Born, in London, 20 May 1806. Educated by his father. In France, May 1820 to July 1821. On return studied for Bar for short time, till appointment as Junior Clerk in Examiner’s Office, India House, May 1823; Assistant Examiner, 1828; First Assistant, 1836; Head of Office, 1856. Founded Utilitarian Soc., winter of 1822. Contrib. to “Traveller,” 1822; to “Morning Chronicle,” 1823; to “Westminster Rev.,” 1824–28, 1835–38, 1864; to “Parliamentary Hist. and Rev.,” 1826–28. Founded Speculative Soc., 1825. In Paris, 1830. Contrib. to “Examiner” and “Monthly Rev.,” 1831–34; to “Tait’s Mag.,” 1832; to “Monthly Repository,” 1834; and to “Jurist.” Editor “London Rev.,” afterwards “Westminster Rev.,” 1834–40. Friendship with Mrs. Taylor begun, 1831; married her, April 1851. Proprietor of “Westminster Rev.,” 1837–40. Severe illness, 1839. Correspondence with Comte, 1841–46. Contrib. to “Edinburgh Rev.,” 1845–46, 1863. Severe illness, 1854. Retired from India House, 1858. In south of France, winter of 1858–59; wife died, at Avignon. For remainder of life spent half the year at Blackheath, half at Avignon. Contrib. articles on “Utilitarianism” to “Fraser’s Mag.,” 1861. M.P. for Westminster, 1865–68. Lord Rector of St. Andrews Univ., 1866. Died, at Avignon, 8 May 1873; buried there. Works: “A System of Logic” (2 vols.), 1843; “Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy,” 1844; “Principles of Political Economy” (2 vols.), 1848; “Memorandum on the Improvements in the Administration of India during the last Thirty Years” (anon.), 1858; “On Liberty,” 1859; “Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform,” 1859 (2nd edn. same year); “Dissertations and Discussions” (4 vols.), 1859–75; “Considerations on Representative Government,” 1861 (2nd edn. same year); “Utilitarianism” (from “Fraser’s Mag.”), 1863; “Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,” 1865 (2nd edn. same year); “Auguste Comte and Positivism” (from “Westminster Rev.,”), 1865; “Inaugural Address” at Univ. of St. Andrews, 1867; “Speech on the Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise,” 1867; “England and Ireland,” 1868; “The Subjection of Women,” 1869 (2nd edn. same year); “Chapters and Speeches on the Irish Land Question,” 1870; “Speech in favour of Woman’s Suffrage,” 1871. Posthumous: “Autobiography,” ed. by Miss Taylor, 1873–74; “Nature; the Utility of Religion; and Theism,” ed. by Miss Taylor, 1874 (2nd edn. same year); “Views … on England’s Danger through the Suppression of her Maritime Power,” 1874; “Early Essays,” ed. by J. W. M. Gibbs, 1897. He edited: Bentham’s “Rationale of Judicial Evidence,” 1827; and the 1869 edn. of James Mill’s “Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind.” Life: “Autobiography,” 1873; “Criticism, with Personal Recollections,” by Prof. Bain, 1882; “Life,” by W. L. Courtney, 1889.

Personal

  This young Mill, I fancy and hope, is “a baying you can love.” A slender, rather tall and elegant youth, with small clear Roman-nosed face, two small earnestly-smiling eyes; modest, remarkably gifted with precision of utterance, enthusiastic, yet lucid, calm; not a great, yet distinctly a gifted and amiable youth.

  John Mill is summoned to town, and goes to-night; the rest leave to-morrow. They feel leaving Falmouth deeply, and say that no place out of London will be so dear to them. Now for some glimpses at Truth through those wonderfully keen, quiet eyes…. His father made him study ecclesiastical history before he was ten. This method of early intense application he would not recommend to others; in most cases it would not answer, and where it does, the buoyancy of youth is entirely superseded by the maturity of manhood, and 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.” In his essays on French affairs he has infused more of himself than into any of his other writings, the whole subject of that country so deeply interests him.

  His physical organization is of that fine and delicate sort which, with reference to the indwelling spirit, may be said to be almost transparent; and on this his first appearance his bearing was so diffident yet so sincere, so tremulous yet so intensely earnest, with so much of the reality of a great intellectual authority, yet so free from the slightest assumption of it, that the genuine English courtesy of the House was conciliated into a deferential and really applausive silence…. His voice, though tremulous and by no means loud, was perfectly distinct, and every syllable from his lips was audible in every part of the House. His manner was the perfection of dignified, scholarly, and sincere speaking; almost pathetic in its earnest tones; not facile with the glibness of practised oratory, yet fluent with the deliberation of one who is master alike of deep thought and of fitting words. It is strange, the magic there is in the slightest touch of genius upon an assemblage, however weary, however dull. The first real statesmanly thought born to us during all the long hours of that night seemed to open the heavens above our heads, and to let in light and the atmosphere of life. All felt the witchery of the spell; and the climax of admiration and of excitement was reached when, at the close of his compact and unanswerable demonstration, he uttered that exquisite peroration which one old member of Parliament told me was the most poetical and eloquent passage heard there for many years.

  Mr. Mill is of a light complexion—is long and thin; his clear blue eye is deep sunk, as if its gaze had been rather internal than external. He has a brisk, genial appearance, and is always neatly and scrupulously dressed in black. His appearance is different from that of any other member. His is not the horsey look of some, nor has he the business air of others, still less does he affect the style of a man of fashion. Altogether, he seems out of his element on his seat on the third row below the gangway on the Opposition side. The men around seem of a coarser and less refined nature. There is a genus loci connected with the House, of hard drinkers, mighty sportsmen, big blusterers, eager partisans. You would never expect to find a philosopher there, yet there is Mr. Mill; and there is not a more constant attendant, or one more able or willing to take his part in the debates when the opportunity occurs.

  A gentleman, in manner like an old French count, full of courtesy, kindness, and small attentions, graceful and almost affectionate in his ways, his face beaming with sentiment, and his eyes lighting up when any heroic or chivalric feeling was called forth. From conversing with him, one would say his prominent characteristic was feeling and sympathy with all the nobler side of human nature.

  It might, indeed, have been supposed that even those who never enjoyed the pleasure of personal acquaintance with Mr. Mill, would have been impressed with the nobility of his nature as indicated in his opinions and deeds. How entirely his public career has been determined by a pure and strong sympathy for his fellow-men—how entirely this sympathy has subordinated all desires for personal advantage—how little even the fear of being injured in reputation or position has deterred him from taking the course which he thought equitable or generous—ought to be manifest to every antagonist, however bitter. A generosity that might almost be called romantic was obviously the feeling prompting sundry of those courses of action which have been commented upon as errors. And nothing like a true conception of him can be formed unless, along with dissent from them, there goes recognition of the fact that they resulted from the eagerness of a noble nature, impatient to rectify injustice, and to further human welfare.

  His nature was, indeed, emotional, and even passionate. Considering what he wrote about his wife it is strange anybody should ever have doubted it. The conception of him which a political opponent vulgarly summed up in calling him a “book in breeches,” was absurd. You could not hear him talk without seeing that he felt strongly, that he loved deeply, that the capacity of hating also was not wanting to him. It was, I suppose, his moderation in controversy as well as his addiction to philosophical pursuits which gave him with the general public the repute of coldness—especially with the public that had not read enough of him to discover the numerous passages that glow with enthusiasm or with indignation. As a talker he had a manner of his own. Talker in the common dinner-table sense he was not. He seldom told a story for the sake of telling it, nor kept a store of anecdotes to be produced for the mere amusement of listeners. Nor would he talk to everybody. On subjects that interested him and to people whom he thought interested, he would pour out in easy profusion his stores of information. Among the men whom I have known in England I remember but two who were comparable to him in the variety and fluent accuracy of his knowledge. These two were extremely unlike him and unlike each other, Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Gladstone.

  He does not need our faint praise, and the perfect harmony of his intellect and character makes an interpreter unnecessary even could a fitting one be found. He laboured to promote the happiness of his fellow-men, and he has added to the number of their purest pleasures the spectacle of a blameless life. He wrote wisely of human liberty and necessary law, and silenced idle fears about a “blind fate,” by living as the very clear-sighted agent of the noblest necessity which has ever been recognized in human kind, the necessity of living well.

  It is impossible to believe that Mrs. Mill was the woman her husband thought her to be; she was not such a woman to any one but him. At the same time she was the most powerful force that acted upon his later life. But how came he to form such an exaggerated opinion of her ability and character? How came the great dialectician to be so mistaken? She was, no doubt, an able and an accomplished woman; she opened up the long-pent emotional fountains of his soul; and his own thoughts and voice, which she echoed back to him, seemed to the devotee, as in many a similar case, a wisdom and a music that he had never heard. True to his training, Mill never calls this relation love; it is “the most valuable friendship of his life.” But it was love,—rather, on his part, it was idolatry in what is perhaps its noblest form. It is strange that he was not led by the strength and fervor of his own devotion to see that religion is a genuine manifestation of the soul; strange that the grave at Avignon, covered by trees, the home of the nightingale, never taught him to see by faith, if not by analysis, an immortal life beyond.

  He was not apparently an amiable youth, but his history shows him capable of passionate personal attachment, and a nature capable of strong affections will always seek an object for them. He was also an egotist. He could hardly have been otherwise. An object of his father’s unremitting attention, and debarred from the penetrating discipline of a boyish companionship, what could he think of but himself and his performances?… But egotist as he thus became, he was susceptible—highly susceptible—to the idea of disinterested devotion to an object. At the bottom of his nature the yearnings of affection and the sense of duty lay hidden in unsuspected strength.

  I found that Mill, although possessed of much learning, and thoroughly acquainted with the state of the political world, was, as might have been expected, the mere exponent of other men’s ideas, those men being his father and Bentham; and that he was utterly ignorant of what is called society; that of the world, as it worked around him, he knew nothing; and, above all, of woman, he was as a child. He had never played with boys; in his life he had never known any, and we, in fact, who were now his associates, were the first companions he had ever mixed with. His father took occasion to remark to myself especially, that he had no great liking for his son’s new friends. I, on the other hand, let him know that I had no fear of him who was looked upon as a sort of Jupiter Tonans. James Mill looked down upon us because we were poor, and not greatly allied, for while in words he was a severe democrat, in fact and in conduct he bowed down to wealth and position. To the young men of wealth and position who came to see him, he was gracious and instructive, while to us he was rude and curt, gave us no advice, but seemed pleased to hurt and offend us. This led to remonstrance and complaint on the part of John Mill, but the result was that we soon ceased to see John Mill at his home.

  As he mentioned his name to me, I recalled at once his portrait. It gave, however, as little idea of the expression of his countenance and the hue of his skin, as of the way in which he walked and stood. Although sixty-four years of age, his complexion was as pure and fresh as that of a child. He had the smooth, childlike skin and the rosy cheeks that are scarcely ever seen in elderly men of the continent, but that not seldom may be observed in the white-haired gentlemen who take their noonday horseback rides in Hyde Park. His eyes were bright, and of a deep, dark blue, his nose slender and curved, his brow high and arched, with a strongly marked protuberance over the left eye; he looked as though the labor of thought might have forced its organs to extend in order to make more room. The face, with its large and marked features, was full of simplicity, but was not calm; it was, indeed, continually distorted by a nervous twitching, which seemed to betray the restless, tremulous life of the soul. In conversation, he had difficulty in finding words, and sometimes stammered at the beginning of a sentence. Seated comfortably in my room, with his fresh, superb physiognomy, and his powerful brow, he looked like a younger and more vigorous man than he really was. When I accompanied him on the street later, however, I observed that his walk, in spite of its rapidity, was rather halting, and that, notwithstanding his slender form, age had left its impress on his bearing. His dress made him seem older than he was. The old-fashioned coat he wore proved how indifferent he was to his external appearance. He was clad in black, and a crape band was wound in many irregular folds about his hat. Although she had been long dead, he still wore mourning for his wife. No further signs of negligence were visible; a quiet nobility and a perfect self-control pervaded his presence. Even to one who had not read his works it would have been very evident that it was one of the kings of thought that had taken his seat in the red velvet armchair near the fireplace, whose mantel clock my unfounded suspicion led me to suppose he had come to wind up.

  In the year 1851 occurred Mill’s marriage to Mrs. Taylor, the “almost infallible counsellor,” whose friendship and assistance he had previously enjoyed for many years, and whose memory, after their brief married life of seven and a half years, had been terminated by her death, remained to him a “religion.” More remarkable and touching devotion to the memory of a woman has rarely been shown than that paid by Mill to the memory of his wife, in his Autobiography, and in the introductory page of his (or, as he says, their joint) work, “On Liberty.” It is not only in most marked contrast with his father’s unchivalrous, not to say brutally unkind, treatment of his own wife (J. S. Mill, too, has nothing to say, in his Autobiography, of his mother), but is also another passionate manifestation of that potentiality of essential human life which was wholly ignored in his training.

  John Stuart Mill always seemed to me to grow suddenly aged when Carlyle was spoken of. The nearest to painful emotion in him which I ever saw was when he made that remark, “Carlyle turned against all his friends.” I did not and do not think the remark correct. When Carlyle came out with his reactionary opinions, as they were deemed, his friends became afraid of him, and nearly all stopped going to see him at the very time when they should have insisted on coming to a right understanding.

  With the same indomitable perseverance and patience which were necessary to enable him [James Mill] in ten years’ time, besides the constant necessities of pot-boiling for a large family, to write the “History of India,” this extraordinary Scotsman set himself to re-create a human soul, and did it triumphantly, making of a susceptible and sensitive nature, full of attractive weakness, credulity, and sentiment, an infant freethinker, a baby philosopher, a scholar in petticoats—a man, when he grew up, who knew almost everything except himself, and whose rigidity of second nature, the art and influence of his father, never ceased to jar against, yet never overcame, the docility and softness of the first. In the strange household thus revealed to us, there is no shadow of any woman, no sound of domestic chat, no genial companionship of brothers and sisters, but only a prolonged encounter of two wits, the one teaching, the other listening and obeying; the man without ruth or thought for the flesh and blood he is straining, the other with innocent child’s eyes fixed upon that prominent figure, ready to follow till he dies. The only thing it reminds us of is the painful training of a young acrobat, where the child obeying a lifted figure goes sheer on to risk any fall or mutilation, or death itself, nothing being worse to its scared faculties than the beating or vituperation which a mistake would occasion. Mill did not either whip or vituperate so far as appears, but his son, we can see even in the record, has his eye nervously, constantly, upon him from beginning to end: and a more extraordinary exhibition of the mental force which one nature can exercise upon another never was.

  Mill’s voice was agreeable, although not specially melodious; it was thin and weak. His articulation was not very clear. His elocution was good, without being particularly showy or impressive; he had a mastery of emphasis; his modulation was sufficiently removed from monotone, so that there was nothing wearying in his manner. He had not much gesture, but it was all in keeping; his features were expressive without his aiming at strong effects. Everything about him had the cast of sobriety and reserve; he did no more than the end required. There was so little of marked peculiarity in his speaking, that I never knew anyone that could mimic him successfully in the enunciation of a sentence. Very few people could assume his voice, to begin with; and his modulation was simply correct colourless elocution. I can account for his seeming hesitation of manner. Although he did not study grand and imposing talk, he always aimed at saying the right things clearly and shortly. He was perfectly fluent, but yet would pause for an instant to get the best word, or the neatest collocation: and he also liked to finish with an epigrammatic turn.

  John Mill was the most severely single-minded of the set. He was of an impassioned nature, but I should conjecture, though I do not know, that in his earliest youth the passion of his nature had not found a free and unobstructed course through the affections and had got a good deal pent up in his intellect; in which, however large (and among the scientific intellects of his time I hardly know where to look for a larger), it was but as an eagle in an aviary. The result was that his political philosophy, cold as was the creed and hard the forms and discipline, caught fire; and while working, as in duty bound, through dry and rigorous processes of induction, was at heart something in the nature of political fanaticism. He was pure-hearted—I was going to say conscientious—but at that time he seemed so naturally and necessarily good, and so inflexible, that one hardly thought of him as having occasion for a conscience, or as a man with whom any question could arise for reference to that tribunal. But his absorption in abstract operations of the intellect, his latent ardors, and his absolute simplicity of heart were hardly, perhaps, compatible with knowledge of men and women, and with wisdom in living his life. His manners were plain, neither graceful nor awkward; his features refined and regular; the eyes small, relatively to the scale of the face, the jaw large, the nose straight and finely shaped, the lips thin and compressed, the forehead and head capacious; and both face and body seemed to represent outwardly the inflexibility of the inner man. He shook hands with you from the shoulder.

  We well knew 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, 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, 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.

  He was the natural leader of Liberal thought; not in the House, but out of it. “Saint of Rationalism,” however, in Mr. Gladstone’s 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 Rationalistic thinker, tempered by the emotional warmth of high moral ideas.

  On the publication of John Stuart Mill’s “Elements of Political Economy,” he sent a presentation-copy of it to Carlyle, his intimacy with whom, though there was no actual breach between them, had ceased for some years. Contemptuous though he was of the “dismal science,” Carlyle called Mill’s a “very clever book,” while comparing its complex treatment of his subject to the operation of “extracting the cube root in Roman numerals.” “It could be done, but was not worth doing,” a rather striking Carlylian comment; whether it was a just one is another matter. Carlyle, in those days at least, always spoke of Mill with a certain regard, his expression of which seemed to indicate a regret that their active friendship had come to an end. His chief criticism on Mill as a companion was that he insisted on “having everything demonstrated.” Mill might have replied that demonstration was sometimes more trustworthy and practically useful than Carlyle’s favourite intuition, which experience proved to be by no means an infallible guide either to himself or to others. Mill, he said, used at one time to come to him every Sunday for a walk. On one point, he added, they were agreed. It was that if the Bible could be buried for a generation and then dug up again, it would in that case be rightly enjoyed.

  Poles asunder in premiss and conclusion, Ward and Mill, in their purely intellectual intercourse, as completely understood each other as two mathematicians who are engaged in proving a proposition in geometry. Given the relevant hypotheses, there can be no dispute as to the proof. They may differ as to facts, if they apply their geometry or trigonometry to practical measurements. The initial understanding as to distances, which may determine whether an angle be of 90° or of 60°, or whether a triangle be equilateral or scalene, may involve points of dispute. Such things may have been ascertained by authorities which seem to one trustworthy, to another not so; but once the facts are agreed upon, the reasoning is clear to both alike. So, too, Ward and Mill,—utterly as they differed on the primary truths which were the data from which to reason,—in their method, and in the conclusions resting on a given hypothesis, reached an agreement which was very remarkable.

  When Mill made her [Mrs. Taylor] acquaintance, his father remonstrated, but he replied that he had no other feeling towards her than he would have towards an equally able man. The equivocal friendship, which was the talk of all Mill’s circle of acquaintances, lasted for twenty years, when Mr. Taylor died, and Mill married his widow. It is impossible to regard the enthusiasm of Mill for this lady without feeling how much there was in it of the humorous, how much also of the pathetic. That Mill had a most exaggerated opinion of her intellectual attainments there can be no doubt…. His language with regard to her was always extravagant, and Grote said that “only John Mill’s reputation could survive such displays.” Mill’s brother George declared that she was “nothing like what John thought her,” and there is much evidence to show that she was but a weak reflection of her husband. Still, it is impossible not to sympathize with such an illusion…. It was at Avignon that the Crown Princess of Prussia and the Princess Alice of Hesse proposed to visit him, when he, with due courtesy, declined to see them.

  His countenance, in its final conviction of a thinker whose mind upon weighty subjects was irrevocably made up, from whose ethic verdicts there was no appeal, had something awful, even sublime, in its rigidity and marble-like implacableness. You felt … that here were the immovable purpose, iron will, and unflinching self-oblivion of which, for good or for evil, the world’s umpires and leaders are made.

  To a generation who know him only by his work there is a danger of losing sight of Mill’s humanity. The student of the “Logic” finds himself, in spite of his pride—his proper pride as a reasoning animal—in the presence of the infallible. It is a feeling he cannot get rid of; the “Autobiography” and Bain’s gossip have no connection with this godlike majesty delivering divine truths. Has the master who was but half-an-hour ago in cricketing flannels, a comrade, anything in common with the being, gowned and awful, in the schoolroom?

  My friend Mr. John Morley, in a speech which he made not very long after Mill’s death, paid a noble tribute to the memory of his lost teacher and friend. “A wiser and more virtuous man,” he said, “I have never known and never hope to know.” I venture to adopt Mr. Morley’s words as the best representation I could possibly find of my own judgment and my own feelings with regard to John Stuart Mill—a wiser and more virtuous man I have never known and do not expect to know; and yet I have had the good fortune to know many wise and virtuous men. I never knew any man of really great intellect who carried less of the ordinary ways of greatness about him. There was an added charm in the very shyness of his manner when one remembered how strong he could be and how fearless he could be, if the occasion called for a display of fortitude and courage.

  No more just, patient, and generous soul ever adorned our public life. One had to be admitted to his intimacy and to association with him in the public movements, to which the whole of his later life was devoted, to know how warm a heart, what fire of enthusiasm lay covered up, like a volcano under snow, beneath the dry, formal, antiquated official which the world saw as Stuart Mill. I spent with him the last night I think he passed in England, but a week or two before his sudden death at Avignon. I have visited his grave in the most romantic of cemeteries beside the rushing Rhone and in sight of the huge palace of the mediæval Popes. And as I meditated on the strange vicissitudes of his career and the historic associations of his last resting-place, I was filled with regret that I could not have worked with him and under him in the new organ of Reform which in leaving England he had contemplated to found.

A System of Logic, 1843

  The effect of the “Logic” has been enormous,—half the minds of the younger generation of Englishmen have been greatly colored by it, and would have been sensibly different if they had not been influenced by it; and there is no other book of English philosophy of which the same can be said, even with a pretext of truth.

  When his “System of Logic” was published, he stood almost alone in his opinions. The work was not written in exposition or defence of this philosophy, but in accordance with its tenets, which were thus reduced to a proximate application, or to a more determinate or concrete form. A qualified nominalism, thoroughly English, and descended from the English schoolman William of Ockham, was its philosophical basis. He welcomed and introduced to English readers the revival of this philosophy in France, by Auguste Comte, with whom he agreed in many positions,—more especially in those which were not original with Comte. His accordance with Comte can hardly be regarded as one of discipleship, since in most important practical matters Mill dissented from the views of the French philosopher. His real allegiance was to the once prevalent teachings of Locke, and to those of Berkeley, Hume, Brown, Hartley, and his father James Mill. No modern thinker has striven more faithfully to restore and build upon those speculations of the past, which appeared to him just and true, or more modestly to exhibit and acknowledge his indebtedness to previous thinkers; yet, by the excellence of his works, this past has fallen to the inheritance of his name and fame. To give scientific form or systematic coherency to views put forth unsystematically by others, was to give soul and life to doctrines which were thus made especially his own.

  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…. If we regard the work as a whole, we are forced to distinguish its scientific character from its metaphysical 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.

  Has in all countries a high reputation, and must take its rank among the great treatises on logic of all times. He is frequently called the founder of the inductive logic, so great was the contribution which he made in his treatment of induction.

Principles of Political Economy, 1848

  Five years after his “Logic,” Mr. Mill published a not less monumental work on Political Economy, in which he attacked every question, and showed on all points at once a profound knowledge of all theories, and that independence of mind which enslaves itself to none. Yet this work, which in England has ranked the author by the side of Adam Smith and of Ricardo, had less originality than thoroughness. The author showed more sense and information than freshness: and gave us an encyclopædia of the science rather than a system of his own.

  Through his “Principles of Political Economy” he has exercised a remarkable influence upon men in all lands; not so much because of great originality, since, in truth, he only put Ricardo’s principles in better and more attractive form, but chiefly by a method of systematic treatment more lucid and practical than had been hitherto reached, by improving vastly beyond the dry treatises of his predecessors (including Ricardo, who was concise and dull), by infusing a human element into his aims, and by illustrations and practical applications. Even yet, however, some parts of his book show the tendency to too great a fondness for abstract statement, induced probably by a dislike to slighting reasons (due to his early training), and by the limits of his book, which obliged him to omit many possible illustrations. With deep sympathy for the laboring-classes, he was tempted into the field of sociology in this book, although he saw distinctly that political economy was but one of the sciences, a knowledge of which was necessary to a legislator in reaching a decision upon social questions. Mill shows an advance beyond Ricardo in this treatise, by giving the study a more practical direction.

  Before saying a few words on what is called the “vulgar” economy, we must not forget to mention John Stuart Mill, who, although in no sense an original thinker, is one of the most popular writers on political economy. His “Principles of Political Economy,” published in 1848, though in substance little more than a manual of the classical system, is distinguished by breadth of sympathy, and by the consciousness that the so-called economic laws, that is the deductions of political economy based on the present conditions of society, have not the absolute character other exponents of the science were apt to assign to them. At the same time it must be remembered that J. S. Mill was totally deficient in what has been sometimes called the “historical sense,” and had little conception of the historical method. His heart rebelled against the hard and fast conclusions and pretended laws of the orthodox economy, but his intellect saw no effectual means of escaping them. In consequence, his book is an alteration of clear statements of the current views and confused attempts to evade their consequences.

  Mill was not the founder of a school in Political Economy; scarcely the originator of a single new economic conception. His economics are those of Ricardo, plus Malthusianism, and several new practical measures proposed by various thinkers between Ricardo and himself. The main significance and the main value of Mill’s work is that, in fluent style and in popular method, he has with scientific reasoning discussed the principles of Political Economy in constant reference to their practical application. This, Mill says in his introduction to his “Political Economy,” was his aim, and in this he, to a large extent, succeeded. Hence his hold and his influence upon the economic and practical thinking of his day, and of succeeding days down to the very present.

  Mill mastered and expressed with great lucidity and force of style all that he considered best in his predecessors, and if he was not very original himself, he has been the cause or occasion of originality in others. In England at any rate many of the recent changes in economic theory may be traced to the criticism or development of Mill’s teaching. At the same time the abundance of these commentaries—to say nothing of the work of both foreign and English writers on independent lines—has rendered Mill’s treatment year by year less satisfactory as a survey of the whole subject, though it is still excellent for students who have time to trace the growth of economic thought.

  Mill’s “Political Economy” is, like his general philosophy, lucid, full and thorough. Though cautious here, as always, in the admission of new principles, Mill made considerable contributions to economics. The theory of international exchanges is almost wholly his, and many particular turns and details of economic doctrine are due to him. In a still greater number of cases he has been, not the originator, but the best exponent of economic theory. The caution and judiciousness of his reasoning were qualities peculiarly valuable in this sphere; and where the views of “orthodox” political economy are accepted at all, Mill’s opinions are treated with respect.

  Mill’s “Political Economy” is a transitional work; and indeed, it may not be too much to say of all his work that it was transitional. He brought to a close a line of development in economics proceeding from Adam Smith through Ricardo, Malthus, and James Mill, and opened a new era. He added on to the superstructure large humanitarian and social considerations which were hardly consistent with the foundations upon which he built; and this he himself recognized late in life. Yet the very imperfections of his book on political economy render it interesting and also instructive. It must be read carefully and in connection with his other writings to be fully understood; but its mastery has been called in itself a liberal education.

  Mill’s contributions to political economy are not mere reasoned products, but are the creation of certain social ideals so blended with the older economic reasoning as to become indistinguishable. Political economy, thus raised above the level of a mere study of environmental facts, has become a concrete form of idealism. The forcible books since Mill’s time have followed his example, and strengthened the idealistic tendencies he stimulated. Such books unite reasoning and ideals as he did. Their initial chapters are drills in close reasoning, followed by a clear presentation of the ideals the writer wishes to attain. Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty,” and Karl Marx’s “Capital,” use Mill’s plan, and a host of other books are written in the same fashion. The reasoning is not always of the same character, but it serves the same purpose by creating a state of mind in which ideals can be appreciated.

On Liberty, 1859

  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 interpreting 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.

  I am reading 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.

  Nowhere is there to be read a more eloquent defence of the rights of individualism, a more generous protest against the tyranny of governments, and still more against that of custom and opinion. It is still in this religious respect for the liberty of all, this tolerance for every idea, this confidence in the final results of the struggle, that we recognize true Liberalism. The author’s notions have not always equal solidity, but his instincts are always lofty. We see on every page the man whose own independence has set him at odds with prejudice.

  “On Liberty” was probably the most popular of all his books, as it is the most charming to read. There are few minds of a liberal turn who can have perused it for the first time without a thrill of delight, even if the continued advance of liberal thought has now made some of its eloquence comparatively commonplace.

  So far as it confuses character with eccentricity, 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 organism 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.

  Mill’s contribution to the movement which he represented seems to have been twofold, lying partly in the moral force and concentration of the man himself, partly in his protest against existing authority in those cases in which it appeared to him to embody injustice. His “Essay on Liberty,” published in 1859, is a masterly exposition of his principles. It is a noble protest against the tyranny of society and legislation, but, as it stands, will seem incomplete to minds which require the statement of some positive principle which, whatever its embodiment, is to take the place of society and legislation.

  The book on “Liberty,” from beginning to end, is an invaluable text-book for the legislator, for the politician, for the social reformer; and its powerful protest against all forms of over-legislation, intolerance, and the tyranny of majorities, is rich with perennial wisdom and noble manliness. But as a piece of social philosophy it is based upon a sophism as radical as that of Rousseau himself, with his assumption of a primordial Contract. And, if these absolute dogmas as to “the sovereignity of the individual” against even the moral coercion of his fellow-citizens were literally enforced, there would be a bar put to the moral and religious development of civilised communities.

The Subjection of Women, 1869

  The highest encomium which John Stuart Mill now receives—that which he would most value—is that every noble woman’s heart in Europe is this day comfortless beside his grave. I remember to have been present once in a company composed chiefly of ladies of the higher class in Moscow, when a friend, introducing me, said, “He is a friend of John Stuart Mill,” when instantly I was surrounded by all of that sex in the room, begging to be told of his look, his manner, and every word I had ever heard him speak. Each declared that she kept his work on “The Subjection of Woman” by her side, and read it as her gospel. Throughout Russia I found it the same, and heard the sentiments of that work quoted on the stage amidst applause in which every woman made her hands attest the homage of her heart. In France the best women proudly claimed him as their adopted fellow-citizen, and the tribute he had written on his wife’s grave made them forget the romances of Hugo and About.

  He did not hesitate, either in his written or in his spoken words, to use the strongest expression in order to place in the right light his conception of the unnaturalness of women’s state of dependence. Indeed, he had not been afraid to challenge universal laughter through his vehement assertion, that, as we had never seen woman in freedom, we did know nothing whatever until now of her nature; as though Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Shakespeare’s young maidens, all the literature about women, in fact, had taught us nothing of the feminine character. On this point he was almost fanatical. He, who in all the relations between man and woman was refinement and delicacy itself, allowed himself to be positively insulting in his expressions when an opinion differing from his own on his favorite topic was uttered in his presence. One day I chanced to be visiting a celebrated French savant when the mail brought him a letter from Stuart Mill. It was an answer to a communication in which the Frenchman had expressed the opinion that the change in the social status of women, demanded in Mill’s essay on “The Subjection of Women,” might turn out well in England, where it would harmonize with the character of the race, but that in France, where the talents and tastes of the women were so contrary to it, there could be no possibility of success. Mill’s pithy reply, which was handed to me with a smile, read as follows: “I see in your remarks that contempt for women which is so prevalent in France. All that I can say on the subject is, that the French women pay this contempt back with interest to the men of France.”

  In many ways the most eloquent of his works, the most characteristic, and perhaps that which has had the most direct and immediate effect. Like the “Liberty,” it was written many years before it was published, and was to a great degree a joint production. His biographer, Professor Bain, very justly calls it “the most sustained exposition of Mill’s life-long theme—the abuses of power.” And Mr. John Morley calls it “the best illustration of all the best and richest qualities of its author’s mind.” “It is fortunate,” he adds, “that a subject of such incomparable importance should have been first effectively presented for discussion in so worthy and pregnant a form.”

  None of his writings is more emphatically marked by generosity and love of justice. A certain shrillness of tone marks the recluse too little able to appreciate the animal nature of mankind. Yet in any case, he made a most effective protest against the prejudices which stunted the development and limited the careers of women.

Autobiography, 1873–74

  You have lost nothing by missing the autobiography of Mill. I have never read a more uninteresting book, nor should I say a sillier, by a man of sense, integrity, and seriousness of mind. The penny-a-liners were very busy with it, I believe, for a week or two, but were evidently pausing in doubt and difficulty by the time the second edition came out. It is wholly the life of a logic-chopping engine, little more of human in it than if it had been done by a thing of mechanized iron. Autobiography of a steam-engine, perhaps, you may sometimes read it. As a mournful psychical curiosity, but in no other point of view, can it interest anybody. I suppose it will deliver us henceforth from the cock-a-leerie crow about “the Great Thinker of his Age.” Welcome, though inconsiderable! The thought of poor Mill altogether, and of his life and history in this poor muddy world, gives me real pain and sorrow.

  I have read Mill’s “Autobiography,” and was much surprised when I came to the passage concerning myself. I do not think it biasses my judgment of the work, though I find that I think better of it than most of his critics. But I had always considered him as a noble spirit, who had the misfortune of being educated by a narrow-minded pedant, who cultivated his intellectual faculties at the expense of all the rest, yet did not succeed in stifling them.

  As an autobiography, the book has but little merit; though this should not be insisted on, since success in writing of this kind is extremely rare…. Mill seems to have been incapable of a healthful sentiment of any kind. The same quality in his stunted and warped moral nature which caused him to have a false and exaggerated sense of the evil that is in the world, leading him to atheism, made him a blind and superstitious worshipper of the imaginary endowments of his wife…. We have never read a sadder book, nor one which to our mind contains stronger proof that the soul longs with an infinite craving for God, and, not finding him, will worship anything—a woman, a stone, a memory.

  Mill’s life is an autobiography with a vengeance! It is his life of himself, and of nobody else! Account for this as you please. He seems to have regarded his father’s life and his own as one; that it was his duty and work to continue his father’s work and duty with such added light as time gave. His wife’s life and his own he seems to consider as one life. There are no more profound and interesting passages in the book than those which describe their perfect communion. These two lives, therefore, are alluded to in the autobiography. Miss Taylor gets mentioned in a postscript, as if for the same reason. But, for the rest, people are mentioned as Westminster Bridge might be mentioned, or the penny-post, if they served to carry out Mill’s wishes and plans, and only so. You would not know that he had a mother, or brothers, or sisters. There are associates spoken of sometimes; but the same plan of the book, or the temperament of the author, or both, hinder him from pausing one moment to give us any view of them. This book is simply and wholly given to the life of John Stuart Mill…. A fascinating book it is from beginning to end.

  Perhaps it is his best composition from the point of view of literature; and certainly it is the most valuable document for a study of the growth of his school.

  The life of John Stuart Mill is in several particulars one of the most remarkable of which we have any record; and it can scarcely be an exaggeration to call his autobiography—in which we find presented in simple, straightforward style the main features of his life—a wonderful book.

General

  No writer, it is probable, was ever more read between the lines: his authoritative force of intellect, his perfect mastery of his materials, his singular neatness of exposition, marked him as a great power in the speculative world: but, as usual, the real interest felt was not less scientific than moral,—as to the direction in which that power would work. A certain air of suppression occasionally assumed by Mr. Mill himself, with hints for a revision of the existing narrow-minded morals, has increased this tendency. This suppressive air is the greatest fault we find in him; it is his only illegitimate instrument of power, for it weighs chiefly on the weak: and the shade which it passes across his face is sometimes so strong as almost to darken the philosopher into the mystagogue.

  The acknowledged chief of English thinkers, John Stuart Mill!

  British speculation, to which, notwithstanding adverse Continental opinion, the chief initial ideas and established truths of Modern Philosophy are due, is no longer dormant. By his “System of Logic,” Mr. Mill probably did more than any other writer to reawaken it. And to the great service he thus rendered some twenty years ago, he now adds by his “Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,”—a work which, taking the views of Sir William Hamilton as texts, reconsiders sundry ultimate questions that still remain unsettled.

  Now, if there is any man among us who has pre-eminently helped to keep Britain from that danger of intellectual death to many which would arise from her being of one religion in Philosophy, it is Mr. Mill. He has never forgotten his true love, the principle of Empiricism, nor in any way denied its name—though the name “Empiricism” is one which he would not himself choose, and for which he would probably substitute Experientialism.

  In all matters of Political Economy, the present generation of Englishmen pins its faith to the sleeve of Mr. Mill. Any utterance of his, therefore, is an event, not only in the history of the science but in the history of the nation.

  Rarely, I grant you, has a thinker better summed up in his teaching the practice of his country; seldom has a man better represented by his negations and his discoveries the limits and scope of his race.

  Himself pervadingly an intellectual machine, Mr. Mill seems to have interest in his countrymen only to the extent that they can be made intellectual machines too. His faith appears to be boundless in the omnipotence of the alphabet: his test of merit and of fitness is wholly mental…. Mr. Mill, by the inexorable directness and the faultless limpidity of his speech, forces back to reality the brain which has been bewildered by a vapoury, chaotic pictorialism. He is the Priessnitz of Literature, and much is a Priessnitz of Literature needed when there has been a reckless revel in furibond and fantastic phrases. If, then, you know any one who has been ensnared of the Carlyle apes—for whom, however, the great and good man they outrageously imitate should not be held responsible—send him to the physician Mill…. The physician Mill, though he gives us water in abundance, furnishes us with rather scanty fare; and those of us who have a good appetite are obliged to go elsewhither…. The works of Mr. Mill, masterpieces under more than one aspect, reveal to us a mind cultivated, disciplined to excess; a mind trained like the body of a boxer, sweated like the body of a jockey. Never was a more perfect thinking and calculating machine. And by thinking and calculating machines alone has Mr. Mill in his studies been attracted. If ever Mr. Mill deserts for a moment his own province, it is from an artificial taste.

  I should find it hard to say why I dislike John Stuart Mill, but I have an instinct that he has done lots of harm.

  Except Darwin, no philosopher has left a deeper impression on the thought of his age. The Utilitarian school, of which he was one of the teachers, we trust is to have but a passing influence. But Mr. Mill himself, in his personal character and his political writings, belongs to that higher school of intuitional moralists, who, in all ages, have shown the utmost attainments of the human soul, in utter and unselfish devotion to the principles of truth and justice and humanity.

  We have lost in John Stuart Mill the best philosophical writer—if not the greatest philosopher—whom England has produced since Hume: and perhaps the most influential teacher of thought, if we consider the variety as well as the intensity of his influence, that this country has ever seen. Originality of the highest kind he only showed in one department—the theory of method and evidence; but the unequalled mastery of method which his logical speculations developed, his patient tenacity and comprehensiveness of study, his rare gifts of exposition and discussion, and the controlled fervour of his intellectual and social enthusiasm enabled him to do in other departments work equally important in forming the minds of his contemporaries.

  To treatises such as Mr. Mill’s “Logic” and his “Political Economy,” it is not usually easy to give important praise which no one will deny: the subjects with which they deal, the “Logic” particularly, are too full of doubts and too fertile in animosities. But no one, we think, will deny that hardly ever, perhaps never, in the history of philosophy, have two books so finished and so ample been written by a man who had only his leisure moments to give to them, and who had a day’s work to do besides. The quantity of writing in these four thick volumes is not small: but many men, in detached essays and on varied points, equal or surpass that quantity,—even a daily occupation in laborious business is easily compatible with much desultory labor. But Mr. Mill’s “Logic” and his “Political Economy” are not collections of desultory remarks; they are orderly, systematic works, in which the beginning has reference to the end, and almost every part has some relation, often a very close relation, to most other parts. To compose such books requires an incessant reminiscence of the past and an equally incessant foresight of the future; and both these, more almost than anything else, strain and fatigue the brain. Only men with their whole time and whole strength can usually accomplish such tasks; but Mr. Mill wrote both these books when a laborious man of business, who had daily difficult and exhausting duties to perform as well. Instead of wondering at occasional faults in such books, we should rather wonder that they exist at all.

  Mr. Mill’s works, partly from their natural clearness, partly from their appropriateness to the intellectual demands of the day, are already so familiar that they have been threatened with promotion to the shelf of classic commonplace; but we should ask, before accepting this fate for them, whether his followers or his opponents have quite exhausted the problems he raised, either by carrying his method to its last legitimate consequences, or by disproving his particular conclusions seriatim. Till this has been done, indifference to his writings can only be accounted for by the unreasoning fickleness to which the principle—not yet become a commonplace and nowhere better illustrated than by himself—affords the best antidote, that the only security against the periodical rediscovery of error lies in recognizing (as he did) the substantial continuity of all right thinking, so that to abandon a legitimate inference is constructively to abandon all the grounds upon which it rested…. Mr. Mill’s influence has been much greater on the manner or processes of contemporary thought than on its substance and results, and if his estimate of the comparative importance of the two elements is correct, the fact will not injure his reputation with posterity.

  The character of his intellectual, no less than of his moral nature, led him to strive to connect his thoughts, whatever was the branch of knowledge at which he labored, with the previously existing body of speculation, to fit them into the same framework, and exhibit them as parts of the same scheme; so that it might be truly said of him that he was at more pains to conceal the originality and independent value of his contributions to the stock of knowledge than most writers are to set forth those qualities in their compositions. As a consequence of this, hasty readers of his works, while recognizing the comprehensiveness of his mind, have sometimes denied its originality; and in political economy in particular he has been frequently represented as little more than an expositor and popularizer of Ricardo. It cannot be denied that there is a show of truth in this representation; about as much as there would be in asserting that Laplace and Herschel were the expositors and popularizers of Newton, or that Faraday performed a like office for Sir Humphry Davy.

  If it is asked why Mr. Mill, with all his width of knowledge and sympathy, has achieved so little of a reputation as a miscellaneous writer, part of the reason no doubt is, that he sternly repressed his desultory tendencies and devoted his powers to special branches of knowledge, attaining in them a distinction that obscured his other writings. Another reason is, that, although his style is extremely clear, he was for popular purposes dangerously familiar with terms belonging more or less to the schools.

  He weighed his arguments as dispassionately as if his aim had been pure science. Rarely have strength of emotion and purpose and strength of intellect been combined in a thinker with such balance and harmony. The strength of his moral emotions gave him insights or premises which had been overlooked by the previous thinkers whose views he expounded or defended. This advantage over his predecessors was conspicuous in the form he gave to the utilitarian theory of moral principles, and in what was strictly original in his “Principles of Political Economy.”

  A man so good and great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies (as I needs must deem them) are more instructive to us than a million platitudes and truisms of teachers whom his transcendent intellectual honesty should put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled with a spark of the generous ardor for the welfare of his race which flamed in his noble heart and animated his entire career.

  I rather think that Mr. Mill himself is scarcely aware of the extent of the resemblance between his doctrines and those of the Scottish sceptic; as he seems to have wrought out his conclusions from data supplied him by his own father, Mr. James Mill, who, however, has evidently drawn much from Hume. The circumstance that Mr. Mill’s work was welcomed by such acclamations by the chief literary organs in London is a proof, either that the would-be leaders of opinion are so ignorant of philosophy that they do not see the consequences; or that the writers, being chiefly young men bred at Oxford or Cambridge, are fully prepared to accept them in the reaction against the revived mediævalism which was sought to be imposed upon them.

  Mr. John Stuart Mill is well known in France. His reputation as an economist; his works on politics and social questions; his various translations; an analysis of his Logic, which the author M. Taine in his “Etude sur Stuart Mill” pronounces “masterly;” the attacks of his numerous adversaries;—all these have contributed to spread abroad his fame. No name has been more frequently quoted among us in contemporary polemics.

  It is also observable, that, in Mill’s analysis of the conception of an external world, he makes no mention at all of space-relations; and yet the absence of this most important element of the objective world is scarcely missed by writer or reader, forasmuch as the terms of common life so readily supply and suggest them. We contend that it is not unfair to say, that, by this interchange of common and technical terminology, Mr. Mill contrives to muddle almost every subject which he essays to treat with philosophical exactness. It is no paradox to say, that when he seems to be the most clear and convincing, and because his terms are familiar and his illustrations are easily followed, he is the most emphatically confusing and disappointing. We need only contrast him with Berkeley to be sensible of these marked defects.

  For my part, I will no longer consent to live silently under the incubus of bad logic and bad philosophy which Mill’s Works have laid upon us. On almost every subject of social importance—religion, morals, political philosophy, political economy, metaphysics, logic—he has expressed unhesitating opinions, and his sayings are quoted by his admirers as if they were the oracles of a perfectly wise and logical mind. Nobody questions, or at least ought to question, the force of Mill’s style, the persuasive power of his words, the candour of his discussions, and the perfect goodness of his motives. If to all his other great qualities had been happily added logical accurateness, his writings would indeed have been a source of light for generations to come. But in one way or another Mill’s intellect was wrecked. The cause of injury may have been the ruthless training which his father imposed upon him in tender years; it may have been Mill’s own life-long attempt to reconcile a false empirical philosophy with conflicting truth. But however it arose, Mill’s mind was essentially illogical.

  I conclude that J. S. Mill’s greatest personal misfortune was that he was born the son of James Mill, and not of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He presents the appearance of a noble nature confined in intellectual fetters, which, forged for him, he himself did his best to rivet upon himself, without wholly succeeding. He attracts a sympathy at once regretful and affectionate. Perhaps his speculative failures, engraved already so conspicuously upon the tablets of the intellectual history of his race, may contribute more for the world’s final instruction than the inconspicuous successes of many another less renowned.

  These approximations of Mr. Mill to Christianity are also the more remarkable, that they come from one who had not, like Strauss and Rénan, any Christian training; and while Mr. Mill has not, any more than they, solved the problem of the origin of Christianity, his willingness to accept a supernatural theory, if it could be found, is also to be noted as what, after so long a period, shows a gleam of Butler more than a reflection of English Deism.

  He is allowed to be not only a great thinker, but a good writer. His lucidity, in particular, is regarded as pre-eminent. Exceptions are taken by the more fastidious critics; he is said by Mr. Pattison to be wanting in classical grace and literary polish…. He was greatly inferior to Bentham in the copiousness, the variety of his primary stock of language elements. He was surpassed, if I mistake not, by both the Austins, by Grote and by Roebuck. Had he been required to express the same idea in ten different forms, all good, he would have come to a standstill sooner than any of those. His grammar is often more defective than we should expect in any one so carefully disciplined as he was from the first…. Critically examined, his style is wanting in delicate attention to the placing of qualifying words generally. He had apparently never thought of this matter farther than to satisfy himself that his sentences were intelligible. Another peculiarity of grammar tending to make his style not unfrequently heavy, and sometimes a little obscure, was the excess of relatives, and especially of the heavy relatives “which” and “who.”… Of arts of the rhetorical kind in the structure of his sentences, he was by no means wanting. He could be sharp and pithy, which goes a great way. He had likewise caught up, probably in a good measure from the French writers, his peculiar epigrammatic smartness, which he practised also in conversation…. As a whole, I should say that Mill was wanting in strength, energy, or momentum. His happiest strokes were of the nature of a corruscation—a lightning flash, rather than effects of impetus or mass of motion. His sentences and paragraphs are apt to diffuse; not because of unnecessary circumstances, but from a want of steady endeavour after emphasis by good collocation and condensation. Every now and then, one of his pithy sentences comes across us, with inexpressible welcome. He is himself conscious when he is becoming too involved, and usually endeavours to relieve us by a terse summary at the close of the paragraph.

  The style of J. S. Mill is a style which expresses thought, and even feeling, in a very abstract manner; and, consequently, there are few writers who gain more by being studied concretely in connexion with life and circumstances.

  Exercised, without doubt, a greater influence in the field of English economics than any other writer since Ricardo. His systematic treatise has been, either directly or through manuals founded on it, especially that of Fawcett, the source from which most of our contemporaries in these countries have derived their knowledge of the science.

  Of all this new generation, the most precocious was certainly John Stuart Mill. He began his contributions to the Westminster Review in 1824, when he was only some eighteen years of age. Two years subsequently there fell on his spirit that darkness, which, as we have seen, the study of Wordsworth dispersed or reduced; and very shortly afterwards, ever bent on some good service for his day and generation, he became one of the noblest and best influences of his time. About the year 1837, stimulated by the perusal of Whewell’s “History of the Inductive Sciences,” he was devoting his attention to those studies of Logic which resulted in his two memorable volumes in 1843.

  When a man lives much in the country he is likely, if he reads, to be chiefly influenced by books. In this way I have been strongly influenced by John Mill, whom I once met, but did not know personally. Mill had a power over all my thinking.

  What, then, is it in Mill’s philosophical writings that has given him this eminence as a thinker? Two qualities, we think, very rarely combined a philosophical style which for clearness and cogency has, perhaps, never been surpassed, and a conscientious painstaking, with a seriousness of conviction, and an earnestness of purpose which did not in general characterize the thinkers whose views he adopted. It was by bringing to the support of doctrines previously regarded as irreligious a truly religious spirit that Mill acquired in part the influence and respect which have given him his eminence as a thinker. He thus redeemed the word “utility” and the utilitarian doctrine of morals from the ill repute they had, for “the greatest happiness principle” was with him a religious principle. An equally important part of his influence is doubtless due to the thoroughness of his early training—the education received from his father’s instruction—which, as we have said, has made him truly regarded as the most accomplished of modern dialecticians.

  Mill must be accounted on the whole by good judges, even if they are utterly opposed to his whole system of philosophy, the chief philosophical writer of England in this century; and the enormous though not permanent influence which he attained about its middle was deserved, partly by qualities purely literary, but partly also by some purely philosophical…. Even those, however, who, as the present writer acknowledges in his own case, are totally opposed to the whole Millian conception of logic and politics, of metaphysics and morality, must, unless prejudiced, admit his great merits of method and treatment. He not only very seldom smuggles in sophistry into the middle of his arguments, but even paralogisms are not common with him; it is with his premises, not with his conclusions, that you must deal if you wish to upset him. Unlike most contemners of formal logic, he is not in much danger, as far as his merely dialectic processes go, from formal logic itself; and it is in the arbitrary and partial character of his preliminary admissions, assumptions, and exclusions that the weak points of his system are to to be found. His style has also very considerable merits. It is not brilliant or charming; it has neither great strength nor great stateliness. But it is perfectly clear, it is impossible to mistake its meaning, and its simplicity is unattended by any of the down-at-heel neglect of neatness and elegance which is to be found, for instance, in Locke.

  He strives laboriously, and with success, to make his meaning quite plain. His chain of reasoning may be confused, but it is never more confused to the reader than to himself. Though he does not avoid technical language when that is necessary, his drift may be caught by any man of average intelligence who will take the trouble to study his books. On the other hand, he is never for a single moment familiar or colloquial. The man of average intelligence, whom we have figured as applying to his works, will not be tempted into the belief that speculation is all plain-sailing. Rather will he have an agreeable and flattering consciousness that he is grappling with problems of no ordinary magnitude and solemnity. And this pleasing impression all Mr. Mill’s artifices—his long sentences, his long words of which he is extremely fond, even his turns and tricks of phrase, such as the habitual use of “needs” for “need” in the third person—will only deepen and confirm. It is in his political enquiries that this combination of qualities—this admixture of the popular with the severe—is most effective; but in all he wrote, it was this which, combined with his moral fervour, raised him so high in the esteem of his own generation, and it is this which is destined, possibly, to atone for the want of many more solid and more brilliant literary excellencies in the judgment of generations yet to come.

  In all his writings he is clear in expression and abundant in illustration. This abundance, in truth, appears to the reader not wholly ignorant of the subject to be cognate to verbosity. It was however part of the secret of Mill’s great influence. He forced people to understand him. He talked round and round the subject, looked at it from every point of view and piled example upon example, until it was impossible to miss his meaning. When we add wide knowledge, patient study, keen intelligence and a considerable, if not exactly a great talent for original speculation, Mill’s influence as a philosopher is explained. He wielded, from the publication of his “Logic” till his death, a greater power than any other English thinker, unless Sir William Hamilton is to be excepted for the earlier part of the period.

  In the seventies his philosophy dominated Oxford. It is of no account to-day. On the philosophical side Mill’s position is weakened by his ignorance of the more simple sciences, which we now know to be of the greatest moment in the study of intellectual problems. Mill knew little of physics, and of biology still less. His education in this respect belonged to the old-fashioned type. His work in logic is all but unshaken, although his book has been superseded for school and college use. His psychology, however, his ethics, much of his economics, and above all, his metaphysics, must be corrected by later ideas. Doubtless Mill’s readjustments in mental science are most valuable, especially his rehandling of the old doctrines; but fundamentally these are Hume’s. Mill’s chief philosophical work was destructive. He utterly routed the remnants of a still earlier philosophy, furbished up with all the knowledge and all the acuteness of Sir William Hamilton.

  Mill’s writings are useful, not only because they mark a period of change in English Philosophy, but also because they possess qualities of thought and expression which give permanent weight to their speculative freedom and precision. To study them is an education in ethics, both because they treat the chief topics of the science in a broad and vigorous way, and because they evoke the mood of mind which is appropriate to the whole subject. It is very important that the student should approach the problems of moral experience in a treatment of them which maintains the human interest of the subject, rather than in purely technical discussions, in which this interest may not appear to those who have not learned their importance; and Mill’s simplicity, his seriousness, the fervour of his appreciation of morality, and his largeness of outlook, help to make his work a real introduction to ethical studies. That his errors are not the least instructive part of his writings is one of the many good results of his singular and unfailing candour.

  He was in an eminent degree compassionate and just, and, to use a happy phrase which Condorcet applied to Turgot, he resembled a volcano clothed in ice. It was indeed the altruistic element in his character that informed and coloured his political philosophy; and he might perhaps without impropriety be described as a Benthamite purified, sublimated and refined.