfaoretic 
 principles of political economy and politics)."* If Mill, 
 then, was an original thinker in logic, metaphysics, and 
 the science of economy and politics, it is clear that he 
 had not learnt these from her lips. And to most men 
 logic and metaphysics may be safely taken as forming a 
 domain in which originality of thought, if it can be 
 honestly professed, is a sufficient title of distinction. 
 
 Mrs. Taylor's assistance in the Political Economy is 
 confined to certain definite points. The purely scientific 
 part was, we are assured, not learnt from her. " But it 
 was chiefly her influence that gave to the book that 
 general tone by which it is distinguished from all 
 previous expositions of Political Economy that had any 
 pretension to being scientific, and which has made it so 
 useful in conciliating minds which those previous exposi- 
 tions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in 
 making the proper distinction between the laws of the 
 Production of Wealth, which are real laws of nature, 
 dependent on the properties of objects, and the modes 
 of its Distribution, which, subject to certain conditions, 
 depend on human will. . . . I had, indeed, partially 
 learnt this view of things from the thoughts awakened in 
 me by the speculations of the St. Simonians ; but it was 
 made a living principle, pervading and animating the 
 * Autobiography, p. 242. 
 
JOHN S TUART MILL. 1 2 1 
 
 %f - 
 book, by my wife's promptings."* The part which is 
 
 italicised is noticeable. Here, as elsewhere, Mill thinks 
 out the matter by himself; the concrete form of the 
 thoughts is suggested or prompted by the wife. Apart 
 from this " general tone," Mill tells us that there was 
 a specific contribution. " The chapter which has had a 
 greater influence on opinion than all the rest, that on the 
 Probable Future of the Labouring Classes, is entirely due 
 to her. In the first draft of the book that chapter did not 
 exist. She pointed out the need of such a chapter, and 
 the extreme imperfection of the book without it ; she 
 was the cause of my writing it.'' From this it would 
 appear that she gave to Mill that tendency to Socialism 
 which, while it lends a progressive spirit to his specula- 
 tions on Politics, at the same time does not manifestly 
 accord with his earlier advocacy of peasant proprietor- 
 ships. Nor, again, is it, on the face of it, con- 
 sistent with those doctrines of individual liberty 
 which, aided by the intellectual companionship of his 
 wife, he propounded in a later work. The ideal ot 
 individual freedom is not the ideal of Socialism, just as 
 that invocation of governmental aid to which the 
 Socialist resorts is not consonant with the theory of 
 laisser-faire. Yet Libetry was planned by Mill and his 
 wife in concert. Perhaps a slight visionariness of 
 speculation was no less the attribute of Mrs. Mill than 
 an absence of rigid logical principles. Be this as it may, 
 she undoubtedly checked the half-recognised leanings ot 
 her husband in the direction of Coleridge and Carlyle. 
 Whether this was an instance of her steadying influence, f 
 
 * Autobiography, pp. 246, 247. 
 
 + Cf. an instructive page in the Atttobiography , p. 252. 
 
122 LIFE OF JOHN S TUA R T MILL. 
 
 or whether it added one more unassimilated element to 
 Mill's diverse intellectual sustenance, may be wisely left 
 an open question. We can not, however, be wrong in 
 attributing to her the parentage of one book of Mill, the 
 Subjection of Women. It is true that Mill had before 
 learnt that men and women ought to be equal in legal, 
 political, social, and domestic relations. This was a 
 point on which he had already fallen foul of his father's 
 Essay on Government. But Mrs. Taylor had actually 
 written on this very point, and the warmth and fervour 
 of Mill's denunciations of women's servitude were unmis- 
 takably caught from his wife's view of the practical 
 disabilities entailed by the feminine position. 
 
 What his wife really was to Mill we shall, perhaps, 
 never know. But that she was an actual and vivid force, 
 which roused the latent enthusiasm of his nature, we 
 have abundant evidence. And when she died at 
 Avignon, though his friends may have regained an 
 almost estranged companionship, Mill was, personally, 
 the poorer. Into the sorrow of that bereavement we 
 cannot enter : we have no right or power to draw the 
 veil. It is enough to quote the simple words, so 
 eloquent of an unspoken grief, " I can say nothing which 
 could describe, even in the faintest manner, what that 
 loss was and is. But because I know that she would 
 have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of what 
 life I have left, and to work on for her purposes with 
 such diminished strength as can be derived from 
 thoughts of her, and communion with her memory." 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS — (1858-1865). 
 
 IT has been remarked that after the publication of the 
 Logic and the Political Economy there was a partial 
 failure of energy in Mill, and a comparative cessa- 
 tion from literary labour. But in the years which we 
 have now reached there is a second harvest, an after- 
 math of intellectual toil, which, if it does not quite reach 
 the level of the work of 1843 and 1848, at all events 
 includes one work, Liberty, which is as likely to live as 
 any of Mill's productions. It also includes Mill's chief 
 contribution to Moral Philosophy in the tract on 
 Utilitarianism, and his principal polemic, The Examina- 
 tion of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy. Nor is it less 
 fruitful in political speculation, as evidenced not only in 
 the Thoughts on Parlia?nentary Reform and the treatise 
 on Representative Government, but also in the directly 
 practical considerations suggested by the essays on the 
 American civil war. At a time when a great deal of 
 mistaken enthusiasm was expended on the Confederate 
 cause, Mill stood conspicuously forth as the champion 
 of the North in articles which he wrote in Eraser's 
 Magazine and the Westminster Review. To these must 
 
124 LIFE OF 
 
 be added an important article on John Austin in the 
 Edinburgh Review, and the valuable papers on Auguste 
 Comte and Positivism, which were collected and published 
 in a volume in 1864. We have only space to notice 
 such of these manifold labours as serve to throw 
 additional light on Mill's character and his life. 
 
 The Liberty, Mill tells us, was more directly and 
 literally the joint production of himself and his wife than 
 anything else which bears his name. " I had first 
 planned and written it as a short essay in 1854. It was 
 in mounting the steps of the Capitol in January 1855 
 that the thought first arose of converting it into a 
 volume. None of my writings have been either so 
 carefully composed or so sedulously corrected as this. 
 After it had been written, as usual, twice over, we kept it 
 by us, bringing it out from time to time and going 
 through it de novo, reading, weighing, and criticising every 
 sentence. Its final revision was to have been a work 
 of the winter of 1858-9, the first after my retirement, 
 which we had arranged to pass in the South of Europe. 
 That hope and every other were frustrated by the most 
 unexpected and bitter calamity of her death. After my 
 irreparable loss, one of my earliest cares was to print and 
 publish the treatise, so much of which was the work of 
 her whom I had lost, and consecrate it to her memory 
 (1859). I have made no alteration or addition to it, nor 
 shall I ever. Though it wants the last touch of her 
 hand, no substitute for that touch shall ever be 
 attempted by mine." The Liberty, then, is, by Mill's 
 express words, immediately connected with that influence 
 of his wife on his mind which the last chapter was 
 occupied in discussing. It seems to have had very 
 
JOHN S TUAR T MILL. I 2 5 
 
 different effects on his different friends. Kingsley, who 
 saw it first on the table in Parker's shop, sat down and 
 read it through there and then, and said that it made 
 him a clearer-headed, braver-minded man on the spot. 
 \ Caroline Fox held another opinion. " I am reading," 
 v ' she says, in a letter to E. T. Carne, " that terrible book of 
 John Mill's on Liberty, so clear and calm and cold; he 
 lays it on one as a tremendous duty to get oneself well 
 contradicted, and admit always a devil's advocate into 
 the presence of your dearest, most sacred truths, as they 
 are apt to grow windy and worthless without such tests, 
 if, indeed, they can stand the shock of argument at all. 
 He looks you through like a basilisk, relentless as Fate. 
 We knew him well at one time, and owe him very much. 
 I fear his remorseless logic has led him far since then. 
 No, my dear, I don't agree with Mill, though I, too, 
 should be very glad to have some of my ' ugly opinions ' 
 corrected, however painful the process ; but Mill makes 
 me shiver, his blade is so keen and so unhesitating." 
 
 In one sense the book has a permanent value, and has 
 largely entered into the life and thought of the present 
 generation ; in another sense its value is relative merely, 
 because it belongs in spirit to the first rather than the 
 last half of the nineteenth century. It is a reasoned 
 defence of Individualism as an element of absolute and 
 paramount importance in a state and in society, founded, 
 as Mill himself admits, on the work of Wilhelm von 
 Humboldt, who supplies the text, as the dedication to 
 Mill's wife forms the preface of the treatise. It is a kind 
 of philosophic text-book (again to avail ourselves of Mill's 
 own statements) of " a single truth, which the changes 
 progressively taking place in modern society tend to 
 
126 LIFE OF, 
 
 \ 
 bring out into even stronger relief: the importance, to 
 
 man and society, of a large variety in types of character, 
 and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand 
 itself in innumerable and conflicting directions." It 
 therefore discusses and defends the individual right 
 to Freedom of Discussion and Freedom of Action, and 
 confines within narrow limits the right of Society 
 to control or to punish. As a vindication of such 
 views, the Liberty, doubtless, has great and lasting 
 value. But so far as it confuses character with eccen- 
 tricity, so far as it belongs to the combative, negative 
 spirit of revolt, rather than to the positive, constructive 
 spirit of organised reform ; so far it shares the fate of the 
 old laisser-faire doctrine of political economy, and is out 
 of harmony with the tendencies and the ideas of the 
 modern age. We have advanced fast and far in the last 
 thirty years, and, organisation and synthesis are our 
 mottoes rather than atomism and individuality. Herbert 
 Spencer is indeed an exception, but in times of change 
 the best men are found on both sides of the dividing 
 line. 
 
 The treatise on Liberty is written under certain pre- 
 suppositions which tend to vitiate some of its conclusions. 
 One of the results of Mill's so-called mental crisis was 
 that he began to recognise the value of opposite and 
 contradictory opinions. As a corrective against bigotry 
 it is a valuable principle to assert the necessity of 
 examining theories which do not accord with one's own. 
 But it is another and a different principle to justify the 
 necessity of such examination by the doctrine that truth 
 lies half-way between two antithetical theories. Such a 
 doctrine might be plausibly urged as an engine against 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 127 
 
 dogmatism, but its value ceases when from a sword of 
 offence and controversy it is beaten into a ploughshare 
 of peace and domestic economy. For it is clearly 
 impossible to have settled convictions, unless we may 
 assume that some things may be taken for granted 
 amongst reasonable people. It is certain that no amount 
 of discussion will improve our belief in scientific dogmas ; 
 for instance, that the world goes round the sun. It is 
 more than doubtful whether even practical principles can 
 be discussed without a very real danger. Does anyone 
 really suppose, to take a recent contemporary instance, 
 that we get a firmer hold on the arguments which prove 
 the advisability of Marriage as a social institution by 
 reading the interminable discussions in a morning paper 
 as to whether marriage is a failure ? In such matters, 
 freedom of discussion, the free play of thought, which 
 is recommended with regard even to our cherished 
 convictions, is a very dubious blessing. 
 
 In reality the vindication of the claims of Individualism 
 issues from an eighteenth-century delusion on the subject 
 of " natural rights of man as man." If every individual 
 has, as such, natural rights, it is clear enough why no 
 amount of social stability can compensate for the infringe- 
 ment or limitation of such natural rights. In Mill, of 
 course, the argument is not based on a fiction like this ; 
 individual liberty is discussed on the grounds of its 
 expediency. But when once divorced from the doctrines 
 of the followers of Rousseau, the argument loses a great 
 deal of its force, if, indeed, it is not fatally impaired. 
 For the appeal to social expediency very often entails a 
 verdict which is inconsistent with individual rights, and 
 which, therefore, defeats the purpose of those who made 
 
128 LIFE OF 
 
 the appeal. If Society be the ultimate arbiter, the indi- 
 vidual must yield. Nor does Mill altogether escape 
 from another eighteenth-century burden in his distinc- 
 tion between self-regarding acts and social acts. The 
 argument is that society has no right to interfere in such 
 things as only concern the individual. But directly the 
 attempt is made to act on such a distinction, it becomes 
 clear that the distinction itself cannot be maintained. 
 It is impossible to draw a hard and fast line between 
 conduct which only affects oneself and conduct which 
 affects others. Indeed, the distinction itself appears to 
 be the issue of the exploded fallacy of the social contract. 
 Before the contract was made, man was only responsible 
 to himself: after its enactment, he becomes responsible 
 both to himself and to that state which his contract has 
 created. But we no longer believe in the social con- 
 tract theory, and the difference between self-regarding 
 and social acts should be equally relegated to the limbo 
 of detected impostures. 
 
 To us, at any rate (and this is the last point on which 
 we need insist), it is becoming habitual to consider 
 Society as logically prior to the Individual. The ten- 
 dency to Universalism, which has been so often noted in 
 modern philosophic thought, just as it places Nature 
 before man, and the Absolute Reason before the indi- 
 vidual thinker, equally emphasises the authority of 
 Society over the members which compose it. Mill's 
 book on Liberty is in reality composed according to a 
 different thesis. It implici tly asserts that the Individu al 
 is l ogically prior to So ciety. In this matter Mill's specu- 
 la tions are completely in accord with that position whic h 
 
 wp^hayp nlr p aH y jaifn him nmimn in hi'f] f , ne rf r All 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 129 
 
 k nowledge depends on Experience, and exp erience is 
 
 the experience of the individual. That experience 
 
 • — • "_ — ~- 
 
 sho uld belong to t he Kane, anH that- in this pnsiKnn pf 
 
 subordination to the Race th e individual should fin d 
 
 so me of his beliefs d priori to h im, however muc h they 
 
 may have been g athered out of the sensitive experience 
 ~^ — j---*- 1 — ■ 
 
 of his forefathers — this is a later doctrine than that which 
 
 ^— ^— . ^_^_^_ v — — — ^ — 
 
 w e find in Mill . And in thp sa me fashion and to t he 
 same extent, later thought has modified the value of the 
 indi vidualistic doctrines of Mill's UJwrfv * Y ~ 
 
 The other contributions which were made by Mill 
 during these years to Political Philosophy need not 
 occupy us long. Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform 
 saw the light in the same year as Liberty, though parts of 
 the pamphlet had been written some years previously. 
 The immediate occasion of publication seems to have 
 been the discussion on Lord Derby's and Mr. Disraeli's 
 Reform Bill (1859) ; the principal features were hostility 
 to the ballot, a claim of representation for minorities, 
 and plurality of votes to be given, not to property, but to 
 proved superiority of education. It was afterwards that 
 Mill became acquainted with Mr. Hare's system of 
 Personal Representation, for which he conceived a 
 great admiration, and which he said he would have 
 incorporated in his treatise had he been then aware of 
 "so great a discovery in the political art.'' The hostility 
 to the ballot he knew would form a point of difference 
 between him and Grote : " Grote," he wrote in a letter, 
 "knows that I now differ with him on the ballot, and we 
 have discused it together, with no effect on either." 
 This formed another of the opinions for which Mill was 
 * See p. 87 in the chapter on Mill's Logic. 
 9 
 
130 LIFE OF 
 
 indebted to his wife ; but it was unfortunate, as Dr. Bain 
 remarks, for Mill's political sagacity and prescience that 
 the Legislature was converted to the ballot after he had 
 abandoned it. In i860 the volume on Representative 
 Government was published, an important work, as 
 containing in a connected form the various political' 
 doctrines to which he had at different times given 
 expression. There is in it the same temperate dis- 
 cussion of the dangers of a Democracy which he had 
 before adopted in his review of De Tocqueville and 
 in essays in the Westminster, and a consideration of 
 the proper relations between Order and Progress, 
 to which he had been led by a study of Comte and 
 the French political writers. Perhaps the most 
 significant piece of political speculation is his dis- 
 tinction between the function of making laws and the 
 function of getting good laws made. The first of these 
 cannot be adequately performed by a numerous popular 
 assembly, but the second cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled 
 by any other authority. The consequence is, that in 
 Mill's opinion there is " need of a Legislative Commis- 
 sion, as a permanent part of the constitution of a free 
 country ; consisting of a small number of highly-trained 
 political minds, on whom, when Parliament has deter- 
 mined that a law shall be made, the task of making it 
 should be devolved ; Parliament retaining the power of 
 passing or rejecting the bill when drawn up, but not 
 of altering it otherwise than by sending proposed 
 amendments to be dealt with by the Commission.'' 
 
 Although Mill does not deal with the question of a 
 Hereditary Monarchy, it is of course known that he, as 
 much as Grote, was a republican by principle ; and in 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 1 3 1 
 
 conversations with Bain he seems to have held that 
 simple Cabinet Government was the natural substitute 
 for Monarchy. In the concluding sentences of the book 
 he takes occasion to advert to the India Bill, which 
 abolished the East India Company. As a late official 
 of that House, and the author of its protest against the 
 proposed change, Mill naturally disliked the measure 
 which removed him from his position, although privately 
 he rejoiced at his own greater freedom and leisure. But 
 his gloomy anticipations of the future of India, in con- 
 sequence of the supercession of "John Company,'' have 
 fortunately not been altogether realised. To the same 
 period which produced Liberty and Representative Govern- 
 ment can be also ascribed the publication of the first two 
 volumes of Mill's Dissertations and Discussions, contain- 
 ing some of the best and most durable portions of his oc- 
 casional work in the Westminster and Edinburgh Reviews. 
 More important for the estimation of Mill's thought 
 and his position as a philosopher are the Utilitarianism 
 and the Examination of Sir W. Hamilto7is Philosophy. 
 The Utilitarianism is a short collection of essays, 
 originally brought out in Fraser's Magazine, which were 
 published in book form in 1861. Hardly any book of 
 Mill has been more fully canvassed and criticised. It is 
 the principal contribution which Mill has made to the 
 science of Ethics, and from this point of view it is, 
 perhaps, a disadvantage that it should be so short and 
 slight in its treatment. For Mill, in discussing the 
 problems of morals, has assuredly raised more questions 
 than he has answered, and made more enemies than 
 friends. He did not please the Utilitarians of his day, 
 who were formed in a narrower mould of thought than 
 
132 LIFE OF 
 
 himself; still less could he satisfy those who belonged to 
 a different school, to whom Utilitarianism and Empirical 
 doctrines were altogether distasteful. Even his succes- 
 sors on scientific lines, who have entered into the heri- 
 tage of the school to which he belonged, have been 
 by no means reluctant to lay hands on their spiritual 
 father. The reason is that here once again the cardinal 
 characteristic of Mill, as a thinker, reappears — the desire 
 to engraft on the older stock of Benthamism the 
 blossoms of an alien growth. 'While the old foundation 
 remains it is sometimes dangerous to add to the width of 
 the superstructure ; in philosophy, at all events, such 
 lateral extension of dogmas only confuses the issue, and 
 ends by discrediting that ground-plan which it was 
 intended to justify. 
 
 Utilitarianism, as it was preached by Bentham, 
 had the merits of precision and clearness. It might 
 contain theories which were repugnant to cultivated 
 and generous minds, but at least it was internally 
 consistent, and presented an unbroken front to its 
 assailants. The end of life was happiness, and happi- 
 ness was ultimately the pleasurable consciousness of the 
 individual. Moreover, the assumption was consistently 
 maintained that the individual agent was animated by 
 selfish motives, for Nature had placed mankind under the 
 dominion of two masters, Pleasure and Pain, and it was 
 for them to prescribe to the individual what he should 
 do. Nor need there be any reasonable doubt as to what 
 is or is not pleasure ; for pleasure is only quantitatively 
 estimable, and differences in kind between pleasures 
 need not trouble the man who is aiming at the greatest 
 sum of felicity. Mill, however, had sympathy with an 
 
JOHN S TUA R T MILL. 133 
 
 opposite school, which maintained that other elements 
 ought to be incorporated into an adequate scheme of 
 human nature. His broad and tolerant mind desired to 
 find room for some of their theories, as implicity 
 contained in or reasonably deducible from his own 
 inherited theories. According to the principles laid 
 down in his Liberty, he had to admit " a devil's 
 advocate " into the presence of his most cherished con- 
 victions. The result is that while Mill's treatise presents 
 that refined and softened form of Utilitarianism which 
 distinguishes it from the moral theory of the eighteenth 
 century, it is by no means so internally coherent as the 
 elder scheme, while it still falls short of the rational 
 Utilitarianism which is based on Evolution, and professed, 
 among others, by Mr. Herbert Spencer. 
 
 Only a few points can here be adverted to. If Happi- 
 ness be the end of life, we have a right to a clear and 
 precise statement of what Happiness means, and what 
 it includes. But Mill is singularly vacillating on this 
 point. So metimes Happines s (as in the earlier part of 
 the treatise) is sim ply irientified with pleasure. Then 
 appear s the doctrine that happiness may e xist without 
 con tentment, which interfe res with its identification with 
 pleasure^ A " sense of dignity " is declared LO be a "part 
 of happiness, and happiness means a desirable kind of 
 life. It is further declared to have " ingredients," and 
 appears not to be a mere " aggregate " or collective 
 something. Thus gradually it has ceased to mean 
 pleasurable emotion; it becomes the preferable or admir- 
 able life, and the " greatest happiness " that we have to 
 seek is the realisation of a high and intense ideal.* 
 
 * See Bradley's Ethical Studies, p. 109. 
 
134 LIFE OF 
 
 Further, if in morality we are to aim at the greatest sum 
 of pleasures, whether for ourselves or for humanity at 
 large, we must know the intrinsic or extrinsic differences 
 between pleasures. Do pleasures differ in kind, or only 
 in amount ? The earlier answer to this question was 
 tolerably clear. Pleasures differ in amount, for quantity 
 of pleasure being equal, said Bentham, pushpin is as 
 good as poetry. But Mill will not commit himself to 
 such barbarism as this. He knows that his own 
 pleasures may perhaps not be relatively so large in 
 amount as those of the sensualist, but that they are far 
 higher in quality. Consequently, he admits that pleasures 
 differ in quality, and, to this extent, puts himself right 
 with that common-sense judgment which the narrower 
 forms of Hedonism had outraged. But a logical 
 difficulty remains. If pleasure be the test of morality, 
 then, 'when we use the terms "higher" or "lower" 
 pleasures, we must not refer to any other standard than 
 that which our emotional test can justify. But inasmuch 
 as the intellectual pleasure, for instance, which we call 
 " higher,'' does not give us a greater amount of emotional 
 gratification, but rather less, than the pleasure of the 
 sensualist, we must, in using such terms as " higher" and 
 " lower," be appealing to some other standard than that 
 of feeling. In other words, a distinction in quality 
 between pleasures can be made if our standard of 
 estimation be something other than feeling, but can not 
 be made, if we remain true to the psychological theory 
 of Bentham. In this instance, as in many others, Mill 
 has included in his scheme a distinction which his 
 ground-plan does not admit of. 
 
 Again, is man originally a wholly selfish creature ? 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 135 
 
 Yes, and no. If we analyse " Conscience" (which 
 Mill treats as an acquired product, not as a primitive 
 possession), we find that a series of associated ideas 
 has gathered round an originally selfish germ. But 
 the great support of our moral ideas is, we are told, 
 the social feelings of mankind. These social feelings 
 are, of course, in their nature sympathetic, and as 
 such, are not selfish, but altruistic. Hence it would 
 appear either that sympathy is originally selfish (which 
 Mill never states and would hardly admit), or else that 
 mankind have primitive feelings of altruism, and are 
 not only inspired by a single regard, each for his own 
 personal interests. Other difficulties surround Mill's 
 account of the ultimate sanction of morality, and the 
 proof of which the principle of Utility is susceptible ; 
 but we have no space to refer to them here. How little 
 the Evolutionists can accommodate themselves to Mill's 
 position can be seen not only in Mr. Herbert Spencer's 
 Data of Ethics* but also in Mr. Leslie Stephen's Science 
 of Ethics. A reference to the latter work admirably 
 illustrates the difference in presupposition and doctrine. 
 According to Mr. Leslie Stephen,t Utilitarianism 
 appears to assume that there is an uniform man, a 
 colourless sheet of paper, a primitive atom, upon whom 
 all qualities are imposed by the circumstances under 
 which he is placed. Further, according to this doctrine, 
 society is an aggregate, built up of the uniform atoms 
 called men. Each of these desires happiness, and so 
 happiness is regarded as a kind of emotional currency 
 capable of being calculated and distributed in lots ; 
 
 * Cf. esp. Data of Ethics, pp. 220 and foil. (Edition of 1879.) 
 t L. Stephen, Science of Ethics, pp. 359 et foil. 
 
136 LIFE OF 
 
 and conduct is immoral or moral according as it 
 diminishes or swells the volume of this hypothetical 
 currency. The fundamental error here is the inability 
 to understand the value of time, the meaning of 
 development, and the consequent innateness (at least 
 for the modern man) of certain tendencies of character, 
 to which must be added the misunderstanding of 
 the true nature of society, which is in many senses 
 a living and growing organism, and not a concourse 
 of independent atoms.* 
 
 In the same year in which the Utilitarianism was pub- 
 lished (1861), Mill turned his thoughts to a criticism of 
 Sir W. Hamilton's philosophy, but he interrupted his 
 work on the subject, not only by a tour in Greece and 
 Asia Minor in the summer of 1862, but also by his 
 articles on the American War and on Comte, which 
 have been already alluded to. As his reading in Hamil- 
 ton progressed, he was increasingly struck by the incon- 
 sistencies which betrayed themselves in the Hamiltonian 
 scheme of Metaphysics and Logic. " I was not pre- 
 pared," he wrote to Bain, " for the degree in which this 
 complete acquaintance lowers my estimate of the man 
 and of his speculations. I did not expect to find them 
 a mass of contradictions. It almost goes against me to 
 write so complete a demolition of a brother-philosopher 
 after he is dead, not having done it while he was alive." 
 The volume (for he soon discovered that the article 
 which he had originally projected did not give him 
 adequate scope for his treatment) appeared in 1865. It 
 is much more than a mere criticism of another system of 
 
 * Perhaps I may be permitted to refer for further details on 
 Utilitarianism to my volume on Ccmstructive Ethics, pp. 135-164. 
 
JOHN S TUAR T MILL. 1 37 
 
 thought. It makes definite contributions to a construc- 
 tive system on empirical lines. As Mill himself said, it 
 enabled him to supply what was left deficient in the 
 Logic, and to do the kind of service to " rational " psy- 
 chology of which he was capable — to write its Polemik. 
 Perhaps the most interesting and suggestive chapters are 
 chapters xi., xii., and xiii., which deal respectively with 
 our belief in an external world, our belief in self, and our 
 belief in the primary attributes of matter. Especially 
 acute and searching is his analysis of the steps by which 
 we gradually form the conception of a great material world 
 outside us. Starting from the changing sensations of the 
 present, we are led to the idea of a permanent back- 
 ground to present sensation in possible sensation, and 
 this background is then looked upon as a cause, of 
 which any given present sensation is the effect. Matter 
 itself can only be defined as the Permanent Possibility of 
 Sensation — a definition which shows Mill's complete 
 acceptance of the theory of Berkeley. Indeed, more 
 than half of the interest of these chapters is the near 
 approach which Mill makes to the position of Idealism, 
 which resolves all our notions of the external world into 
 the subjective affections of the thinking self. But the 
 point is too intricate to be indicated by merely passing 
 references, as it opens up the whole question of the 
 metaphysical basis of Mill's philosophy, and the exact 
 value of that intermediate position which he consciously 
 or unconsciously assumed between the Empiricism of 
 Locke and Hume, and the Idealism of the German 
 school. 
 
 The more strictly polemical portions of the book are very 
 effective, especially against the so-called "philosophy of 
 
1 38 LIFE OF 
 
 the conditioned," as professed by Hamilton and Mansel. 
 Indeed, it may be suspected that it was Mansel's 
 application of the doctrine to Religious Thought in 
 his celebrated " Bampton Lectures " which gave a 
 keener zest to Mill's critical ardour. In private con- 
 versation, he called Mansel's Limits of Religimcs Thought 
 a " loathsome " book. For it seemed to make the God 
 whom we describe by our moral terms exempt from the 
 ordinary rules of our morality. If all the qualities we 
 give to God have meaning only in reference to our- 
 selves, and have no meaning in reference to God, 
 such a doctrine does not put God above us, but in 
 reality below the best level of our nature. Mill's style 
 rises to an unusual height of emotional eloquence as 
 he stigmatises this theory. The passage, which may be 
 found in the seventh chapter of the Examination, ends 
 with the famous climax, which was posted in large letters 
 over the hoardings of Westminster, when Mill became a 
 parliamentary candidate : " If such a being can sentence 
 me to hell, to hell I will go." Mansel called this an 
 exhibition of taste and temper ; Grote called it a Pro- 
 methean defiance of Jove ; it at least served his political 
 adversary as a convenient text for party polemics.* 
 
 It is pleasant in the midst of these literary toils to 
 catch a glimpse of Mill's life at Avignon, and to discover 
 
 * Dr. Bain, in his J. S. Mill, p. 122, has the following curious 
 note : — " Grote thought that the phrase was an echo of something 
 occurring in Ben Jonson ; where a military captain's implicit 
 obedience is crowned by the illustration — ' Tell him to go to hell, to 
 hell he will go.' I have never got any clue to the place." The 
 line, of course, occurs in Johnson's " Vanity of Human Wishes," 
 " and bid him go to hell, to hell he goes," a translation of the 
 phrase, " in ccelum jusseris, ibit," of Juvenal's Graculus esuriens. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 139 
 
 that he had quite regained the natural buoyancy of his 
 spirits. " Life here," he wrote to his friend Thornton in 
 1861, "is uneventful, and feels like a perpetual holiday. 
 It is one of the great privileges of advanced civilisation, 
 that while keeping out of the turmoil and depressing 
 wear of life, one can have brought to one's door all that 
 is agreeable or stimulating in the activities of the outward 
 world, by newspapers, new books, periodicals, etc. It is, 
 in truth, too self-indulgent a life for anyone to allow 
 himself whose duties lie among his fellow-beings, unless, 
 as is fortunately the case with me, they are mostly such 
 as can be better fulfilled at a distance from their society, 
 than in the midst of it." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MILL IN PARLIAMENT. "A SAINT OF RATIONALISM." 
 
 (1865-1868.) 
 
 IN the celebrated allegory of the Cave, in Plato's 
 Republic, an account is given of the philosopher, who 
 had attained to the beatific vision, coming back again 
 to the old home of darkness, and with pain and difficulty 
 striving to discern in the company of his fellow-prisoners 
 the fleeting shadows on the wall. "Is there anything 
 surprising," asks Plato, " in one who passes from divine 
 contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving 
 himself in a ridiculous manner? If, while his eyes are 
 blinking, and before he has become accustomed to the 
 surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts 
 of law, or in other places, about the images or shadows 
 of images of justice, and is endeavouring to meet the 
 conceptions of those who have never yet seen the 
 absolute justice ? Any one who has common sense will 
 remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two 
 kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out 
 of the light or from going into the light, which is true of 
 the mind's eye quite as much as of the bodily eye ; and 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 141 
 
 he who remembers this when he sees any one whose 
 vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to 
 laugh ; he will first ask whether that soul of man has 
 come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see 
 because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned 
 from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. 
 And he will count the one happy in his condition and 
 state of being, and he will pity the other ; or, if he have 
 a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into 
 the light, there will be more reason in this than in the 
 laugh which greets the other coming from above into the 
 den."* The time had now come for Mill to enter public 
 life ; and if he too may have seemed to have had " a 
 weak and perplexed vision,'' perhaps the reason was that 
 he had come out of the brighter life. Some of the 
 contempt, some of the admiration, which he encountered 
 in what he himself terms a " a less congenial task," may 
 be at least understood if we bear in mind Plato's acute 
 distinction between the two kinds of disordered vision. 
 If the philosopher of Avignon was called to the House 
 of Commons at Westminster, shall we say that he was 
 dazzled by excess of light, or bewildered because unac- 
 customed to the darkness ? 
 
 In a letter, kindly contributed to the present life of 
 Mill by Mr. Gladstone, an unequivocal judgment is 
 expressed on this point. "We well knew," Mr. 
 Gladstone writes, "Mr. Mill's intellectual eminence 
 before he entered Parliament. What his conduct there 
 principally disclosed, at least to me, was his singular 
 moral elevation. I remember now that at the time, 
 
 * Plato, Republic, §§ 517, 518. Jowett's Translation, vol. iii., 
 403-4- 
 
142 LIFE OF 
 
 more than twenty years back, I used familiarly to call 
 him the Saint of Rationalism, a phrase roughly and 
 partially expressing what I now mean. Of all the 
 motives, stings, and stimulants that reach men through 
 their egoism in Parliament, no part could move or even 
 touch him. His conduct and his language were, in this 
 respect, a sermon. Again, though he was a philosopher, 
 he was not, I think, a man of crotchets. He had, I 
 think, the good sense and practical tact of politics, 
 together with the high independent thought of a recluse. 
 I need not tell you,'' Mr. Gladstone adds, "that, for the 
 sake of the House of Commons at large, I rejoiced in his 
 advent, and deplored his disappearance. He did us all 
 good. In whatever party, whatever form of opinion, I 
 sorrowfully confess that such men are rare." Other 
 judgments, however, are not equally complimentary to 
 Mill. Some of his friends regretted his being in the 
 House for his own sake. They thought that he was not 
 great enough there as compared with his standing in the 
 intellectual world. He seemed to them to remain the 
 literary man, apart from the world and manners of 
 politics ; and although his earnestness, his quick enthu- 
 siasm, and the transparency of his convictions were 
 readily acknowledged as i^^fcive, there was some- 
 how in their mind more the dHre for his success than 
 any feeling that the success had been won. To the 
 Conservatives he was, of course, obnoxious; but even 
 his political allies sometimes must have repeated to 
 themselves the Tacitean maxim, Omnium consensu capax 
 imperii nisi imperasset He was the natural leader 
 of Liberal thought ; not in the House, but out of it. 
 "Saint of Rationalism," however, in Mr. Gladstone's 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 143 
 
 happy phrase, he remained. He had been declared to 
 be Adam Smith and Petrarch rolled into one ; and if he 
 thus combined sentimentalism with the doctrines of 
 political economy, he equally exhibited the cold clearness 
 of the Rationalist thinker, tempered by the emotional 
 warmth of high moral ideas. 
 
 He was invited to become a candidate for West- 
 minster, early in 1865, by Mr. James Beal, acting on 
 behalf of the Liberal members of the constituency. It 
 was not the first invitation that Mill had received. More 
 than ten years previously Mr. Lucas and Mr. Duffey 
 offered to bring him into Parliament for an Irish county, 
 in consequence of his opinions on the Irish Land 
 Question ; but as he was then an official in the India 
 House, the offer had to be declined. In the present 
 instance the circumstances were altered. Westminster 
 had always an ambition to be represented by eminent 
 men, and to the list of men of such different kinds of 
 distinction as Sir Francis Burdett, Cochrane, Byron's 
 friend Hobhouse, and Sir de Lacy Evans, it desired to 
 add the name of John Stuart Mill. Moreover, it would 
 accept Mill on his own terms. • He wrote, on receipt of 
 the offer of his supporters, a letter for publication, 
 which he himself characl^^k as one of the frankest 
 explanations ever tendere^PBn electoral body by a can- 
 didate. He told them that he had no personal wish to 
 become a member of Parliament, and that, as he thought 
 that no candidate ought either to canvass or to incur any 
 expense, he could not consent to do either. He said 
 that if he were elected he could not undertake to give 
 any of his time and labour to their local interests. He 
 announced that he would answer no question on the 
 
144 LIFE OF 
 
 subject of his religious opinions, and that it was his firm 
 persuasion that women were entitled to representation in 
 Parliament on the same terms with men. " Nothing at 
 the time," says Mill, "appeared more unlikely than that 
 a candidate (if candidate I could be called) whose 
 profession and conduct set so completely at defiance all 
 ordinary notions of electioneering should nevertheless be 
 elected. A well-known literary man was heard to say 
 that the Almighty himself would have no chance of being 
 elected on such a programme. I strictly adhered to it, 
 neither spending money, nor canvassing, nor did I take 
 any personal part in the election, until about a week 
 preceding the day of nomination, when I attended a few 
 public meetings to state my principles and give answers 
 to any questions which the electors might exercise their 
 just right of putting to me for their own guidance ; 
 answers as plain and unreserved as my address."* 
 Despite such disadvantages Mill was elected by a 
 majority of some hundreds over his Conservative com- 
 petitor. One incident in the history of this election is 
 too interesting to be passed over. At one of the 
 meetings, chiefly composed of the working classes, Mill 
 was asked whether he had ever written and published a 
 judgment on the working classes of England, that, though 
 they differed from those -ef other countries in being 
 ashamed of lying, they were generally liars. The sentence 
 occurred in the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, and 
 Mill, without hesitation, at once answered in two words, 
 " I did." Scarcely were the words out of his mouth 
 when vehement applause resounded through the whole 
 meeting. The first working man who spoke after Mill's 
 
 * Autobiography, p. 283. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 145 
 
 admission was Mr. Odger, and he said, amid cheers, that 
 the working classes had no desire not to be told of their 
 faults. They wanted friends, not flatterers, and felt 
 under obligation to anyone who told them anything in 
 themselves which he sincerely believed to require amend- 
 ment. "A more striking instance," says Mill, "never 
 came under my notice of what, I believe, is the experience 
 of those who best know the working classes, that the 
 most essential of all recommendations to their favour is 
 that of complete straightforwardness ; its presence out- 
 weighs in their minds very strong objections, while no 
 amount of other qualities will make amends for its 
 apparent absence." 
 
 The first session of Parliament in which Mill took a 
 part was the last in the career of Lord John Russell. 
 After the death of Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell was 
 invited by the Queen to form a Government, in which 
 Mr. Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer and 
 leader of the House of Commons, and Mr. Chichester 
 Fortescue became Secretary for Ireland. It was 
 rumoured that Mill was to be offered the Secretaryship 
 for India, in consequence of his services at the India 
 House, but this proved as baseless as many of the 
 rumours which were floating at the time. The session of 
 1866 was that of the Cattle Plague, the Jamaica Com- 
 mission, the Fenian troubles in Ireland, and the abortive 
 Reform Bill, which ended in the overthrow of the Liberal 
 Ministry. In all of these matters Mill bore his share. 
 His first vote in the House was in support of an amend- 
 ment in favour of Ireland, moved by an Irish member, 
 for which only five English and Scotch votes were given ; 
 
 the other four, besides Mill's, being those of Mr. Bright, 
 
 10 
 
146 LIFE OF 
 
 Mr. M'Laren, Mr. J. B. Potter, and Mr. Hadfield. His 
 first speech was in answer to Mr. Lowe's reply to Mr. 
 Bright on the Cattle Plague Bill, and, as Mill himself 
 says, " was thought to have helped to get rid of a 
 provision in the Government measure which would have 
 given to landholders a second indemnity, after they had 
 already been once indemnified for the loss of some of 
 their cattle by the increased selling price of the 
 remainder." His second speech was on the proposal 
 made on February 16th to suspend the Habeas Corpus 
 Act in Ireland, in which his sympathy with the Irish 
 brought him into so much disfavour that he resolved to 
 allow some interval to elapse before addressing the 
 House again. The ear of the House was, however, 
 gained by a speech which he delivered in support of Mr. 
 Gladstone's Reform Bill. That ill-fated measure of 1866, 
 which proposed to reduce the county franchise from 
 £>S° t0 ^!4i ar >d the borough franchise from £\o to 
 £7, apparently pleased its friends no more than it did 
 its natural enemies, and only served as an occasion for 
 Mr. Lowe's fitful brilliance and Mr. Bright's famous 
 allusions to the Cave of Adullam. Mill supported the 
 measure, especially defending the working classes from 
 various aspersions which had been cast on them in the 
 course of debate. He argued that the interests of the 
 working class never could be fairly explained and dis- 
 cussed unless they had a larger and more direct 
 representation. The example of the United States was 
 sufficient to prove that the Democracy were neither 
 obstinate nor unteachable, for it was his belief that 
 working men would correct their faults more readily than 
 any other class when warned of them in a friendly and 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 147 
 
 sincere spirit. During a subsequent debate on the 
 Redistribution Bill, Mill was still more successful in an 
 answer to an attack made upon him by Sir John Pakington 
 for calling the Conservative party "the stupid party." 
 Admitting that the passage referred to was to be found 
 in his Considerations on Representative Government, he 
 proceeded to say, "I never meant to say that the 
 Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that 
 stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that 
 is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that 
 hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any 
 party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the 
 ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its 
 stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, 
 be the stupidest party ; and I do not see why honourable 
 gentlemen should see that position at all offensive to 
 them, for it ensures their being always an extremely 
 powerful party. I know I am liable to a retort, and an 
 obvious one enough ; and as I do not wish to allow any 
 honourable gentleman the credit of making it, I make it 
 myself. It may be said that if stupidity has a tendency 
 to Conservatism, sciolism, or half-knowledge, has a 
 tendency to Liberalism. Something might be said for 
 that, but it is not at all so clear as the other. There is 
 an uncertainty about sciolists ; we cannot count upon 
 them ; and therefore they are a less dangerous class. 
 But there is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, 
 that any body of able men with that force pressing 
 behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and 
 many a victory the Conservative party has gained 
 through that power." A short time afterwards the 
 Conservative party succeeded in ousting their rivals, and 
 
148 LIFE OF 
 
 Mr. Disraeli vindicated the truth of Mill's words by the 
 necessity under which he lay of " educating his party." 
 
 The chief occasion during the session of 1866, on 
 which Mill became at once notorious and unpopular, was 
 the attempted prosecution of Governor Eyre for his 
 conduct in the Jamaica insurrection. The insurrection 
 had taken place in the preceding year ; and though at 
 first the majority of Englishmen congratulated themselves 
 on the promptitude with which it had been stamped out, 
 it was subsequently discovered with how much un- 
 necessary violence and brutality the repressive measures 
 had been executed. So high did the feeling run, that the 
 Government felt themselves under the necessity of 
 sending out a Royal Commission and relieving Eyre 
 of his governorship. After the report of the Commission 
 the excitement increased, for it became clear that, long 
 after the insurrectionary movements of the negroes had 
 subsided, there was an amount of hanging, flogging, and 
 burning, which seemed to prove that the authorities had 
 completely lost their heads. Men were flogged and 
 hanged for no other reason than because they fell in the 
 way of an excited soldiery, ripe for vindictive work ; 
 women were stripped and scourged under circumstances 
 of the grossest cruelty. In all, four hundred and thirty- 
 nine persons were put to death ; over six hundred of both 
 sexes were flogged. Especial suspicion attached to 
 Governor Eyre for his conduct in putting to death 
 Gordon, the supposed leader of the negro revolt ; for the 
 man had been arrested in Kingston, where no martial 
 law had been proclaimed, and hurried off to Morant Bay, 
 in order to come under the jurisdiction of martial law. 
 The court-martial which tried him was in itself ridiculous ; 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 149 
 
 it was composed of two young navy lieutenants and an 
 ensign in one of the West India regiments. Yet it was 
 under these circumstances, and by such a court as 
 this, that Gordon was condemned to the fate 
 which he subsequently suffered. Lord Chief-Justice 
 Cockburn, in a celebrated charge which was soon after 
 delivered to a grand jury, laid down his opinion of the 
 matter in the following words : — " After a most careful 
 perusal of the evidence which was adduced against him 
 (Gordon), I come irresistibly to the conclusion that if 
 the man had been tried on that evidence — I must correct 
 myself; he could not have been tried upon that 
 evidence ; I was going too far, a great deal too far, in 
 assuming that he could. No competent judge acquainted 
 with the duties of his office could have received that 
 evidence. Three-fourths, I had almost said nine-tenths, 
 of the evidence upon which that man was convicted and 
 sentenced to death, was evidence which, according to no 
 known rules — not only of ordinary law, but of military 
 law — according to no rules of right or justice, could 
 possibly have been admitted ; and it never would have 
 been admitted, if a competent judge had presided, or if 
 there had been the advantage of a military officer of any 
 experience in the practice of courts-martial." Carlyle 
 may have thought it right to be indignant with this 
 charge ; but it was an exposition of the laws of England, 
 which was fatal to the credit of the authorities in Jamaica. 
 Two parties were formed in England on this question. 
 One of them was in a fashion led by Carlyle, and 
 received the support of Tennyson, Kingsley, and 
 Ruskin, besides a number of Conservative politicians. 
 The leaders of the other party were Mill and Herbert 
 
T50 LIFE OF 
 
 Spencer, among philosophers ; Bright, and other Liberal 
 politicians; Professor Huxley, Mr. Frederick Harrison, 
 and Mr. Goldwin Smith. A Jamaica Committee was 
 formed by the latter party, of which the first chairman 
 was Mr. Charles Buxton, and the second Mill himself. It 
 is not necessary at the present day to recount in 
 detail the arguments that were urged on both sides. It 
 is clear enough that the plea of Carlyle, and all those who 
 took up what was called the '' damned nigger " view, was 
 that, in a moment of general panic, Governor Eyre 
 by his promptitude had saved the island. They did 
 not deny that cruel acts had been committed; they 
 only urged that it was better, even at the price of 
 cruelty, to put down every chance of a general out- 
 break. The party led by Mill was, so far as we can 
 see, animated by the purest motives. Whether they 
 sufficiently estimated the conditions under which a 
 government of Blacks by Whites has to be carried on 
 is, perhaps, an open question ; but there was no doubt 
 that it was their chief desire to vindicate the fair fame of 
 England from the stain of ferocious outrage. The late 
 Professor Green of Oxford, himself a Humanitarian and 
 a Moralist, once remarked that he would rather have 
 been Mill than Carlyle, perhaps in reference to this very 
 controversy. However unpopular Mill's activity against 
 Governor Eyre might have made him at the moment, it 
 is probable that most thinking men of fhe present day 
 will consider that the part which he took in this 
 matter is one of the chief evidences of the high moral 
 spirit which animated him in his public life. His 
 speech on this question in the House, when he 
 moved that recent transactions in Jamaica required the 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 151 
 
 investigation of a judical tribunal, was considered by 
 Mill to have been his best Parliamentary speech.* He 
 may not have been able to discern the shadows on the 
 wall as well as some of the habitual denizens of the Cave, 
 and he may have been wrong in pressing the matter, 
 as he did, before the Law Courts. But the charge 
 of the Chief-Justice of England remains as the best 
 defence of the action of the Jamaica Committee, and the 
 most damning piece of evidence .against Eyre and his 
 subordinates. 
 
 Another occasion on which Mill's name came before 
 the public is less equivocal in its bearing on his fame. 
 The Government of Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone 
 had been overthrown by a motion of Lord Dunkellin on 
 the Reform Question, and had been succeeded by a 
 ministry in which Lord Derby was Premier, and Mr. 
 Disraeli Chancellor of the Exchequer. Some of the 
 disappointed Reform Leaguers in London, incensed at 
 this failure of a measure which was, at all events, 
 intended to promote their wishes, determined to hold 
 a meeting in Hyde Park. Their adviser and the 
 president of the League was Mr. Edmond Beales, who 
 appears to have been a man of some resolution. Mr. 
 Walpole, the Home-Secretary, acting on behalf of the 
 authorities, posted up a proclamation prohibiting the 
 meeting. Whether it was legal or not to prevent the 
 gathering was apparently somewhat of an open question ; 
 but the leaders of the Reformers, on being refused 
 admittance into the Park, retired quietly enough to 
 Trafalgar Square, and held a meeting there. Meanwhile, 
 the crowd at the Park entrances, composed partly 
 * Autobiography, p. 298. 
 
152 LIFE OF 
 
 of sympathisers, partly of sightseers, being woefully 
 disappointed at the tameness of the issue, revenged 
 themselves by breaking down the iron railings, and, 
 despite the resistance of the police, careered over the 
 flower-beds through the greater part of the night. Next 
 morning Mr. Beales and his friends waited on Mr. 
 Walpole, and gravely expostulated with him, as though 
 he had been the sole cause of the disturbances of 
 the day before. Mr. Walpole was understood to have 
 melted into tears at the kindness of the Reformers, and 
 to have agreed that the right of meeting was to be tested 
 in a more satisfactory fashion at some future day. 
 
 And now Mill comes on the scene. He had already 
 in Parliament taken the side of the working-men in the 
 censure passed on the Home-Secretary, and asserted 
 that if the people had not the right to meet in the Park, 
 they ought to have it. He was now enabled to prove 
 himself the friend of the Reformers in still better fashion. 
 It must be remembered that the exasperation of the 
 working-men at the issue of the first conflict between 
 them and authority was extreme. " They showed," says 
 Mill, " a determination to make another attempt at a 
 meeting in the Park, to which many of them would 
 probably have come armed." The Government made 
 military preparations to resist the attempt, and something 
 very serious seemed impending. The sequel may be 
 told in Mill's words. " At this crisis I really believe that 
 I was the means of preventing much mischief. I was 
 invited, with several other Radical Members of Parlia- 
 ment, to a conference with the leading members of the 
 Council of the Reform League ; and the task fell chiefly 
 upon myself of persuading them to give up the Hyde 
 
JOHN S TUAR T MILL. 1 5 3 
 
 Park project, and hold their meeting elsewhere. It was 
 not Mr. Beales and Colonel Dickson who needed 
 persuading; on the contrary, it was evident that these 
 gentlemen had already exerted their influence in the 
 same direction, thus far without success. It was the 
 working-men who held out, and so bent were they on 
 their original scheme that I was obliged to have recourse 
 to les grands moyens. I told them that a proceeding 
 which would certainly produce a collision with the 
 military could only be justifiable on two conditions — if 
 the position of affairs had become such that a revolution 
 was desirable, and if they thought themselves able to 
 accomplish one. To these arguments, after considerable 
 discussion, they at last yielded, and I was able to 
 inform Mr. Walpole that their intention was given up. 
 I shall never forget the depth of his relief, or the 
 warmth of his expressions of gratitude." Subsequently, 
 because Mill thought he owed them something for their 
 concessions on this occasion, he attended a meeting of 
 the Reform Leaguers, and spoke at the Agricultural Hall. 
 But he was never a member of the League. He disagreed 
 on two important points. He could neither believe in 
 the virtues of the ballot, nor could he accept the pro- 
 gramme of manhood suffrage without considerable 
 limitations. 
 
 We now come to the session of 1867 and the Reform 
 Bill of the Conservative Government. It was the session 
 of the "leap in the dark" — the session in which Mr. 
 Disraeli so far educated his party as to make them accept 
 a measure which was considerably in advance of that 
 proposed in the preceding year. To the various changes 
 and ameliorations forced upon the Government, or 
 
154 LIFE OF 
 
 suggested by the Proteus-like Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer, Mill contributed but little. He spoke on 
 May 2nd on the question of the Compound Householder, 
 that strange and irrepressible creature who so long vexed 
 the ingenuity of the House, and who was wittily described 
 by some member of the House as the male of the femme 
 incomprise. Mill supported an amendment of Mr. 
 Hibbert that householders under ;£io should come in 
 on the same terms as the compound householders at or 
 above that amount ; but the Government triumphed by 
 a majority of sixty-six. A more important contribution 
 to the debate was furnished later. Mill moved an 
 amendment on a favourite theme, which had often been 
 in his thoughts — the right of women to the vote. He 
 did not claim, he said, the vote for women as an abstract 
 right, but his argument was one of expediency and 
 justice. It was a doctrine of the British Constitution 
 that taxation and representation should co-exist ; many 
 women paid taxes, and, therefore, should be allowed to 
 vote. There was evidence in our records that women, in 
 a distant period of our history, had voted for counties 
 and some boroughs, and there was no reason why they 
 should not vote now. Women, he submitted, ought no 
 longer to be classed with children and idiots and lunatics, 
 who needed to have everything done for them, but they 
 ought to be treated as equal in intelligence to, and having 
 equal rights with, men ; and the disadvantages under 
 which they laboured with respect to the laws affecting 
 property, and the admission to professions, ought to be 
 removed. The amendment, which was at first treated in 
 a somewhat jocular spirit, was afterwards argued with 
 such earnestness that Mill induced seventy-three members 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 155 
 
 in all to vote for it. It was thrown out by a majority of 
 one hundred and twenty-three. At a subsequent period 
 Mill brought forward the question of the representation 
 of minorities, on the lines of Mr. Hare's plan, and 
 supported Mr. Lowe on the question of cumulative 
 voting. On these points he acted in complete conformity 
 with what he had put forward in his published writings. 
 
 Hardly any allusion has as yet been made to that 
 important sphere of Mill's activity in Parliament which is 
 concerned with the Irish question. It is, of course, 
 impossible, within the limits prescribed by this chapter, to 
 trace the course of the Fenian movement, together with 
 all the circumstances of tragi-comedy which followed in 
 its train. The eccentric career of James Stephens, the 
 fate of the " Phoenix " clubs, and all the mingled misery 
 and fortitude of the rising of the " bare-armed Fenians " 
 — to use the expression of Hector Mclntyre in Scott's 
 Antiquary — are only of importance so far as they explain 
 and justify Mill's sympathetic energy. Early in the 
 session of 1866 the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended. 
 In the debate which preceded that suspension, Mill made 
 a speech in which he compared the action of the Govern- 
 ment to that of the captain of a ship, or the master of a 
 school, who is for ever taking strong measures to preserve 
 discipline. In such cases the constant necessity for 
 strong measures proves that the system is wrong. Those, 
 on the contrary, who demand exceptional measures in 
 the treatment of Ireland are continually met with " the 
 eternal political non possumus" of English statesmen, 
 which in Mill's judgment only meant, " We don't do it in 
 England." A stronger speech followed subsequently on 
 a motion of the Irish Secretary, Mr. Fortescue, which 
 
156 LIFE OF 
 
 attempted to deal with the vexed relations between 
 landlord and tenant in the Sister Isle. In this, which 
 Mill calls " a careful speech " in his Autobiography, he 
 argued on the same lines. The application of the same 
 laws to England and Ireland, he said, showed that double 
 ignorance which was older than the time of Socrates ; the 
 English not only did not know the people of whom they 
 were talking, but they did not know themselves. The 
 fact was that Ireland was not an exceptional country, 
 but England was. They ought to look to Continental 
 experiences ; and that told them that, wherever a system 
 of agricultural economy like that in Ireland had been 
 found consistent with the good cultivation of the land 
 and the good condition of its peasants, rents had not 
 been, as in Ireland, fixed by contract, but the occupier 
 had had the protection of fixed usage, the custom of the 
 country, and had had secured to him permanence of 
 tenure so long as he pleased to possess it. The speech, 
 together with one delivered some time afterwards, to 
 which we shall presently refer, was published, not by 
 Mill, but with his permission, in Ireland. Then in 1867 
 occurred the Fenian rising and the trials of the Fenian 
 leaders. One of these, Colonel Burke, who had served 
 with distinction in the ranks of the South in the American 
 war, was sentenced to death in May. It was felt that in 
 such a case justice might be mitigated with mercy, and 
 in a great public meeting at St. James' Hall, Mill made a 
 fine speech amidst the cheers of an audience composed 
 almost entirely of English workmen. The orator was 
 successful, and the sentence of death was remitted by 
 Lord Derby. 
 
 The rescue of prisoners in Manchester and the 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 157 
 
 Clerkenwell explosion, towards the end of the same 
 year, brought the Irish question once more to the front, 
 and, as we now know, first induced Mr. Gladstone to 
 enter upon his Irish legislation. Mill had written a 
 pamphlet on England and Ireland in the winter of 1867, 
 which was published early in the following year. In the 
 session of 1868, when Mr. Disraeli became Prime 
 Minister, on the retirement of Lord Derby, Mr. Maguire, 
 one of the members for Cork, brought forward a motion 
 on March 16th relative to the condition of Ireland, in 
 which express mention was made of the " scandal and 
 anomaly " of the Irish Church. A few days later Mill 
 spoke. He began by regretting that nothing was to be 
 done on the land question ; but he specially regretted 
 the determination not to deal with the State Church, an 
 anomaly condemned by the whole human race, which no 
 people would submit to but at the point of the sword. 
 The taunt of Utopianism had been levelled at Mill, in 
 consequence of his pamphlet and his known opinions on 
 peasant-proprietorship in Ireland. He retorted that the 
 proposal to endow the Roman Catholic clergy was 
 " kakotopian," too bad to be put into practice — a 
 frigidly academic phrase, which did not amuse the 
 House. But the text of his discourse, that "large 
 and bold measures alone could cure Ireland," was 
 strikingly prophetic of what was to come in the following 
 session. 
 
 There is no space to do more than mention other 
 occasions on which Mill spoke. In the session of 1866 
 he made a powerful speech on the necessity of paying off 
 the National Debt before the coal-fields were exhausted, 
 in which occurred a fine passage on our duty to Posterity. 
 
158 LIFE OF 
 
 He also sat as one of a committee presided over by Mr. 
 Ayrton, in reference to a proposed municipal govern- 
 ment for the metropolis. In Mr. Disraeli's administra- 
 tion (1868) he opposed a motion to abolish Capital 
 Punishments, and also spoke on the Election Petitions 
 Bill. Lastly, on the question of the Alabama claims, he 
 suggested, in support of Arbitration, that a mixed 
 Commission should be appointed to ascertain the 
 damages inflicted on the United States. Then came 
 the celebrated resolutions on the Irish Church, proposed 
 by Mr. Gladstone, which led to the dissolution of 
 Parliament, and the general election in the winter. Mill 
 was defeated at Westminster by Mr. W. H. Smith (who 
 has since become leader of the House in the present 
 Conservative Government), and immediately retired into 
 seclusion at Avignon. 
 
 It is not difficult to find reasons for Mill's failure in 
 1868. Perhaps the constituency was tired of being 
 represented by a philosopher ; perhaps the philosopher 
 himself had been guilty of eccentricity, which is so much 
 graver a fault in a member than complacent stupidity. 
 Certain it is that Mill had to some extent disappointed 
 the expectations of his partisans, though it is by no 
 means certain that those expectations were reasonable. 
 He had, as he himself said, taken up the more recondite 
 points of the Liberal creed, and hence was not in perfect 
 sympathy even with the party with which he habitually 
 acted. Above all, he had publicly sent a subscription 
 to Mr. Bradlaugh's election expenses, which argued 
 greater sympathy with working men's interests else- 
 where than prudence in the case of his own interests at 
 Westminster. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 159 
 
 Many were sorry that he could not share in the 
 fortunes of the Liberal Administration of 1869, especially 
 those who cared for the higher moralities of public life. 
 For Mill, at all events, was untouched by the wiles of 
 that which a French writer calls " la politique, la grande 
 suborneuse '' — Politics the great corruptress ; he had 
 entered the arena of Politics, as men of the better sort 
 usually do, with convictions, but, unlike them, had left 
 with something higher than mere interests. Mr. Glad- 
 stone, who was bound in closer friendship with Mill than 
 members of the House were generally aware of, was 
 struck, as we have seen, with the singular moral elevation 
 of his character. " He did us all good." But nature 
 had evidently not intended Mill for a debater and an 
 orator. The House listened to him with respect, but he 
 seemed like a man who was performing a difficult and 
 disagreeable duty in addressing it. He was hardly 
 fluent, deliberating on every sentence, and though quite 
 calm in manner, often pausing for some minutes for an 
 appropriate phrase. Mr. Gladstone's judgment on this 
 matter is final. In his letter, which was quoted at 
 the commencement of this chapter, he praises Mill's 
 mental faculty as a debater. But there was no warmth 
 or contagiousness about Mill's oratory. "Physically, it 
 came as from a statue." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 CONCLUDING YEARS (1868-1873). 
 
 WHILE Mill was in Parliament, the recess was his 
 only opportunity for continuing his literary 
 work. Thus, in the winter which succeeded his 
 election at Westminster, he wrote a long article on 
 Grote's Plato and the other Companions of Socrates, in 
 preparation for which, in his usual laborious way, he 
 studied the whole of Plato's works. He also brought 
 out a new edition of his Logic, in which he added fresh 
 examples to the inductive methods detailed in his third 
 book, and argued for the first time against Spencer's 
 " inconceivability of the opposite " as a test of truth. In 
 the next recess, between 1866 and 1867, he wrote his 
 address to the students of St. Andrews, who, without 
 asking his leave, had elected him their Lord Rector. 
 Dr. Bain, who speaks with some authority on such a 
 question, says that this address was a failure. Mill, he 
 says,* had no conception of the limits of a University 
 curriculum. " At present the obligatory sciences [in the 
 Scotch Universities] are Mathematics, Natural Philo- 
 sophy, Logic, and Moral Philosophy. If he had con- 
 sulted me on this occasion, I should have endeavoured 
 
 * Bain : /. S. Mill, p. 127. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 161 
 
 to impress upon him the limits of our possible curri- 
 culum, and should have asked him to arbitrate between 
 the claims of Literature and Science, so as to make the 
 very most of our time and means. He would then have 
 had to balance Latin and Greek against Chemistry, 
 Physiology, and Jurisprudence, for it is quite certain that 
 both these languages would have to be dropped absolutely 
 to admit his extended science course." But Mill was 
 doing more than merely addressing a Scotch audience ; 
 he was drawing a picture of the whole of the Higher 
 Education. Perhaps Dr. Bain is wounded by Mill's 
 resolute vindication of the importance of Greek and 
 Roman classics, for half the address is occupied with 
 this subject, on which he had already given his opinion 
 in his article on De Tocqueville.* The series of the 
 sciences is discussed in accordance with the scheme of 
 Comte. Amongst other noticeable passages he intro- 
 duced one on the subject of free-thought, which seems 
 especially to have pleased the St. Andrews students. 
 
 In the recess of 1867 he was busy with his edition of 
 James Mill's Analysis of t?ie Human Mind, which was 
 published in 1869. The work, which was called by Mill 
 " a duty to philosophy and to the memory of my father,'' 
 was undertaken conjointly by Dr. Bain, Mr. Grote, and 
 Dr. Andrew Findlater, with Mill himself as editor. Mill 
 found this occupation a very great relief "from its 
 extreme unlikeness to parliamentary work, and to 
 parliamentary semi-work or idleness." "Admirably 
 adapted," he says, " for a class-book of the Experience 
 Metaphysics, it only required to be enriched, and in 
 some cases corrected, by the results of more recent 
 
 * Dissertations and Discussions, vol. ii., p. 69, note. 
 II 
 
1 62 LIFE OF 
 
 labours in the same school of thought, to stand, as it 
 now does, at the head of systematic works on Analyic 
 Psychology." The most remarkable publication belong- 
 ing to the year 1867* is, however, the Siibjection of 
 Women, of which portions were written by Miss Helen 
 Taylor, while Mill's share was the result of discussions 
 and conversations with his wife. With the possible 
 exception of the Utilitarianism, there is no work of Mill 
 which has been more abundantly criticised than this. 
 Even his friends thought its argument was overstrained ; 
 for it has a depth and intensity of passion in the language 
 which could only be understood if the author were 
 advocating divorce, pure and simple, in the case of 
 ill-assorted unions. But this is exactly what Mill does not 
 do. The argument proceeds on the following principles : 
 equality is itself the highest expediency, and the burden 
 of proof must always lie on those who maintain inequality. 
 Justice, in fact, requires that all people should live in 
 society as equals. Moreover, history shows that progress 
 has been from a law of force to a condition in which 
 command and obedience become exceptional. Finally, 
 the law of the strongest having been abandoned in this 
 country, it ought not to apply to the relation between the 
 sexes. Now it is obvious that none of these propositions 
 are axiomatic ; they can be, and have been, impugned in 
 detail by many thinkers and critics. No discussion on 
 this subject equals in vigour Sir Fitzjames Stephen's 
 attack in his Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.^ The critic 
 
 * In the same year were published Endowments and Labour ami 
 its Claims, a review of Thornton's work. 
 
 t Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. By James Fitzjames Stephen, 
 Q.C. Pp. 203, et foil. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 163 
 
 admits that there are cases in which men have abused 
 their power, as, for instance, in the " stupid coarseness" 
 of the laws about the effects of marriage on property, 
 but while he believes that all Societies ultimately rest 
 on force, he does not conceal his disbelief in the natural 
 equality of individuals. It is needless to repeat argu- 
 ments which have been abundantly thrashed out in 
 contemporary discussions. But there is one simple 
 principle which must largely affect our view on the 
 possible equality of men and women. Nature has 
 prescribed to woman specific functions, which, as they 
 are exhaustive to her powers, must leave her unequal to 
 man in vigour, unless she has been originally furnished 
 with greater chances of success in the struggle of life. 
 Can anyone assert that she starts stronger than man ? 
 And, if not, how can she, being what she is, ever be his 
 equal ? 
 
 It is more interesting and more profitable to pass 
 from such contested points to the remaining incidents of 
 Mill's life. In 1869 he meditated, we are told, writing a 
 book on Socialism,* and he was busy with peasant 
 proprietorships and the "unearned increment" in his 
 studies on the Land Question. The last public work in 
 which he was engaged was the starting of the Land 
 Tenure Reform Association, in favour of which he made 
 a public speech only a few months before his death. We 
 get a pleasant picture of his cottage life at Avignon in a 
 letter he wrote to his friend Thornton. " Helen [Miss 
 Helen Taylor, his step-daughter] has carried out her 
 long-cherished scheme (about which she tells me she 
 consulted you) of a ' vibratory ' for me, and has made a 
 * See "Chapters on Socialism," Fortnightly Review, 1879. 
 
1 64 LIFE OF 
 
 pleasant covered walk, some thirty feet long, where I can 
 vibrate in cold or rainy weather. The terrace, you must 
 know, as it goes round two sides of the house, has got 
 itself dubbed the ' semi-circumgyratory.' In addition to 
 this Helen has built me a herbarium, a little room fitted 
 up with closets for my plants, shelves for my botanical 
 books, and a great table whereon to manipulate them 
 all. Thus, you see, with my herbarium, my vibratory, 
 and my semi-circumgyratory, I am in clover ; and you 
 may imagine with what scorn I think of the House of 
 Commons, which, comfortable club as it is said to be, 
 could offer me none of these comforts, or more perfectly 
 speaking, these necessaries of life."* Mill, as we have 
 said before, was an enthusiastic botanist, and during his 
 last journey to Avignon he was looking forward with 
 keen interest to the spring flowers. 
 
 In 187 1 his own and his father's friend, Grote, died, 
 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Mill disliked 
 this public interment, but could not refuse to attend 
 the funeral and walk as one of the pall-bearers. Dr. 
 Bain says that as he and Mill walked out from the 
 ceremony, Mill made the remark — " In no very long 
 time I shall be laid in the ground with a very different 
 ceremonial from that." In this year he was only 
 sixty-seven, but he felt that he had taxed his energies 
 to the full, and that the end could not be far off. 
 Several attacks of illness he bore with patience during 
 the next two years, and a few days before his actual 
 death he made a long botanical excursion. But a local 
 endemic disease proved fatal, and he died on May 8th, 
 1873. There is an interesting note in Dr. Bain's book as 
 * Quoted by Professor Minto in Encyd. Brit., vol. xvi. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 165 
 
 to Mill's funeral. It seems that Mill had made a friend 
 of the Protestant pastor at Avignon, who was an intelligent 
 and liberal-minded man. The pastor ventured to offer up a 
 prayer over Mill's grave, and thereby got into trouble, and 
 had to write a letter in. the local newspapers excusing 
 himself for this act of consideration on behalf of a 
 notorious sceptic. It is a satisfaction to know that Mill 
 died with his faculties clear. His favourite text had been 
 " the night cometh when no man can work," and on the 
 night of his death, when he was informed that he would 
 not recover, he said simply, " My work is done." Few 
 men had better reason to express so calm a confidence. 
 
 The Autobiography, part of which had been written in 
 1861, and part after 1870, came out after his death, and 
 enabled all men to understand how serious and simple 
 had been the life of the man who had died so calmly. 
 The other posthumous work, Essays on Religion, caused 
 more commotion, and renewed many of the controversies 
 which had existed during his lifetime as to his real 
 convictions. To some the book came as a disappoint- 
 ment, to others as a relief, to all as a surprise. But 
 while it renders still more difficult the task of reconciling 
 the various items of Mill's creed, it must be remembered 
 that the third essay, at all events, is only a first draft, and 
 had not the benefit of that careful revision which Mill 
 was in the habit of giving to all that he published on his 
 own authority. 
 
 " The two first of these three essays," says Miss Helen 
 Taylor in her introductory notice, " were written between 
 the years 1850 and 1858, during the period which 
 intervened between the publication of the Principles of 
 Political Economy and that of the work on Liberty. The 
 
1 66 LIFE OF 
 
 last essay belongs to a different epoch. It was written 
 between the years 1868 and 1870, but it was not 
 designed as a sequel to the two essays which now appear 
 along with it, nor were they intended to appear all 
 together.'' It is important to remember these facts, for 
 they serve to explain in some measure the divergence 
 in view between the earlier and later portions of the 
 volume — a divergence which we may take for granted, 
 since so enthusiastic a disciple of Mill as Mr. Morley 
 has taken pains to accentuate it in the articles which he 
 wrote in the Fortnightly Review* The first essay has 
 as its subject the various interpretations which may be 
 given of the term Nature. Its purpose is to show that if 
 " Nature " be taken as a guide either in religion or in 
 morals, it is a term equally ambiguous and defective. 
 We can neither construct an ethical theory on the ground 
 of " conformity to Nature," as, for instance, the Stoics 
 attempted, nor have we any justification for basing a 
 religious creed on a consideration of natural processes. 
 For the fact is, according to Mill, that Nature, as distinct 
 from human activity and foresight, exhibits specimens 
 of reckless violence and brutality which would be univer- 
 sally condemned according to any human standard. In a 
 passage of great rhetorical energy Mill describes Nature 
 as Tennyson describes her in his In Memoriam : " red 
 in tooth and claw with ravine." All the good that has 
 been done to the world and to humanity has been 
 effected by human powers in limiting, controlling, and 
 overpowering the blind and senseless havoc of natural 
 forces. How, then, can a so-called " natural religion " be 
 defensible? To argue from the signs and evidences 
 
 * Fortnightly Review, 1874, 1S75. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 167 
 
 of the natural world to its Creator, is to ascribe what 
 is immeasurably below man to that which is, in the 
 language of religious fervour, asserted to be infinitely 
 above man. One of the hardest tasks which is assigned 
 to the human race is the duty of reforming religion 
 itself. The conclusion which Mill reaches is thus ex- 
 pressed* — "The only admissible moral theory of 
 Creation is that the principle of good cannot at once 
 and altogether subdue the powers of evil, either physical 
 or moral; could not place mankind free from the 
 necessity of an incessant struggle with the maleficent 
 powers, or make them always victorious in that struggle, 
 but could and did make them capable of carrying on 
 the fight with vigour and with progressively increasing 
 success. Of all the religious explanations of the order 
 of nature, this alone is neither contradictory to itself 
 nor to the facts for which it attempts to account.'' It 
 must be admitted, however, that the value of the essay 
 is much lessened by the fact that at the time at which 
 it was composed, Darwin's newer view of nature was 
 not fully before the world. Here, as elsewhere in Mill, 
 we are to regard Nature on the ground of a conception 
 based on individual experiences. Mill takes, as Mr. 
 Morley terms it, merely the surface or horizontal view 
 of Nature. The works of Darwin and Herbert Spencer 
 enable us to substitute for this what may be called 
 a transverse section of natural phenomena, whereby we 
 can observe the successive layers of a historical develop- 
 ment. One result of the latter view is effectually to 
 reduce that power which Mill attributed to man, of 
 altering or transforming the course of nature for his 
 * Essays on Religion, p. 39. 
 
1 63 LIFE OF 
 
 own and other's good : for man is shown to be swept 
 along the current of natural forces, and to be himself a 
 part of nature. This may or may not affect the general 
 conclusions of the essay ; it obviously interferes with 
 some of the arguments in detail.* 
 
 The second essay may be passed over with only a 
 slight reference. It is on the Utility of Religion, and 
 is, in Mr. Morley's summary, an attempt to answer the 
 following questions : — Is religion of direct service to 
 temporal interests, a direct instrument of social good ? 
 Is it useful in improving and ennobling individual 
 human nature ? If its utility in either of these two 
 ways be allowed, must the form of religion be necessarily 
 supernatural, involving a journey beyond the boundaries 
 of the world which we inhabit, and beyond anything 
 which could be supplied by the idealisation of our 
 earthly life ? In dealing with these questions, Mill's 
 general contention is that religion is .of considerable 
 utility, but it need not be supernatural, nor deal with 
 problems beyond the reach of human ken. But as 
 we found that Mill's Utilitarianism was considerably 
 embarrassed by the want of any clear conception of 
 what happiness is, so his discussion of the present 
 subject is hampered by a similar obscurity in his con- 
 ception of religion. Religion is apparently a yearning 
 to know whether our ideal and imaginative conceptions 
 have realities answering to them in other worlds than 
 ours. But the conclusion of the essay is that the 
 
 * The reader may be referred for an able polemic in favour 
 of the religious view as against some of the inferences from 
 Darwinism to Dr. James Martineau's Study of Religion, esp. 
 vol. ii., pp. 270-397. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 169 
 
 Positivist religion of Humanity, or as Mill prefers to 
 call it, the religion of Social Duty, has all the value 
 of the popular religion, as well as greater scientific 
 certainty. Now, a religion of Humanity has clearly 
 nothing to do with other worlds than ours. Hence 
 some part, at all events, of the essence of religion is 
 missed in that which Mill proposes to give as an entirely 
 adequate substitute. 
 
 His object is, as we have said, to replace what is 
 ordinarily termed Religion by the Positivist conception 
 of a religion of Humanity. But the value and expediency 
 of this substitution is rendered more than doubtful in 
 the third essay. In the Essay on Theism there is some- 
 times the suggestion, sometimes the clear recognition, 
 that what is valuable in religion (or, at all events, that 
 which renders it valuable to the majority of mankind) is 
 the element of wonder and mystery which encircles the 
 problems with which it deals. With regard to three 
 leading ideas — the idea of God as cause of the world, the 
 idea of Christ as a divinely-appointed teacher, and the 
 idea of immortality — Mill has considerations to offer 
 which render them not indeed dogmas to be intellectually 
 accepted, but hypotheses of some little probability, 
 which may be defended on even scientific grounds. 
 The ideas are not, it is true, such as they would be 
 represented by the religious consciousness, but they are 
 put forward in a sketchy, tentative fashion, as though 
 most of the destructive portions of the two first essays 
 had never been written. It is this playing with prob- 
 abilities, this deliberate attempt to live in a twilight land 
 of semi-faith, which caused so much consternation among 
 those of Mill's disciples who had fed themselves on his 
 
170 LIFE OF 
 
 earlier work. God is declared to be, though not 
 omnipotent, yet always benevolent ; albeit that the main 
 object of the Essay on Nature was to show that natural 
 operations were replete with unreasoning cruelty. There 
 is a shadow of chance that the soul may be immortal, 
 because the physical part of our thinking frame is only a 
 concomitant, not the cause of our mental life.* Lastly, 
 if we select all those sayings of Christ which strike us as 
 of the highest value, and reject all those which appear to 
 be merely on the level or below the level of the morality of 
 his age, we are left with a character which is apparently 
 inexplicable on natural and historical grounds. Yet 
 if there was one thing more than another which the 
 sixth book of Mill's Logic was designed to teach, it was 
 the notion of a science of social development, in which 
 there could be no breaks, no want of continuity in the 
 natural order. A science of historical sociology could 
 not admit that, at a given period in the world's develop- 
 ment, a character arose which had no relation to the 
 past, and no roots in the existing social conditions. Yet 
 here in the last of Mill's writings there is the suggestion 
 that Christ was charged with "a special, express, and 
 unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth 
 and virtue."! The passage in which these words occur 
 has often been quoted, but it is worth while to quote it 
 once more. If it proves nothing else, it proves how 
 ready Mill was to find some sympathetic alliance with 
 those whose feelings he had so obviously outraged in the 
 earlier essays. On the strength of this passage it has 
 
 * This consideration would, of course, only lead up to metem- 
 psychosis, not personal immortality, 
 t Essays on Religion, p. 255. 
 
JOHN S TUART MILL. 1 7 1 
 
 been suggested that Mill was at bottom a religious man. 
 Such a notion is clearly in direct contradiction to the 
 facts of his life. But he was, as we have had many 
 opportunities of seeing, a man of uncommon warmth 
 and intensity of feeling; and it is in the light rather 
 of his emotional than of his religious character that the 
 following words should be regarded : — 
 
 " Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, 
 Christ is still left ; a unique figure not more unlike all his pre- 
 cursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit 
 of his personal teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ, as 
 exhibited in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not 
 how much of what is admirable has been superadded by the tradi- 
 tion of his followers. The tradition of followers suffices to -insert 
 any number of marvels, but who among his disciples or among their 
 proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or 
 of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels ? . . . 
 But about the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal 
 originality, combined with profundity of insight, which, if we 
 abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where 
 something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of 
 Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his 
 inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of 
 whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is 
 combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer 
 and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion 
 cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching upon this man 
 as the ideal representative and guide of humanity ; nor even now 
 would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation 
 of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to 
 endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life. When to 
 this we add that to the conception of the rational Sceptic it remains 
 a possibility that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to 
 be — not God, for he never made the smallest pretension to that 
 character, and would probably have thought such a pretension as 
 blasphemous, as it seemed to the men who condemned him — but a 
 
172 LIFE OF 
 
 man, charged with a special, express, and unique commission from 
 God to lead mankind to truth and virtue ; we may well conclude 
 that the influences of religion on the character, which will remain 
 after rational criticism has done its utmost against the evidences of 
 religion, are well worth preserving, and that what they lack in direct 
 strength as compared with those of a firmer belief, is more than 
 compensated by the greater truth and rectitude of the morality they 
 sanction." 
 
 This is a striking paragraph on many grounds, and 
 perhaps it is no wonder that Mr. Morley, in reviewing 
 the essay, should have felt that the Mill he knew and 
 admired was slipping from his grasp. But it need 
 cause no wonder to those who accept that conception 
 of Mill's character which it has been the object of these 
 pages to enforce. Let us remind ourselves that Mill 
 had acknowledged as his chief office in the realm of 
 thought to see the truth in the views of opponents, and 
 to put the adversary's case, as was said of him in the 
 House, better than the adversary himself could have 
 put it. The sentences in the Autobiography are quite 
 decisive on this point : — " I thought myself much 
 superior to most of my contemporaries in willingness 
 and ability to learn from anybody ; as I found hardly 
 anyone who made such a point of examining what was 
 said in defence of all opinions, however new or however 
 old, in the conviction that even if they were errors there 
 might be a substratum of truth underneath them, and 
 that, in any case, the discovery of what it was that made 
 them plausible would be a benefit to truth." . . . 
 " Goethe's device, ' many-sidedness,' was one which I 
 would most willingly have taken for mine."* A man 
 who takes such a view of his duties would be likely 
 Autobiography, pp. 163, 242, 243. 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 173 
 
 enough to astonish his more dogmatic and more logical 
 friends. 
 
 Iff truth, Mill's character was eminently receptive of 
 all the influences to which it was subjected. In his 
 youth the prevailing influence is Bentham and James 
 Mill; then comes the time when Sterling and Carlyle 
 gain a large share of his sympathies ; to that succeeds the' 
 influence of Mrs. Taylor ; and after his wife's death, his 
 views (as in the Essay on Theism, which was composed 
 after his bereavement) seem to swing back on some of 
 the older lines from which her ascendency over his 
 mind had diverted them. It is his mental receptivity 
 which constitutes, perhaps, his chief charm ; it is that 
 which explains his aims of reconciliation and mediator - 
 ship. But it is this also which gives that vacillation 
 which here and there we have noticed in his grasp of 
 doctrines, and leaves us with the final verdict that he 
 belongs to a transitional period of thought. No one but 
 a " transitional " thinker could, for instance, have 
 written the following sentence in his Essay on Theism — 
 " It is perfectly conceivable that religion may be morally 
 useful without being intellectually sustainable.'' Such a 
 phrase reminds us of the allegorical devices within 
 which the' less audacious spirits took refuge in their 
 criticism of early mythology. It is like the Legal 
 Fictions, which serve as a compromise for those who 
 desire to retain the letter while they change the spirit of 
 old institutions. But it is not written in the temper 
 either of the clear-eyed iconoclast, or the constructive 
 reformer. It belongs to the middle period between two 
 eras, when men's thoughts are swaying iv yueTo«x/-«<£ 
 (tkotov, in the battle-ground of darkness. 
 
174 LIFE OF 
 
 Enough, however, has already been said of Mill in this 
 aspect. We have seen that he has a destructive side, 
 and also a constructive side. As a destroyer, he works 
 with Bentham and James Mill, and certainly, as Dr. 
 Bain remarks, no more formidable trio can be imagined 
 in the work of pulling down rotten institutions. As a 
 constructor, he stands more isolated, for everywhere the 
 ground has to be prepared for the newer edifices. We 
 have certainly no desire to depreciate the value of his 
 constructive agency, In providing science with a careful 
 and elaborate theory of Induction, in sketching the 
 outlines of a new science of Sociology, in discussing the 
 dangers and the inevitableness of Democracy — in these 
 and many other points his influence over the present 
 generation can hardly be exaggerated. If we see, or 
 think we see, further, it is because we stand on his 
 shoulders. Nor is it possible to give an exhaustive 
 enumeration of the various spheres in which his influence 
 has been felt. No calculus, it has been well said, can 
 integrate the innumerable little pulses of knowledge and 
 of thought that he has made to vibrate in the minds of 
 his generation. In logic, in ethics, in politics, we have 
 nourished ourselves at his springs. Let us make the full 
 acknowledgment of our debt, and also add that while all 
 that is worst in him belongs to the eighteenth century, all 
 that is best is akin to the highest, best spirit of the 
 nineteenth. 
 
 In Mill's case, a longer study may perhaps lessen our 
 admiration of him as a thinker, but increases our affection 
 for him, as a man. Everything about him, it is true, is 
 set in a quiet key. But perhaps the delicate spirit of self- 
 effacement only adds to the power of the teacher. With 
 
JOHN STUART MILL. 175 
 
 his temper of sobriety and reserve, he did not think for 
 men ; he rather made them think for themselves. Such, 
 at least, is the opinion of Mr. Morley, who, on this point, 
 is a competent judge.* Let us note, in passing, that he 
 discovered Tennyson for his generation, that he saved 
 Lord Durham by his quick insight into the value of his 
 report, and that he rescued Carlyle's French Revolution 
 from a too probable failure. If, in these matters, he 
 guided the opinions of his countrymen, in other respects 
 he held before them a splendid example of disinterested- 
 ness, of courage, and of zeal for mankind. It required, 
 probably, no little courage to face public opinion as 
 he did on the question of the American War and of 
 Governor Eyre. It certainly required no less disinterested- 
 ness to write the articles on Bentham and Coleridge, and 
 compose the Essay on Theism. And as to his love of his 
 kind, there is abundant evidence. He cordially sympa 
 thised with every form of improvement, and did what- 
 ever lay in him to aid the contrivers of new and 
 beneficial schemes. " He was a strong supporter," says 
 Dr. Bain, " of Mr. Chadwick's Poor-Law and Sanitary 
 Legislation. He was quite exultant when the Peel 
 Government of 1841 acquiesced in the Penny Postage, 
 which Peel had at first opposed. His taking up of 
 Hare's scheme of Representation was a notable illustra- 
 tion of his readiness to embrace proposals that he had no 
 hand in suggesting."! Even the Londoner, as he walks 
 
 * See "Death of Mr. Mill," Fortnightly Review, 1873. 
 
 t He was so uniformly courteous to opponents that it is a matter 
 of surprise that he should have been discourteous enough to refuse 
 to see the then Crown Princess of Prussia and the Princess Alice 
 when they proposed to go to Avignon to visit him. 
 
176 LIFE OF 
 
 down Piccadilly, has occasion, though he probably does 
 not know it, to bless Mill's memory. When Lord Lincoln 
 (so Dr. Bain says) was Chief Commissioner of Woods and 
 Forests, Piccadilly was widened by taking a slice off the 
 Green Park. A row of trees was included in the addition, 
 and would, in all probability, have been cut down. Mill 
 intervened at the right moment, and induced Lord 
 Lincoln to preserve the row as they now remain at the 
 street-edge of the pavement. * 
 
 No pleasanter picture of Mill as a man can be found 
 than in the sympathetic pages which Mr. Morley wrote 
 in the Fortnightly Review on the occasion of his death. 
 Perhaps no more fitting way can be found of taking 
 leave of Mill than the reproduction of them here : — 
 
 "The last time I saw him was a few days before he left England. 
 He came to spend a day with me in the country, of which the 
 following rough notes happened to be written at the time in a letter 
 to a friend : — 
 
 "He came down by a morning train to G. Station, where I was 
 waiting for him. He was in his most even and mellow humour. 
 We walked in a leisurely way, and through roundabout tracks, 
 for some four hours along the ancient green road, which you know, 
 over the high grassy downs, into old chalk-pits picturesque with 
 juniper and yew, across heaths and commons, and so up to our 
 windy promontory, where the majestic prospect stirred him with 
 lively delight. You know he is a fervent botanist, and every ten 
 minutes he stooped to look at this or that on the path. Unluckily 
 I am ignorant of the very rudiments of the matter, so his 
 parenthetic enthusiasms were lost upon me. 
 
 " Of course he talked, and talked well. He admitted that 
 Goethe had added new points of view to life, but has a deep dislike 
 of his moral[character ; wondered how a man who could draw the 
 sorrows of a deserted woman like Aurelia in Wilhelm Meister, 
 should yet^have behaved so systematically ill to women. Goethe 
 * Bain ; /. S. Mill, p. 154. 
 
JOHN S TUA R T MILL. 1 7 7 
 
 tried as hard as he could to be a Greek yet his failure to produce 
 anything perfect in form except a few lyrics proves the irresistible 
 expansion of the modern spirit, and the inadequateness of the 
 Greek type to the modern needs of activity and expression. 
 Greatly prefers Schiller in all respects ; turning to him from 
 Goethe is like going into the fresh air from a hot-house. 
 Spoke of style ; thinks Goldsmith unsurpassed ; then Addison 
 comes. Greatly dislikes the style of Junius and of Gibbon ; 
 indeed, thinks meanly of the latter in all respects, except for his 
 research, which alone of the work of that century stands the test of 
 nineteenth century criticism. Did not agree with me that George 
 Sand's is the high-water mark of prose, but yet could not name 
 anybody higher, and admitted that her prose stirs you like music. 
 
 "Seemed disposed to think that the most feasible solution of the 
 Irish University question is a Catholic University, the restrictive 
 and obscurantist tendencies of which you may expect to have 
 checked by the active competition of life with men trained in more 
 enlightened systems. Spoke of Home Rule. 
 
 " Made remarks on the difference in the feeling of modern refusers 
 of Christianity as compared with men like his father, impassioned 
 deniers, who believed that if only you broke up the power of the 
 priests and checked superstition, all would go well — a dream 
 from which they were partially awakened by seeing that the French 
 Revolution, which overthrew the Church, still did not bring the 
 millennium. His radical friends used to be very angry with him for 
 loving Wordsworth. ' Wordsworth,' I used to say, 'is against you, 
 no doubt, in the battle which you are now waging, but after you 
 have won, the world will need more than ever those qualities which 
 Wordsworth is keeping alive and nourishing.' 
 
 "In his youth mere negation of religion was a firm bond of union, 
 social and otherwise, between men who agreed in nothing else. 
 . . . And so forth, full of suggestiveness and interest all through. 
 When he got here he chatted to R. over lunch with something of 
 the amiableness of a child, about the wild flowers, the ways of 
 insects, and notes of birds. He was impatient for the song of the 
 nightingale. Then I drove him to our road-side station, and one 
 of the most delightful days of my life came to its end, like all other 
 days delightful and sorrowful." 
 
178 LIFE OF JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 When the news arrived of his death, it was said 
 that a great spirit had gone. We may still repeat the 
 words. Perhaps we seek to remember all that he did in 
 the world. Perhaps our thoughts prefer to linger round 
 those simple scenes of feeling and affection which were 
 enacted amid the Fox family at Falmouth. But as Mill 
 himself said, his work was done, and he could take leave 
 of the world in the words of Socrates : " Wherefore let a 
 man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away 
 the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him, 
 and hurtful rather in their effects, and has followed after 
 the pleasures of knowledge in this life ; who has arrayed 
 the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance 
 and justice and courage and nobility and truth. Thus 
 adorned, she is ready to go on her journey to the world 
 below, whenever her hour comes."* 
 
 * Tlato : Fhado, 115. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 Address to Students of St. 
 
 Andrews, by Mill, 160 
 Adullam, Cave of (Bright's 
 
 phrase), 146 
 "^Esop's Fables" read by 
 
 Mill, 32 
 Agricultural Hall, Mill speaks 
 
 at, 153 
 Alabama claims, 158 
 America, Repudiation, go ; 
 
 Civil War, Mill's view of, 
 
 123- 175 
 
 " Analysis of the Human 
 Mind," by James Mill, 18, 
 21, 22 ; new edition, edited 
 by Mill, 161 ; estimate of 
 James Mill's character in 
 Preface, 12 
 
 " Annals of the Parish," Gait's 
 novel, 51 
 
 Aristotle's "Rhetoric" studied 
 by Mill, 32 ; " Organon," 
 33. 37 
 
 Association, Associationism, 18, 
 
 21, 50 
 Austin, Charles, 46, 54 
 Austin, John, 46, 53, 124 
 "Autobiography," Mill's, 27, 
 
 31, 34, 36, Si. 55. 68, 165 
 Avignon, Mrs. Mill buried at, 
 
 114; Mill at, 138, 163, 165 
 Axioms, Geometrical, Mill's 
 
 view, 85, 86 
 Ayrton, Mr., 158 
 
 B. 
 
 Bailey's Theory of Vision criti- 
 cised by Mill, 90 
 
 Bain, Dr. Alexander, quota- 
 tions from, 15, 16, 17, 19, 24, 
 42 ; picture of Mill, 71 ; 
 assists Mill in preparing 
 " Logic," 80 ; helps to anno- 
 tate James Mill's " Analysis," 
 161 ; view of Mill's "crisis," 
 56 
 
 "Balance of Trade, "95 
 
i8o 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Ballot, Mill's hostility to, 129, 
 
 153 
 Bazard, the St. Simonian, 67 
 Beal, Mr. James, 143 
 Beales, Mr. Edmond, 151 
 Beauchamp, Philip, work on 
 
 Natural Religion, 53 
 Bentham, his friendship with 
 James Mill, 15; his criticisms 
 of James Mill, 15 ; article 
 on, by Mill, 60, 63 ; his 
 Utilitarianism, 51, 132 
 Bentham, Sir Samuel, 42 
 Berkeley's Idealism, 90, 137 
 Bowring, Sir J. on Mill, 73 
 Bradlaugh, Mr., 158 
 Bright, John, Mr., 146, 150 
 Brooke's " Fool of Quality," 32 
 Brougham, Lord, 15, 16 
 Burke, Colonel, 156 
 Burrow, Harriet, James Mill's 
 
 wife, Mill's mother, 16 
 Buxton, Mr. Charles, 150 
 
 C. 
 
 Cairnes, view of Mill's "Politi- 
 cal Economy," 99, 10S 
 
 " Calendar of Odours," Mill's, 
 75 
 
 Calvert, Dr., 74 
 
 Cambridge, 46 
 
 Canada, Lord Durham and, 175 
 
 Capital Punishment, Mill's 
 speech against abolishing, 153 
 
 Carlile, Richard, prosecution of, 
 3° 
 
 Carlyle, view of Mill, 55, 77 ; 
 " French Revolution," 49, 
 114; view of Mrs. Taylor 
 (Mrs. Mill), 113; heads party 
 for Governor Eyre, 149 ; com- 
 pared with Mill by Green, 
 
 150 
 Cattle Plague, Mill's speech on, 
 
 146 
 Cause, Mill's views of, 86, 87 
 Character, Mill's, 172-175 
 Chemistry learnt in childhood 
 
 by Mill, 33 
 Christ, Mill's description of, 
 
 170-172 
 Church, Irish, Mill's view of, 
 
 157 
 Cicero, quoted from, 116 
 
 Classical training, Mill defends, 
 in address to St. Andrews 
 students, 161 
 
 Classification, 81 
 
 Coal-fields, exhaustion of, Mill's 
 speech on, 157 
 
 Cockburn, Chief-Justice, his 
 charge to the Grand Jury, 
 149 
 
 Coleridge, influence on Mill, 
 59 ; Mill's article on, 65, 
 66 
 
 Commons, House of, Mill's 
 career in, 140-159 
 
 Comte, Auguste, the Positivist, 
 52, 67,88; Mill's debt to, 81, 
 103, 106 ; Mill's correspond- 
 ence with, 92, 93 ; Mill's book 
 on, 124 
 
INDEX. 
 
 1»I 
 
 "Compound Householder,'' 
 
 Mill on, 154 
 " Conscience," Mill's view on, 
 
 135 
 
 Conservative party "the stupid 
 
 party," 147 
 " Crisis" in Mill's life, its causes, 
 
 56 ; its nature, 56, 57 ; its 
 
 results, 59, 
 " Crotchet Castle," by Thomas 
 
 Love Peacock, 29 
 Cumulative vote, 155 
 
 D. 
 
 Darwin's newer view of Nature, 
 167 
 
 "Data of Ethics," Herbert 
 Spencer's, 135 
 
 Death of James Mill, 69 ; of 
 Mill, 165; of Mrs. Mill, 
 114; of Henry Mill, at Fal- 
 mouth, 74 
 
 ' ' Debating Society, Specul- 
 ative," 54 
 
 Deductive Method, James Mill's 
 employment of, 22, 24 ; Mill's 
 treatment of, 80 
 
 Democracy, Mill's view of, 66, 
 67, 130, 146 
 
 Democracy, De Tocqueville on 
 American, 60, 66 
 
 Derby, Lord, 129, 151 
 
 Determinism, Liberty and, 76 
 
 De Tocqueville, Mill reviews 
 his book, 60, 66. 
 
 Dickson, Colonel, 153 
 " Disquisitive Youth," a, 29 
 Disraeli, Chancellor of Ex- 
 chequer, 129, 151 
 " Dissertations and Discus- 
 sions," vols. i. and ii., 131 ; 
 quoted, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 
 Dumont's " Traite de Legisla- 
 tion," 30, 51 
 Durham, Lord, 175 
 
 E. 
 
 East India Company, see India 
 House 
 
 "Edinburgh Review," attack 
 on, by James Mill, 18 ; first 
 article in by Mill, 60 ; other 
 articles referred to, 13, 91, 
 123, etc. 
 
 Education, James Mill's article 
 on, 23, 24 ; of Mill by father, 
 31-34 ; its nature and success, 
 34-41 ; Mill's discourse on to 
 the students of St. Andrews, 
 160, 161 
 
 Eighteenth - Century Thought, 
 character of, 20 
 
 Election to Parliament, Mill's, 
 144 
 
 " Elements of Political Econ- 
 omy," by James Mill, 17 
 
 Emotional side of J. S. Mill's 
 character, 36, 64, 65, 74, 115, 
 171 
 
1S2 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 " Encyclopedia Britannica," 18, 
 
 164 
 Enfantin, the St. Simonian, 
 
 °7 
 England and Ireland, pamphlet 
 
 by Mill, 157 
 English Society, Mill's views 
 
 of, 44, 45 
 Equality between men and 
 
 women, 68, 122, 162 
 Ethology, Mill's, 88 
 Evidence, Bentham's papers on, 
 
 edited by Mill, 56 
 " Examination " of Hamilton' 
 
 Philosophy, see Hamilton 
 Experience, Mill's view of, 85, 
 
 cf. 129 
 Experimental Science, Mill's 
 
 early training in, 33 ; methods 
 
 of, So 
 Eyre, Governor of Jamaica, 
 
 148, 149 ; Mill's attitude 
 
 towards, 150, 151 
 
 Fallacies discussed by Mill, 
 
 76, 81 
 Falmouth, scenes at, 70 
 Fenians, 155 
 
 Ferrier's Metaphysics, no 
 Findlater, Dr. Andrew, 161 
 Fortescue, Mr, Irish Secretary, 
 
 145. 155 
 "Fortnightly Review," 166, 176 
 
 Fox, Caroline, her judgments o n 
 Mill, 70, 72, 118, 125; at 
 Falmouth, 70 
 
 Fox, R. Barclay, Mill's letters 
 to, 71, 74 
 
 " Fragment on Mackintosh," 
 by James Mill, 18 
 
 " Fraser's Magazine," 123, 131 
 
 French, Politics, Mill's know- 
 ledge of, 45, 69; Revolution 
 studied by Mill, 49 ; Carlyle's 
 MS. of " History of French 
 Revolution" destroyed, 114; 
 review of that work by 
 Mill, 175 ; society, Mill's 
 view of, 44, 45 
 
 G- 
 
 Gait's novel, 51 
 
 Geometrical Axioms, 85, 86 
 
 German, learnt by Mill, 56 ; 
 logicians, 76 ; school of 
 Political Economy, 95, 104 
 
 Gibbon, 177 
 
 Gladstone, W. E., 141, 145, 
 158, 159 
 
 God, as Cause, 169 
 
 Goethe, 59, 172, 176, 177 
 
 Gordon, his Execution in 
 Jamaica, 148, 149 
 
 Government, James Mill's essay 
 on, 22 ; attacked by Macau- 
 lay, 13, 67 
 
 Greatest Happiness Principle, 
 51, see Bentham 
 
INDEX. 
 
 ' 3 3 
 
 Greece, Grote's History of, see 
 
 Grote 
 Greek, when learnt by Mill, 
 
 31 
 
 Green, Professor, of Oxford, 
 150 
 
 Grote, George, friend of James 
 Mill, 15 ; eulogy on James 
 Mill, 26; Grote's "History 
 of Greece,'' 91, ill ; on the 
 Ballot, 129 ; Mill's article on 
 his Plato, 160 ; annotator of 
 James Mill's Analysis, 161 ; 
 buried at Westminster, 164 
 
 Guizot, Mill's article on, 91 
 
 H. 
 
 Habeas Corpus, suspension of, 
 
 in Ireland, 146, 155 
 Hadfield, Mr., 146 
 Hamilton, Sir W., Examination 
 
 of his Philosophy, by Mill, 
 
 136-138 
 Happiness, greatest, Bentham's 
 
 Principle, 51 ; ambiguities in 
 
 Mill's use of the word, 
 
 '33 
 
 Hare, Mr., his system of Per- 
 sonal Representation, 129 
 
 Hartley, his Association Theory, 
 18, 21, 50; his " Observations 
 on Man," 21, 50 
 
 Helvetius, 50 
 
 Herschel, 82 
 
 Hildebrand, German Economist, 
 104 
 
 Historical Method in Political 
 
 Economy, 108 
 Hobbes, 34, 61 
 Home Rule, 177 
 Homer, 91 
 Humanity, Positivist Religion 
 
 of, 169 
 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, on 
 
 Freedom, 125 
 Hume, David, 78, 85, 137 
 Hume, Joseph, James Mill's 
 
 friend, 15 
 Hyde Park, riot in, 151, 152 
 
 I. 
 
 Idealism, Berkeley's, 90, 137 
 Imagination, cultivation of, in 
 
 Mill, 63-65, 74 
 "India, History of," by James 
 
 Mill, 17 
 India House, James Mill at, 17; 
 
 Mill at, 46, 47 ; Mill's 
 
 defence of, m, 131 
 Individual Experience, 85, £7 
 Individual Rights, 125, 127 
 Individualism, text of Mill's 
 
 "Liberty,'' 125 
 Induction, meanings of, 79, 80 ; 
 
 methods of, 80 
 Inference, Mill's theory of, 83, 
 
 84 
 Ingram, " History of Political 
 
 Economy,'' 98, 102, 109 
 Intuition, theories of, 50 
 
184 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Ireland, pamphlet on, by Mill, 
 157 ; Mill's views on, 91, 
 ioo, 155, 177; speeches on, 
 IS5-IS7 
 
 J- 
 Jamaica, insurrection in, 148- 
 
 151 
 Jesus Christ, Mill's views on, 
 
 170-172 
 Jones, Richard, Professor at 
 
 Haileybury, 101 
 
 K. 
 
 Kingsley's view of Mill's 
 "Liberty," 125 
 
 L. 
 
 " Laiser-faire," 87, 96, 109 
 Land question in Ireland, 100, 
 
 156, 157 ; Tenure Reform 
 
 Association, 163 
 Latin authors, Mill's early study 
 
 of, 32 
 Law, Mill's studies in, 46, 53 
 Legislative Commission, need 
 
 of, 130 
 " Liberty," Mill's work on, 124- 
 
 129 ; Determinism, 76 ; 
 
 ' ' Liberty, Equality, and 
 
 Fraternity," by Stephen, 162 
 Locke's " Essay on the Human 
 
 Understanding," 50 
 
 Logic, early lessons in, 33 ; dis- 
 cussions on, 34 ; Mill's system 
 of, 69, 70, 77, 78 ; contents 
 of his book on, 79, 80 ; 
 general character of, 81-89 
 
 " London Review," 18, 89 
 
 Lowe, Robert, 146 
 
 M. 
 
 Macaulay, essay in the "Edin- 
 burgh Review," 12, 13; effect 
 on Mill, 13, 67 
 
 Mackintosh, Fragment on, by 
 James Mill, 18 
 
 Malthus, 54, 101, 107 
 
 Mansel's " Limits of Religious 
 Thought," 138 
 
 Martineau, Harriet, 112 
 
 Martineau, James, 168 
 
 Mathematics learnt, 33, 43 
 
 Matter, Mill on belief in, 137 
 
 Maurice, Frederick, 59 
 
 McCullock, 98 
 
 McLaren, 146 
 
 " Mercantile System," 95 
 
 Michelet, 91 
 
 Mill, Henry, dies at Falmouth, 
 I9» 7°, 74 
 
 Mill, James, birth, 11, 14; J. S. 
 Mill's estimate, 12 ; Macau- 
 lay's estimate, 13 ; external 
 life, 14; internal life, 15-17; 
 intellectual work, 17-19; 
 Mends, 15; domestic lite, 
 16, 17, 25 ; hardness of 
 
INDEX. 
 
 185 
 
 fibre, 19-21, defects, 21-25; 
 successes, 25, 26 ; biography 
 by Dr. Bain, 15, 16, 17, 19, 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, birth of, 41; 
 youthful education, 30-41 ; 
 relations with father, 35, 36 ; 
 tour in France with Sir S. 
 Bentham, 42 ; studies French 
 Revolution, 45, 49 ; as Ben- 
 thamite and Utilitarian, 49- 
 52; "crisis," 56-58; on Ben- 
 tham, 61-63 5 on Coleridge, 
 65 ; on De Tocquville, 66 ; at 
 Falmouth, 71-77; system of 
 logic, 77-89; "Unsettled ques- 
 tions on Political Economy," 
 93; "Political Economy," 
 93-109 ; and Comte, 92 ; and 
 Mrs. Taylor, 112 -122; 
 "Liberty;" 124-128; Parlia- 
 mentary Reform, 129 ; Re- 
 presentative Government, 1 30; 
 Utilitarianism, 131-135; Ex- 
 amination of Sir W. Hamilton, 
 136-138 ; at Avignon, 138, 
 163 ; in Parliament, 140-159 ; 
 as politician, 142 ; as orator, 
 159 ; and Governor Eyre, 
 1 50 ; and Reform League, 
 152; and Irish question, 155- 
 157 ; defeat at Westminster, 
 158; on subjection of women, 
 162 ; Land question, 163 ; at 
 Grote's funeral, 164 ; death 
 of, 164; "Autobiography," 
 165 ; " Essays on Religion," 
 
 165; and Christ, 171 ; recep- 
 tivity of, 173 ; transitional 
 character of his opinions, 173 ; 
 destructive side, 174 ; con- 
 structive side, 174, 175 ; 
 personal character, 174-177 ; 
 courage, disinterestedness, 
 love of mankind, 175, 176 ; 
 day with Mr. John Morley, 
 176, 177 
 
 Mill, Mrs., see Taylor, Mrs. 
 
 Minorities, representation of, 
 
 155 
 
 Miranda, General, the South 
 American patriot, 15 
 
 Molesworth, Sir W., 75, 92 
 
 Monarchy, 130 
 
 Moral Sense, 50 
 
 Morals, Mill's views on, see 
 Utilitarianism 
 
 Morley, Mr. John, 166, 168, 
 172, 176 
 
 "Morning Chronicle,'' 91 
 
 Municipal Government ior Lon- 
 don, 158 
 
 " Mystic, a new," 55 
 
 N. 
 
 National Debt, 157 
 
 National Religion, Beauchamp's 
 
 book on, 53 ; Mill on, 167 
 Nature, meanings of, 166 
 Necessity, 76 
 Negroes, how treated in Jamaica, 
 
 148, 150 
 
i86 
 
 IXDEX. 
 
 o. 
 
 Odger, Mr., 145 
 
 Odours, Mill's "calendar of," 
 
 75 
 Orator, Mill as an, 159 
 "Organon," Aristotle's, 33, 37 
 Oxford, Professor Green of, 150 
 
 P. 
 
 Parliament, Mill's election to 
 (1865), 144; defeat of, in 
 subsequent election (1868), 
 158 
 
 " Parliamentary History and 
 Review," 56; reform, thoughts 
 on, 129 
 
 Peacock, Thomas Love, 29, 
 47, in 
 
 Penny Postage, 175 
 
 Personal Representation, Mr. 
 Hare's system of, 129 
 
 Philosophers, Plato on, 140 
 
 " Philosophes," 65 
 
 " Philosophie positive," 23, 8S, 
 92, 103, 124 
 
 " Physiocrats," 96 
 
 Plato's dialogues read by 
 Mill, 32 ; ideal of Dia- 
 lectician, 27 ; on Philo- 
 sophers, 141 ; Grote's work 
 on, 160 
 
 Poetry, "Thoughts on,'' 60; 
 Mill's readings in, 33 ; 
 views on, 63, 64; Bentham's 
 view of, 58, 63 
 
 Political Economy, early lessons 
 in, 34, 93 ; brief history of, 
 
 95-98 ; Ingram's history of, 
 98, 102, 109 ; Mill's book 
 on, 90, 93-109; "Essays on 
 unsettled questions in," 93, 
 94, 106 
 
 Population, see Malthus 
 
 Positivism, see ' ' Philosophie 
 positive " 
 
 Production of Wealth dis- 
 tinguished from Distribution 
 of Wealth, 106, 120 
 
 Proprietorships, Peasant, 91, 
 121 
 
 Psychology, 88 
 
 Punishment, Capital, Mill's 
 speech on, 158 
 
 " Quarterly Review," criticised 
 
 by James Mill, 18 ; quoted 
 
 from, 29 
 Queen's Square, life at, 16 
 " Questions, unsettled, in 
 
 Political Economy, Essays 
 
 on," 93, 94, 106 
 
 R. 
 Rationalism, 57 
 
 Reform Bill, Liberal, 146 ; Con- 
 servative, 153 
 Reform League, 151-153 
 " Religion, Essays on," 165- 
 
 172 ; of Humanity, 169 
 Religious views, see Scepticism 
 Rent, Ricardo's views of, 97, 99 
 
INDEX. 
 
 187 
 
 " Representative Government," 
 130 
 
 Revolution, French, Mill's ac- 
 quaintance with, 49 ; Car- 
 lyle's book on, 49, 114 
 
 Rhetoric, Aristotle's, 32 
 
 Ricardo, David, James Mill's 
 friend, 15 ; Political Economy 
 of, 97, 98 
 
 Roebuck, John Arthur, 29, 112, 
 
 »3 
 Roman History, Mill's early 
 
 studies of, 33, 38 
 Roscher, German Economist, 
 
 104, 108, 109 
 Rousseau's view of Individual 
 
 Rights, 127 
 Russell, Lord, 145 
 
 " Saint of Rationalism," 142 
 Say, M., Mill's visit to, 42 
 Scepticism of James Mill, 15, 25 ; 
 
 of Mill, 30, 31, S3, 169-172 
 Science, methods of, see Experi- 
 mental Science 
 Sectarianism, 48, 55, 59 
 Sedgwick, Professor, 11 1 
 Sidgwick, Professor, 94 
 Shakespeare, 33 
 Shelley, Mill's views of, 64 
 Smith, Adam, 96, 97 
 Smith, Mr. Goldwin, 150 
 Smith, Mr. W. H., 158 
 "Smithianismus," 97 
 Social Contract Theory, 128 
 
 Socialism, Mill's tendencies to, 
 104, 107, 108, 121 ; projected 
 work on, 163 
 Society, French, 44, 45 ; Eng- 
 lish, 44, 45 
 Sociology, 23, 88, 103 
 Socrates, his last words, 178 
 Southey's " Book of the 
 Church," James Mill's article 
 on, 18 
 Speculative Debating Society, 
 
 5i. 54 
 Speeches by Mill, 145-159 
 Spencer, Herbert, 84, 85, 126, 
 
 133. I3S. "5° 
 St. Andrews, 160 
 Stanley, Lord, m 
 Stephen, Leslie, 135 
 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 
 
 162 
 Sterling, John, friendship wiih 
 
 Mill, 59, 70 ; character, 72 ; 
 
 at Falmouth, 70, 73, 74 
 St. James' Hall, Mill speaks at, 
 
 156 
 St. Simon, St. Simonians, 45, 
 
 67, 104, 120 
 Stuart, Sir John, of Fettercairn, 
 
 14 
 " Stupidity" of the Conservative 
 
 party, 147 
 "Subjection of Women," Mill 
 
 on, 122, 162 
 Suffrage, extension of, 26, 153 ; 
 
 rights of women to, 154 
 Syllogism, validity of, 79, 83 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Taylor, Miss Helen, 162, 163, 
 
 165 
 Taylor, Mrs., acquaintance with 
 
 Mill, 68, 101, 112: close 
 
 friendship, 112 ; marriage, 
 
 113; Mill's estimate of her 
 
 character, 112, 114, 115-122 
 Tennyson, Mill's review of his 
 
 poems, 1 1 6, 175 
 Theism, Essay on, 169 
 Thornton, Mr., 91, 100, 1391 
 
 162, 163 
 " Thoughts on Parliamentary 
 
 Reform," 129 
 " Thoughts on Poetry," 60 
 Tocqueville, De, Mill's essay 
 
 on his book, 60, 66 
 Torrens, Colonel, 94 
 Townshend, Professor, 46 
 " Traite de Legislation,'' Du- 
 
 mont's, 30, 51 
 "Transitional," as epithet for 
 
 Mill's views, 85, 100, 101, 
 
 173 
 " Traveller," newspaper, 30 
 
 U. 
 
 "Uniformity of Nature" in 
 
 Mill's view, 84 
 "Unsettled questions in Political 
 
 Economy," essays on, 93, 94, 
 
 106 
 Utility, principle of, 52 
 Utility of Religion, 53, 168, 
 
 169 
 
 Utilitarian Society, 51 
 Utilitarianism, origin of word, 
 51; Mill's book on, 131-136 
 
 V. 
 Villiers, Hyde and Charles, 46 
 
 W. 
 
 Wage fund theory, 100 
 Walpole, Mr., 151, 152, 153 
 Ward, W. G.'s criticism of 
 
 Mill, 78 
 Watson's Philip the Second, 32 
 Wealth, production, distribution, 
 
 and consumption of, 95, 106, 
 
 109 
 Westminster, election at, 143 
 " Westminster Review," 13, 18, 
 
 53,60, 90, in, 123 
 Whately, Archbishop, logic of, 
 
 70 
 Whewell, logic of, 72, 88 ; 
 
 " Elements of Morality," ill 
 Will, determinism of, 76 
 Women, subjection of, 122, 
 
 162 ; their voting rights, 154 
 Wordsworth, influence of, on 
 
 Mill, 59, 63 ; character of 
 
 poetry, 64 
 Working-classes, 26, 121, 144, 
 
 146 
 
 Xenophon, 32 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
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 13 -O 
 
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 J3 O 
 
 14-1 "^ 
 
 ro 
 
 J- CTs 
 
 h6 
 
APPENDIX II. 
 
 CALENDAR 
 OF THE LIVES OF THE TWO MILLS. 
 
 JAMES MILL. 
 
 (1773-1836.) 
 
 1773. James Mill bora (April 6th). 
 (Montrose Academy. Acquaint- 
 ance with Sir John Stuart of 
 Eettercairn.) 
 
 1790. Goes to the University of Edin- 
 burgh at seventeen and a half. 
 "Brought forward" for the 
 ministry. Educates Wilhelmina, 
 daughter of Sir J. Stuart. 
 
 1798. Licensed as preacher. 
 
 1802. Goes to London with Sir John 
 Stuart. Writes in the Anti- 
 Jacobite Review and Literary 
 Journal. 
 
 1804. A volunteer. 
 
 1805. Editor of St. Jaineit Chronicle. 
 
 Marries Harriet Burrow. 
 
 1806. Begins History of India. John 
 
 Stuart bom. 
 
 1808. Begins to write for the Edinburgh 
 
 Review. 
 
 Intimacy begun with Bentham. 
 
 1809. Miranda and Spanish America 
 
 —article in Edinburgh Review. 
 
 1811. Introduction to Bicardo and 
 
 Place. 
 
 1812. Anxiety for John's training (in 
 
 case of his own death). 
 
 1813. Summer tour with John and 
 
 Bentham. 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 (1806-1873.) 
 
 1806. J. S. Mill born, May 20th. (Early 
 education with father up to 
 1820.) 
 
192 
 
 CALENDAR. 
 
 J A MES MILL. 
 
 1817. Publication of History of India. 
 1819. Appointment at India House. 
 1S20. Article on Government. 
 
 1821. Elements of Political Economy. 
 
 1822. Begins Analysis of Human Mind. 
 
 (Published 1829.) 
 
 1823 Appointed First Assistant Exam- 
 iner at the India House. 
 
 JOHN STUART MI LL. 
 
 1820. \ In France with Sir Samuel 
 
 1821. / Bentham. 
 
 1821. Begins Psychological studies 
 
 (Condillac). 
 
 1822. Reads History of French Revolu- 
 
 tion. Studies Law with Austin. 
 Dumont on Bentham read and 
 admired. Studies in English 
 philosophy. Writes in the 
 Traveller. 
 
 1823. Utilitarian Society. Letters to 
 
 Morning Chronicle on Richard 
 Carlile prosecutions. Enters 
 India House as clerk. 
 
 1824. In Westminster Review criticises 1824. 
 the Edinburgh Review. Th e 
 Quarterly also overhauled. 
 
 Southey's Book of the Church 
 attacked in Westminster Review. 
 Founding of the University of 
 London. 
 
 1826. Ecclesiastical Establishments — ar- 
 
 ticle in Westminster Review. 
 
 1827. Article in Parliamentary History 
 
 and Review. 
 
 1829. Analysis of Human Mind pub- 
 
 lished. Macaulay's attack on 
 Go vernment— article in the Edin- 
 burgh Review. 
 
 1830. Culmination of Mill's career. India 
 
 Charter renewal. Mill made 
 Head Examiner. 
 
 1832. 
 
 'Agony Week" of Reform Move- 
 ment. Death of Bentham (June 6). 
 
 Contributes to Westminster Review 
 in continuation of father's attack 
 on Edinburgh Review. 
 
 1825. Edits Bentham's book on Evidence. 
 Starting of Parliamentary His- 
 tory and Review. Learns German. 
 Founding of Speculative De- 
 bating Society. Writes in the 
 Westminster Revieiv. 
 
 1827. Readings at Grote's house on 
 
 Logic. Article, Whately's Logic 
 written for Westminster Review 
 (published January 1828). 
 
 1828. Acquaintance with Maurice and 
 
 Sterling. Reads Wordsworth for 
 the first time. Made Assistant 
 Examiner in India House. 
 
 1829. Change in his views on Logic of 
 
 Politics, owing to Macaulay's 
 attack on Father. Readings at 
 Grote's house on Analysis of 
 Human Mind. 
 
 1830. Puts on paper ideas on Logical 
 
 Distinctions and Import of Propo- 
 sition s . First acquaintance with 
 French Philosophy of History 
 (St. Simonians and Comte). Goes 
 to Paris. Writes in Examiner on 
 French Politics. Prospects in 
 France. 
 
 1831. Essays^ on Unsettled Questions in 
 
 Political Economy written (only 
 published 1844). Resumes Study 
 of Logical Axioms and Theory of 
 Syllogism. First introduction to 
 Mrs. Taylor. 
 
 1832. Essays in TaWs Magazine and 
 
 Jurist. 
 
 1833. Thoughts on Poetry (Monthht 
 
 Repository). 
 
CALENDAR. 
 
 193 
 
 JAMES MILL. 
 
 1835. State of the Nation, in London 
 
 Review. Church and its Reform, 
 in London Review. Attack of 
 haemorrhage. Fragment on Mac- 
 kintosh. Land Reform, in London 
 Review. 
 
 1836. Aristocracy, in London Review. 
 
 Dialogue, Whether Political 
 Economy is useful, in London 
 Review. (Mill's last work.) Death 
 of James Mill (June 23). 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 1835. Reads DeTocqueville's Democracy 
 in America. London Review 
 article on Sedgwick. 
 
 1836. Father's death. Illness and three 
 
 months' absence in Switzerland 
 and Italy. London and West- 
 minster Review article on Civilisa- 
 tion. Promoted to second 
 Assistant (£800) and first Assist- 
 ant (£1200). 
 
 1837. Canada and Lord Durham, 
 
 article written for London and 
 Westmin 'iter Revieiv. Also 
 
 article on Carlyle's French Revo- 
 'lution. 
 
 1838. Bentham, article in London and 
 
 Westminster Review. Finishes 
 third book of his Logic. 
 
 1839. Illness. Six months' absence in 
 
 Italy. 
 
 1840. Coleridge, article in London and 
 
 Westminster Review. First con- 
 tribution to Edinbitrah Review 
 on De Tocqueville. Writes sixth 
 hook of his Lome. With brother 
 Henry and the Fox family at 
 Falmouth. 
 
 1841-6. Correspondence with Comte. 
 
 1842. Review of Bailey's Theory of 
 
 Vision in the Westminster Review. 
 Loss of money, owing to American 
 repudiation. 
 
 1843. System of Logic published. 
 
 1844. Michelet, in Edinburgh Review. 
 
 1S45. CJ.aims of Labour and Guizot, 
 in Edinburgh Review. 
 
 1846. Review of Grote's Greece (vols. i. 
 
 and ii.) in Edinburgh Review. 
 
 1847. Articles on Irish Affairs in the 
 
 Chronicle. 
 
 1848. Political Economy published. 
 
 Accident, owing to a fall, and 
 illness. 
 
 1849. Vindication of French Revolution 
 
 of 1848, in reply to Lord 
 Brougham in Westminster Review. 
 
 1851. Marriage with Mrs. Taylor. 
 
 1852. Article on Whewell's Moral Philo- 
 
 sophy in Westminster Review. 
 
 1853. Final article on Grote's Greece in 
 
 Edinburgh Review. 
 
 13 
 
194 
 
 CALENDAR. 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 1854. Serious illness, and consequent 
 tour in Sicily, Italy, and. Greece 
 for eight months 
 
 1S56. Head of Examiners' Office in the 
 India House. 
 
 1857. Drafts petition to Parliament 'on 
 
 behalf of East India Company 
 threatened with extinction. 
 
 1858. Official work over, owiDg to 
 
 transfer of India to the Crown. 
 Death of Wife. 
 
 1859. Liberty and Thoughts on Parlia- 
 
 mentary Reform published. 
 
 1861. Representative Government pub- 
 
 lished 
 
 1862. "Writes in Fra^er on American 
 
 Civil War, taking the side of the 
 North. Also on ^ame subject 
 in Westminster Review. Tour in 
 Greece and Asia Minor. 
 
 1863. ?7(<7^fm"a?u'.sm published. Article 
 
 on John Austin in Edinburgh 
 
 Revieiv. 
 
 1864. Articles on Comte and Positivism/ 
 
 1865. Examination of Sir W. Hamilton 
 
 published. Election at West- 
 minster. 
 
 1866. Article on Grote's Plato. 
 
 1567 Address to students of St. Andrews 
 
 as Rector. 
 
 1568 Pamphlet on England and Ireland. 
 
 Defeated at Westminster iu 
 General Election by W. H. 
 Smith. Retires to Avignon. 
 
 1869. Edition of father's Analysis of 
 Human J/Y/ftf published. Subjec- 
 tion of Women published. En- 
 dowments and Labour and its 
 Claims (a review of Thornton's 
 book). Meditates writing a book 
 on Socialism. 
 
 1871. Attends Grote's funeral in West- 
 minster Abbey. 
 
 1873. Death (May S)i 
 
 In the three last years of his life 
 worked at Land Question. 
 Posthumous works : — 
 
 Autobiography, 1S73. 
 Three essays oa ' , -« 
 Religion. \' lS,i - 
 Chapters on\ Fort nightly Review, 
 Socialism. J 1879. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN P. ANDERSON 
 
 (British Museum). 
 
 I. Works. 
 n. Miscellaneous. 
 
 ILL Appendix — 
 
 Biography, Criticism, etc. 
 Magazine Articles. 
 
 IV. Chronological List of Works. 
 
 I. WORKS. 
 
 Dissertations and Discussions ; 
 political, philosophical, and 
 historical. Reprinted chiefly 
 from the Edinburgh and West- 
 minster Reviews. 4 vols. 
 London, 1859-75, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition. 4 vols. 
 
 London, 1875, 8vo. 
 
 Auguste Comte and Positivism. 
 
 Reprinted from the Westminster 
 
 Review. London, 1865, 8vo. 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1866, 8vo. 
 Third edition. London, 1882, 
 
 8vo. 
 
 Vol. xvi. of The English and 
 
 Foreign Philosophical Library. 
 
 Autobiography. [Edited by Helen 
 Taylor.] London, 1873, 8vo. 
 
 Another edition. New York, 
 
 1874, 8vo. 
 
 Considerations on Representative 
 
 Government. London, 1861, 
 
 8vo. 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1861, 8vo. 
 Third edition. London, 
 
 1865, 8vo. 
 England and Ireland. London, 
 
 1868, 8vo. 
 
 Essays on some unsettled ques- 
 tions of Political Economy. 
 London, 1844, 8vo. 
 
 These Essays were written in 
 1S30-S1. 
 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1874, 8vo. 
 
11 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 An examination of Sir W. Hamil 
 ton's Philosophy, and of the 
 principal Philosophical ques 
 tions discussed in his writings 
 London, 1865, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition. Loudon 
 
 1865, 8vo. 
 
 Third edition. London 
 
 1867, 8vo. 
 
 Fifth edition. London 
 
 1878, 8vo. 
 
 Memorandum of the Improve 
 ments in the Administration of 
 India during the last thirty 
 years, and the petition of the 
 East-India Company to Parlia- 
 ment [drawn up by John Stuart 
 Mill]. London, 1858, 8vo. 
 
 Nature, the Utility of Religion 
 and Theism. [With introduc 
 tory notice by Helen Taylor.^ 
 London, 1874, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1874, 8vo. 
 
 On Liberty. London, 1859, 8vo, 
 
 Third edition. London 
 
 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Principles of Political Economy 
 with some of their applications 
 to Social Philosophy. 2 vols, 
 London, 1848, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition. 2 vols 
 
 London, 1849, 8vo. 
 
 Third edition. 2 vols. Lon 
 
 don, 1852, 8vo. 
 
 Fourth edition. 2 vols. 
 
 London, 1857, 8vo. 
 
 Fifth edition. 2 vols. Lon 
 
 don, 1862, 8vo. 
 
 Sixth edition. 2 vols. Lon 
 
 don, 1865, 8vo. 
 
 Abridged, with notes, 
 
 and a Sketch of the History of 
 Political Economy, by J. L 
 Laughlin, etc. New York 
 1884, 8vo. 
 
 Principles of Political Economy, 
 Chapters and Speeches on the 
 Irish Land Question. Reprinted 
 from Principles of Political 
 Economy , and Hansard's De- 
 bates. London, 1870, 8vo. 
 
 The Subjection of Women. Lon- 
 don, 1869, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1869, 8vo. 
 
 Fourth edition. London, 
 
 1878, 8vo. 
 
 A System of Logic, ratiocination 
 and induction, being a con- 
 nected view of the principles of 
 evidence and the methods of 
 scientific investigation. 2 vols. 
 London, 1843, Svo. 
 
 Third edition. 2 vols. 
 
 London, 1851, 8vo. 
 
 Fourth edition. 2 vols. 
 
 London, 1856, 8vo. 
 
 Fifth edition. 2 vols. Lon- 
 don, 1862, 8vo. 
 
 Seventh edition. 2 vols. 
 
 London, 1868, 8vo. 
 
 Eighth edition. London, 
 
 1872, 8vo. 
 
 Ninth edition. 2 vols. Lon- 
 don, 1875, 8vo. 
 
 People's edition. London, 
 
 1884, Svo. 
 
 Analysis of Mr. Mill's 
 
 System of Logic. By W. 
 Stebbing. London, 1864, 
 
 12mo. 
 
 The Student's Hand- 
 book, synoptical and explana 
 tory of J. S. Mill's System of 
 Logic. By A. H. Killick. 
 London, 1870, 8vo. 
 
 Thoughts on Parliamentary 
 Reform. London, 1859, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition, with addi- 
 tions. London, 1859, 8vo. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 in 
 
 Utilitarianism. Reprinted from 
 Fraser's Magazine. London, 
 
 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1864, 870. 
 
 Another edition. London, 
 
 1871, 8vo. 
 
 II. MISCELLANEOUS. 
 
 Analysis of the Phenomena of 
 the Human Mind. By James 
 Mill. A new edition, with 
 notes illustrative and critical, 
 hy A. Bain, A. Findlater, and 
 G. Grote. Edited, with addi- 
 tional notes, by John Stuart 
 Mill. 2 vols. London, 1869, 
 Svo. 
 
 Inaugural Address delivered to 
 the University of St. Andrew's, 
 February 1st, 1S67. London, 
 1867, 8vo. 
 
 The London Review, afterwards 
 incorporated into the West- 
 minster Review, under the title 
 of the London and Westminster 
 Review. [Edited by J. S. Mill]. 
 London, 1834-40, 8vo. 
 
 Memories of Old Friends ; being 
 extracts from the journals and 
 letters of Caroline Fox, from 
 1835 to 1871. Edited by H. 
 N. Pym. Second edition. To 
 which are added fourteen orig- 
 inal letters from J. S. Mill, 
 etc. 2 vols. London, 1882, 
 8vo. 
 
 Programme of the Land Tenure 
 Reform Association, with an 
 explanatory statement by J. S. 
 Mill. London, 1871, 8vo, 
 
 Public Responsibility and Vote by 
 Ballot. By Henry Romilly. 
 To which are appended, a letter 
 from J. S. Mill to the Editor of 
 
 the Reader, 29th April, 1865, 
 and observations thereon. Lon- 
 don, 1867, 8vo. 
 
 Rationale of judicial evidence, 
 specially applied to English 
 practice. From the manu- 
 scripts of Jeremy Bentham. 5 
 vols. [Edited by J. Stuart 
 Mill]. London, 1827, 8vo. 
 
 Selection from the Correspondence 
 of the late Maevey Napier, Esq. 
 London, 1879, Svo. 
 
 Contains several letters from J. S. 
 Mill. 
 
 Speech in favour of Women's 
 Suffrage. January 12th, 1871. 
 Edinburgh, 1873, 8vo. 
 
 Speech on the Admission of 
 Women to the Electoral Fran- 
 chise. Spoken in the House of 
 Commons, May 20th, 1867. 
 London, 1867, 8vo. 
 
 Views of J. S. Mill on England's 
 danger through the suppression 
 of her maritime power. Lon- 
 don, 1874, 8vo. 
 
 Consists of a letter from J. S. 
 Mill, and his Speech in the House 
 of Commons, August 5, 1867. 
 
 III. APPENDIX. 
 Biography, Criticism, etc. 
 
 Alexander, Patrick P. — Mill and 
 Carlyle. An examination of J. 
 Stuart Mill's Doctrine of Causa- 
 tion in relation to moral free- 
 dom, etc. Edinburgh, 1866, 
 8vo. 
 
 Moral Causation ; or notes on 
 
 Mr. Mill's Notes to the Chapter 
 on "Freedom," in the third edi- 
 tion of his " Examination of Sir 
 W. Hamilton's Philosophy." 
 Edinburgh, 1868, 8vo. 
 
IV 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Alexander, Patrick P. — Second 
 edition, revised and extended. 
 Edinburgh and London, 1875, 
 8vo. 
 
 Antichrist. — The Jesus Christ of 
 John Stuart Mill. By Anti- 
 christ. London, 1875, Svo. 
 
 B., H. B. F., i.e., H. E. Fox 
 Bourne. — John Stuart Mill ; 
 notices of his life and works. 
 Together with two papers 
 written by him on the Land 
 Question. [Edited by H. E. 
 F. B.] Eeprinted from the 
 Examiner. London, 1873, 
 8vo. 
 
 Bain, Alexander. — John Stuart 
 Mill. A Criticism ; with per- 
 sonal recollections. London, 
 Aberdeen [printed], 1SS2, 8vo. 
 
 Ballantyne, J. E. — On the Philo 
 sophy of Induction. [Compiled, 
 by J. E. Ballantyne, principally 
 from J. S. Mill's System of 
 Logic] Allahabad, 1851 ? 
 Svo. 
 
 Beggs, Thomas. — The Deterrent 
 Influence of Capital Punish- 
 ment. Being a reply to the 
 Speech of J. Stuart Mill, de- 
 livered in the House of Com- 
 mons on the 21st of April 1868. 
 London, 1868, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1868, Svo. 
 
 Birks, Thomas Eawson. — Modern 
 Utilitarianism, or the Systems 
 of Paley, Bentham, and Mill 
 examined and compared. Lon- 
 don, Cambridge [printed], 1874, 
 8vo. 
 
 Blackwood, F. T. H., Earl of 
 Dufferin.—m. Mill's Plan for 
 the Pacification of Ireland 
 examined. London, 186S, Svo. 
 
 Another edition. London, 
 
 1868, 8vo. 
 
 Brandes, Dr. Georg. — Eminent 
 Authors of the Nineteenth 
 Century. Literary Portraits. 
 Translated from the original by 
 E. B. Anderson, New York, 
 1886, 8vo. 
 John Stuart Mill, pp. 123-U6. 
 
 Bridges, John Henry. — The Unity 
 of Comte's Life and Doctrine. 
 A reply to strictures on Comte's 
 later writings, addressed to J. 
 S. Mill. London [Bungay, 
 printed], 1866, 8vo. 
 
 Browne, Walter E.— The Auto- 
 biography of J. S. Mill. Lon- 
 don, 1874, Svo. 
 
 Christian Evidence Lectures. 
 
 Strivings for the Faith, etc. 
 London, 1874, 8vo. 
 
 The Autobiography of John 
 Stuart Mill. By W. E. Browne, pp. 
 259-287. 
 _ _Cannegieter, Dr. T. — De Nuttig- 
 heidsleer van John Stuart Mill 
 en Professor Van der Wijck. 
 Groningen, 1876, Svo. 
 
 Carlyle Thomas. — Eeminiscences. 
 Edited by C. E. Norton. 2 vols. 
 London, 18S7, 8vo. 
 References to J. S. Mill. 
 
 Christie, W. D.— J. S. Mill and 
 Mr. A. Hayward. A reply 
 about Mill to a letter [from A. 
 Hayward] to the Eev. Stopford 
 Brooke, privately circulated and 
 actually published. London, 
 1873, 8vo. 
 
 Comte, J. A. M. F. X— Lettres k 
 J. S. Mill, 1811-1846. Paris, 
 1877, Svo. 
 
 Conway, Moncure Daniel. — In 
 Memoriam. A Memorial Dis- 
 course in honour of John Stuart 
 Mill, May 25th, 1873. [Lon- 
 don, 1873], 16mo. 
 
 Courtney, William L.— The Meta- 
 physics of J. S. Mill. London, 
 1879, 8vo. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Deuehar, Robert. — Review of 
 " An Examination of the 
 Hamiltonian Philosophy, by J. 
 S. Mill," etc. Edinburgh, 
 1865, 8vo. 
 
 Eccarius, J. Georg. — Bines Ar- 
 beiters Widerlegung der 
 national-bkonomischen Lehren 
 J. S. Mill's. Berlin, Leipzig 
 [printed], 1869, 8vo. 
 
 English, William Watson. — An 
 Essay on Moral Philosophy . . . 
 with a few Criticisms ... of 
 Professor Tyndall, the Duke of 
 Argyll, and J. S. Mill. London, 
 1S69, 8vo. 
 
 Examiner. — See supra, B., H. 
 R. F. 
 
 Froude, James Anthony. — Thomas 
 Carlyle, a history of the first 
 forty years of bis life etc. 2 
 vols. LoDdon, 1882, 8vo. 
 
 Numerous references to J. S. 
 Mill. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle, a history of 
 
 his life in London, etc. 2 
 vols. London, 1884, 8vo. 
 
 Numerous references to J. S. 
 MiU. 
 
 Galasso, Antonio. — Delia con- 
 ciliazione dell'egoismo coll' 
 altruismo - secondo J. S. Mill. 
 Discorso, etc. [Estratto dal vol. 
 xviii. degli " Atti del'Ac- 
 cademia di Scienze morali e 
 politiche."] Napoli, 1883, 8vo. 
 
 Gneist, Heinrich Rudolph. — 
 Gneist und Stuart Mill. Alt- 
 Englische und Neu-Englische 
 Staatsanschaung. Eine poli- 
 tische Parallele. Berlin, 1869, 
 8vo. 
 
 Gocraia, P. E. — La Mente di 
 Mill. Saggio di logica positiva 
 applicata specialmente alia 
 storia. Livorno, 1869, 8vo. 
 
 Grant, Sir Alexander, Bart. — Re- 
 cess Studies. Edinburgh, 1870, 
 8vo. 
 
 Mr. Mill on Trades Unions- 
 A Criticism. By James Stirling, pp. 
 309-332. 
 
 Grote, George. — Review of the 
 Work of Mr. J. S. Mill, entitled 
 " Examination of Sir W. Hamil- 
 ton's Philosophy." [Reprinted 
 from the Westminster Review,] 
 London, 1868 [1867], 8vo. 
 
 Grote, John. — An examination of 
 the Utilitarian Philosophy [of 
 J. S. Mill.] Edited by J. B. 
 Mayor. Cambridge, 1870, 8vo. 
 
 The Minor Works of G. Grote. 
 
 London, 1873, 8vo. 
 
 Review of John Stuart Mill on 
 the Philosophy of Sir William 
 Hamilton, pp. 277-330 ; reprinted 
 from the Westminster Review, 1866. 
 
 Hazard, Rowland G. — Two Letters 
 on Causation and Freedom in 
 Willing, addressed to J. S. 
 Mill [in reference to his philo- 
 sophical work]. Boston, 1869, 
 Svo. 
 
 Hodgson, Shadworth H. — Out- 
 cast Essays and Verse Transla- 
 tions. London, 1881, 8vo. 
 
 De Quincey as Political Econo- 
 mist, or De Quincey and Mill on 
 Supply and Demand, pp. 67-98. 
 
 Holyoake, George Jacob. — A new 
 Defence of the Ballot in con- 
 sequence of Mr. Mill's objections 
 to it. London, 1868, 8vo. 
 
 Index, pseud [i.e. George Vasey]. — 
 Individual Liberty, moral and 
 licentious ; in which the political 
 fallacies of J. S. Mill's Essay 
 ' ' On Liberty " are pointed out. 
 By Index. London, 1867, Svo. 
 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1877, 8vo. 
 
VI 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Inquirer. — The Battle of the two 
 Philosophers [Sir W. Hamil- 
 ton, Bart., and J. S. Mill]. By 
 an Inquirer. London, 1866, 
 12mo. 
 
 Kohn, Benno. — Untersuchungen 
 Uber das Causal Problem auf 
 dem Boden einer Kritik der 
 einschlagigen Lehren J. S. 
 Mills. Wien, 1881, 8vo. 
 
 Lange, Friedrich A. — J. S. Mill's 
 Ansichten iiber die sociale Frage 
 und die angebliche Umwalzung 
 der Social-wissenschaft durch 
 Carey. Dinsburg, 1866, 8vo. 
 
 Levin, Thomas W. — Notes on 
 Inductive Logic, Book I ; being 
 an introduction to Mill's System 
 of Logic. Cambridge, 1885, 
 16mo. 
 
 Liberal. — A Review of Mr. J. S. 
 Mill's Essay "On Liberty;" 
 and an investigation of his claim 
 to be considered the leading 
 Philosopher and Thinker of the 
 Age. Also a refutation of his 
 two statements : — I. That Chris- 
 tian Morality teaches us to be 
 selfish. II. That the working- 
 classes of this country are mostly 
 habitual liars. By a Liberal. 
 London, 1867, 8vo. 
 
 Littre, M. P. E. — Auguste Comte 
 et Stuart Mill. [An answer to 
 a work of the latter, entitled, 
 " Auguste Comte and Pos- 
 itivism."] Suivi de Stuart Mill 
 et la Philosophic Positive par G. 
 Wyrouboif [on the same sub- 
 ject]. London [1866], 8vo. 
 
 Lbchen, Arne. — Om J. Stuart 
 Mill's Logik. En kritisk 
 studie. Kristiania, 1885, 8vo. 
 
 Longe, Francis D. — A refutation 
 of the wage-fund theory of 
 modern Political Economy as 
 
 enunciated by Mr. Mill and Mr. 
 Fawcett. London, 1866, 8vo. 
 
 A Critical Examination of 
 
 Mr. George's " Progress and 
 Poverty," and Mr. Mill's 
 "Theory of Wages." London 
 [1883], 8vo. 
 
 Lyall, A. — Agonistes ; or Philoso- 
 phical Strictures, etc. London, 
 1856, 8vo. 
 
 Mill's " System of Logic," pp. 
 307-385. 
 
 MacCall, William.— The Newest 
 Materialism ; sundry papers on 
 the books of Mill, Comte, etc 
 London, 1873, 8vo. 
 
 MacCosh, James. — An Examina- 
 tion of J. S. Mill's Philosophy, 
 being a defence of fundamental 
 truth. London, 1866, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition, with ad- 
 ditions. London, 1877, 8vo. 
 
 Philosophical Papers. I. Ex- 
 amination of Sir W. Hamilton's 
 Logic. II. Reply to Mr. Mill's 
 third edition. III. Present 
 state of moral philosophy in 
 Britain. London, 1868, 8vo. 
 
 Manning, H.E., Cardinal. — Essays 
 on Religion and Literature by 
 various writers. Edited by 
 Henry Edward, Archbishop of 
 Westminster. London, 1874, 
 8vo. 
 
 Mr. Mill on Liberty of the Press, 
 by Edward Lucas. Third series, 
 pp. 142-173. 
 
 Mansel, Henry Longueville. — The 
 Philosophy of the Conditional ; 
 comprising some remarks on Sir 
 W. Hamilton's Philosophy, and 
 on Mr. J. S. Mill's Examination 
 of that Philosophy. (Reprinted, 
 with additions, from " The 
 Contemporary Review.") Lon- 
 don, 1866, 8vo. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 vii 
 
 Marston, Mansfield. — The Life of 
 J. S. Mill, etc. London [1873], 
 8vo. 
 
 Martineau, James. — Essays philo- 
 sophical and theological. New 
 York, 1879, 8vo. 
 John Stuart Mill, vol i., pp. 6-120. 
 
 Masson, David. — Recent British 
 Philosophy : a review, with 
 criticisms ; including some com- 
 ments on Mr. Mill's answer to 
 Sir W. Hamilton. London, 
 1865, 8vo. 
 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1867, 8vo. 
 
 Third edition, with an addi- 
 tional chapter. London, 1877, 
 8vo. 
 
 Mill, John Stuart. — Objections to 
 the Ballot, answered from the 
 writings and speeches of Mill, 
 Grote, etc. London, 1837, 
 8vo. 
 
 Who is the " Reformer," J. 
 
 S. Mill or John Bright ? Lon- 
 don, 1859, 8vo. 
 
 Utilitarianism explained and 
 
 exemplified in moral and 
 political government. [Being 
 a reply to J. S. Mill's work, 
 entitled " Utilitarianism."] 
 London, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Hamilton versus Mill. A 
 
 thorough discussion of each 
 chapter in Mr. John S. Mill's 
 Examination of Hamilton's 
 Logic and Philosophy, etc. 
 Edinburgh, 1866, 8vo. 
 
 Odd Bricks from a tumble- 
 down private building. [Being 
 remarks on J. S. Mill's work, 
 entitled "An Examination of 
 Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy," 
 etc.] By a retired Con- 
 structor. London, 1866, 12mo. 
 
 Mr. J. S. Mill and the 
 
 Ballot : a criticism of his 
 
 opinions as expressed in 
 " Thoughts on Parliamentary 
 Reform." By a Westminster 
 Elector. London, 1869, 8vo. 
 
 The Grosvenor Papers. An 
 
 Answer to Mr. J. Stuart Mill's 
 " Subjection of Women." Lon- 
 don, 1869, 8vo. 
 
 A Reply to John Stuart Mill 
 
 on the Subjection of Women. 
 Philadelphia, 1870, 8vo. 
 
 Leaving us an Example : is 
 
 it living — and why ? An 
 Enquiry suggested by certain 
 passages in J. S. Mill's 
 "Essays on Religion." Lon- 
 don [1876], 8vo. 
 
 Millet, J. — An Millius veram 
 Mathematicorum axiomatum 
 originem invenerit, etc. Parisiis, 
 1867, 8vo. 
 
 Minto, Professor. — John Stuart 
 Mill. (In the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica, vol. xvi.) Edin- 
 burgh, 1883, 4to. 
 
 Morley, John. — Critical Mis- 
 cellanies. Second series. Lon- 
 don, 1877, 8vo. 
 
 The death of Mr. Mill, Ser. ii., 
 pp. 239-250; Mr. Mill's Auto- 
 biography, pp. 253-284 ; Mr. Mill on 
 Religion, pp. 287-336. 
 
 K., N. — Thirteen pages on intel- 
 lectual property, written 
 with special reference to a 
 doubtful doctrine of J. S. Mill, 
 by one of his pupils (N. N. ). 
 Manchester [1876], 8vo. 
 
 Napier, Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph. — 
 The Miracles. Butler's Argu- 
 ment on Miracles, explained 
 and defended ; with observa- 
 tions on Hume, Baden Powell, 
 and J. S. Mill, etc. Dublin, 
 1863, 8vo. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Neaves, Lord. — Stuart Mill on 
 Mind and Matter. (In verse.) 
 Blackwood's Edinburgh Maga- 
 zine, vol. 99, 1866, pp. 257- 
 259, and vol. 100, pp. 245, 
 246. 
 
 Notes and Queries. — General Index 
 to Notes and Queries. Five 
 Series. London, 1856-1880, 4to. 
 Numerous references to Mill. 
 
 O'Hanlon, Hugh F.— A Criticism 
 on J. S. Mill's Pure Idealism ; 
 and an attempt to show that, if 
 logically carried out, it is pure 
 Nihilism. Oxford [printed], 
 London, 1866, 8vo. 
 
 Parker, Joseph. — J. S. Mill on 
 Liberty. A Critique. London, 
 1865, 8vo. 
 
 Purnell, Thomas. — Literature and 
 its Professors. London, 1867, 
 8vo. 
 John Stuart Mill, pp. 47-62. 
 
 Eeybaud, Louis. — Economistes 
 
 Modernes. Paris, 1862, 8vo. 
 
 John Stuart Mill, pp. 244-304. 
 
 Ribot, Th. — La Psyehologie 
 Anglaise Contemporaine. Paris, 
 1870, 8vo. 
 J. Stuart Mill, pp 87-144. 
 
 English Psychology. Trans- 
 lated from the French of Th. 
 Ribot. London, 1873, 8vo. 
 John Stuart Mill, pp. 78-123. 
 
 Sangar, James Mortimer. — Epis- 
 copal Vows. What do they 
 mean? A letter to the Lord 
 Bishop of St. David's on his 
 recent endorsements of the 
 alleged infidelity of J. S. Mill. 
 London (1866), 8vo. 
 
 Scherer, Edmond. — Etudes Criti- 
 ques sur la Literature Contem- 
 poraine. Paris, 1863, 8vo. 
 
 John Stuart Mill (Representative 
 Government), torn, i., pp. 299-320; 
 reprinted from the Temps. 
 
 Schiel, J. — Die Methode der in- 
 duction Forschung als die 
 Methode der Naturforschung in 
 gedrangter Darstellung haupt- 
 sachlich nach John Stuart Mill. 
 Braunschweig, 1865, 8vo. 
 
 Seccombe, John Thomas. — Science, 
 theism, and revelation, con- 
 sidered in relation to Mr. Mill's 
 essays on nature, religion, and 
 theism. London, King's Lynn 
 (printed), 1875, 8vo. 
 
 Taine, Hippolyte A.— Le Posi- 
 tivisme Anglais, etade sur 
 Stuart Mill. Paris, 1864, 12mo. 
 
 English Positivism. A study 
 
 on J. S. Mill. Translated by 
 T. D. Haye. London, 1870, 
 8vo. 
 
 Histoire de la Litterature 
 
 Anglaise. 4 torn. Paris, 1863-4, 
 8vo. 
 
 La Philosophic, Stuart Mill, torn, 
 iv., pp. 339-429. 
 
 History of English Literature. 
 
 4 vols. London, 1873-4, 8vo. 
 
 Philosophy, Stuart Mill, vol. iv., 
 pp. 357-426. 
 
 Taylor, Sir Henry. — Autobio- 
 graphy of Henry Taylor. 2 
 vols. London, 1885, 8vo. 
 References to J. S. Mill, 
 
 Thompson, Thomas Perronet. — 
 The true theory of rent in 
 opposition to Mr. Ricardo and 
 others. Being an exposition oi 
 fallacies on rent, tithes, etc., in 
 the form of a review of Mr. 
 Mill's Elements of Political 
 Economy. Ninth edition. Lon- 
 don, 1832, 8vo. 
 
 Torrens, Robert. — The principles 
 and practical operation of Sir 
 R. Peel's Act of 1844 explained 
 . . . and a critical examination 
 of the chapter " On the regula- 
 tion of a convertible Paper 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 IX 
 
 Currency" in J. S. Mill's 
 " Principles of Political Econ- 
 omy." London, 1857, 8vo. 
 
 Torens, Robert. — Another edition. 
 London, 1858, 8vo. 
 
 The Budget. . . . With an 
 
 introduction, in which the 
 Deduction Method, as presented 
 in Mr. Mill's "System of 
 Logic," is applied to the solu- 
 tion of some controverted ques- 
 tions in Political Economy. 
 London, 1844, 8vo. 
 
 Whewell.William. — Of Induction, 
 with especial reference to Mr. J. 
 Stuart Mill's "System of 
 Logic." London, Cambridge 
 [printed], 1849, 16mo. 
 
 White, Carlos. — Ecce Femina : 
 an attempt to solve the Woman 
 Question. Being an examina- 
 tion of arguments in favor of 
 female suffage by John Stuart 
 Mill and others, etc. Hanover, 
 N.H., 1870, 8vo. 
 
 Magazine Articles. 
 
 National Review, by J. Martineau, 
 vol. 9, 1859, pp. 474-508.— 
 Boston Review, by J. H. Ward, 
 vol. 6, 1866, pp. 104-120.— 
 Eclectic Magazine (with por- 
 trait), vol. 4 N.S., 1866, 
 pp. 120-122.— Galaxy, by J. 
 McCarthy, vol. 7, i869, pp. 
 373-382. — Appleton's Journal of 
 Literature (with portrait), vol. 
 3, 1870, pp! 126-129.— Quarterly 
 Review, vol. 135, 1873, pp. 
 178-201, — Eraser's Magazine, 
 vol. 8 N.S., 1873, pp. 663- 
 681. — Macmillan's Magazine 
 (Poem), by J. J. Murphy, vol. 
 28, 1873, pp. 348, 349.— 
 Nation, by E. L. Godkin and 
 
 Mill, John Stuart. 
 
 C. Wright, vol. 16, 1873, pp. 
 350, 351, 382, 383.— Popular 
 Science Monthly, by H. R. 
 Fox-Bourne, H. Spencer, and 
 others, vol. 3, 1873, pp. 367- 
 388.— Nature, vol. 8, 1873, p. 
 47.— Canadian Monthly, by N. 
 F. Davin, vol. 3, 1873, pp. 
 512-519. — La Renaissance, by 
 E. Blemont, vol. 2, 1873, pp. 
 121-122. — International Review, 
 by N. Porter, vol. 1, 1874, pp. 
 385-406.— Old and New, by 
 E. E. Hale, vol. 9, 1874, 
 pp. 128-135. — Contemporary 
 Review, by Lord Blachford, 
 vol. 28, 1876, pp. 508-536.— 
 New Englander, by L. Adams, 
 vol. 36, 1877, pp. 92-114, 425- 
 444, 740-784.— Western, by 
 Ellen M. Mitchell, vol. 3, 1877, 
 pp. 555-561.— Mind, by A. 
 Bain, vol. 4, 1879, pp. 211-229, 
 375-394, 520-541. — Popular 
 Science Review, by A. Bain, 
 vol. 14, 1879, pp. 697-714 ; vol. 
 
 15, pp. 327-345, 750-759 ; vol. 
 
 16, pp. 25-35, 501-507. 
 
 and Christianity. Baptist 
 
 Quarterly, by C. B. Crane, vol. 
 8, 1874, pp. 348-362. 
 
 and Fundamental Truth, 
 
 McCosh on. Princeton Review, 
 bv L. H. Atwater, vol. 38, 
 1866, pp. 416-424. 
 
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 minster Review, vol, 46 N.S., 
 1874, pp. 38-70. 
 
 and Inductive Origin of First 
 
 Principles. Journal of Sacred 
 Literature, vol. 9, 4th Series, 
 1S66, pp. 1-35. 
 
 Autobiography. St. Paul's, by 
 
 H. Holbeach, vol. 13, 1873, pp. 
 686-701.— Victoria Magazine, 
 vol. 22, 1873, pp. 181-189.— 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Hill, John Stuart. 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, by 
 Auguste Laugel, torn. 108, 
 
 1873, pp. 906-937.— Quarterly 
 Review, vol. 136, 1874, pp. 
 150-179 ; same article, Littell's 
 Living Age, vol. 120, pp. 771- 
 787. — Westminster Review, vol. 
 45N.S., 1874, pp. 122-159.— 
 Edinburgh Review, vol. 139, 
 
 1874, pp. 91-129.— Fortnightly 
 Review, by J. Morley, vol. 15 
 N.S., 1874, pp. 1-20— Contem- 
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 vol. 23, 1874, pp. 53-65.— 
 British Quarterly Review, vol. 
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 Monthly, vol. 7, 1874, pp. 600- 
 611. — New Englander, by A. L. 
 Chapin, vol. 33, 1871, pp. 605- 
 622.— Catholic World, by J. L. 
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 721-733. —Nation, by A. V. 
 Dicey, vol. 18, 1874, pp. 26-28, 
 43, 44.— Galaxy, by R. G. 
 White, vol. 17, 1874, pp. 332- 
 343.— Baptist Quarterly, by H. 
 Lincoln, vol. 8, 1874, pp. 233- 
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 and the Destruction of Theism. 
 
 Princeton Review, by D. S. 
 Gregory, Sept. 1878, pp. 409- 
 448. 
 
 Death of. Fortnightly Re- 
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 N.S., 1873, pp. 669-676; same 
 article, Eclectic Magazine, vol. 
 18 N.S., pp. 207-212, and 
 Littell's Living Age, vol. 118, 
 pp. 159-164. 
 
 Denial of Freewill. Dublin 
 
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 pp. 326-361. 
 
 Mill, John Stuart. 
 
 Denial of Necessary Truth. 
 
 Dublin Review, vol. 17 N.S., 
 1871, pp. 285-318. 
 
 Education and Science. — 
 
 Popular Science Monthly, vol. 
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 Essay on Nature. Month, by 
 
 J. Rickaby, vol. 23, 1875, pp. 
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 Review, by J. Morley, vol. 16 
 N.S., pp. 634-651, and vol. 17, 
 1875, pp. 103-131.— Theological 
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 Examination of Hamilton's 
 
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 1865, pp 301-327.— Dublin 
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 — — -for Westminster. Mac- 
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 Contemporary Review, by 
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 Bayioard on. Dublin Uni- 
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 Influence of Writings of. 
 
 Contemporary Review, by Edith 
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 317. 
 
 Loqic. British Critic, vol. 
 
 34,1843, pp. 349-427.— Demo- 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 » 
 
 Mill, John Stuart. 
 
 cratio Review, vol. 15 N.S., 
 1844, pp. 441-453.— Revue des 
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 Metaphysics of, Courtney on. 
 
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 vol. 27 N.S., 1876, pp. 57-82. 
 
 on the Foundation of Morality. 
 
 Dublin Review, vol. 18 N.S., 
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 on Socialism. To-Day, by 
 
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 on the Utility of Religion. 
 
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 vol. 5, pp. 169-180. 
 
 Philosophical Position of. 
 
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 Philosophy of Necessary Truth 
 
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 289. 
 
 Mill, John Stuart. 
 
 Political Writings of. Boston 
 
 Review, by J. H. Ward, vol. 6, 
 
 1866, pp. 567-590. 
 
 Portrait by Watts, etched 
 
 by Bajon. Portfolio, by P. G. 
 Hamerton, 1875, p. 11. 
 
 Relations with Mrs. Taylor. 
 
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 Religious Confessions of. 
 
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 pp. 508-512. 
 
 Religious Philosophy of. Inter- 
 national Review, by N. Porter, 
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 Reminiscence of. Victoria 
 
 Magazine, by C. L. Brace, vol. 
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 vol. 133, 1872, pp. 77-118. 
 
 Writings of. Christian Ex- 
 aminer, by C. A. Cummings, 
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 Quarterly Review, vol. 48, 1868, 
 pp. 1-58 ; same article, Eclectic 
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 pp. 580-591. 
 
IV. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF 'WORKS. 
 
 System of Logic 
 
 Essays on some unsettled 
 questions of Political 
 Economy 
 
 Principles ot Political 
 Economy 
 
 Memorandum of the Im- 
 provements in the Ad- 
 ministration of India 
 
 On Liberty 
 
 Thoughts on Parliamentary 
 Reform .... 
 
 Dissertations and Discus- 
 
 1843 
 
 Considerations on Repre- 
 
 
 
 sentative Government . 
 
 1861 
 
 
 Utilitarianism . 
 
 1863 
 
 1844 
 
 Examination of Sir William 
 
 
 
 Hamilton's Philosophy . 
 
 1865 
 
 1848 
 
 Auguste Comte and Pos- 
 
 
 
 itivism .... 
 
 1865 
 
 
 England and Ireland . 
 
 1868 
 
 1858 
 1859 
 
 Subjection of Women 
 
 1869 
 
 1859 
 
 Autobiography . 
 
 Nature, the Utility of 
 
 1873 
 
 59-75 
 
 Religion, and Theism 
 
 1874 
 
 Printed by Walter Scott, Felling, Xewmstle-on-Tym. 
 
VOL. 1 READY OCTOBER 25th. 
 Crown 8vo, about 350 pp. each, Cloth Cover, 2s. 6d. per Vol. 
 
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 COUNT TOLSTOI'S WORKS. 
 
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