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+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3)
+       Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2007 [EBook #20887]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  CRITICAL
+  MISCELLANIES
+
+  BY
+  JOHN MORLEY
+
+  VOL. III.
+
+
+  ESSAY 2: THE DEATH OF MR MILL
+  ESSAY 3: MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+
+  London
+  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+  1904
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  THE DEATH OF MR. MILL.
+
+
+  Peculiar office of the Teacher                                      37
+
+  Mill's influence in the universities and the press                  39
+
+  His union of science with aspiration                                40
+
+  And of courage with patience                                        42
+
+  His abstinence from society                                         45
+
+  Sense of the tendency of society to relapse                         46
+
+  Peculiar trait of his authority                                     47
+
+  The writer's last day with him                                      48
+
+
+  MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+
+  The spirit of search                                                53
+
+  Key to Mill's type of character and its value                       54
+
+  Sensibility of his intellect                                        56
+
+  Yet no reaction against his peculiar education                      57
+
+  Quality of the Autobiography                                        58
+
+  One of its lessons--[Greek: memnêso apistein]                       60
+
+  Mill's aversion to the spirit of sect                               60
+
+  Not a hindrance to systematisation                                  61
+
+  Criticism united with belief                                        63
+
+  Practical difficulties in the union of loyalty with tolerance       64
+
+  Impressiveness of Mill's self-effacement                            65
+
+  His contempt for socialistic declamation                            68
+
+  Yet the social aim paramount in him                                 69
+
+  Illustrated in his attack on Hamilton                               71
+
+  And in the Logic                                                    72
+
+  The book on the Subjection of Women                                 75
+
+  The two crises of life                                              77
+
+  Mill did not escape the second of them                              78
+
+  Influence of Wordsworth                                             79
+
+  Hope from reformed institutions                                     79
+
+  This hope replaced by efforts in a deeper vein                      80
+
+  Popular opinion of such efforts                                     81
+
+  Irrational disparagement of Mill's hope                             82
+
+  Mill's conception of happiness contrasted with his father's         84
+
+  Remarks on his withdrawal from society                              88
+
+  It arose from no moral valetudinarianism                            91
+
+
+
+
+THE DEATH OF MR. MILL.
+
+(_May 1873._)
+
+
+The tragic commonplaces of the grave sound a fuller note as we mourn for
+one of the greater among the servants of humanity. A strong and pure
+light is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficent
+purpose. One of those high and most worthy spirits who arise from time
+to time to stir their generation with new mental impulses in the deeper
+things, has perished from among us. The death of one who did so much to
+impress on his contemporaries that physical law works independently of
+moral law, marks with profounder emphasis the ever ancient and ever
+fresh decree that there is one end to the just and the unjust, and that
+the same strait tomb awaits alike the poor dead whom nature or
+circumstance imprisoned in mean horizons, and those who saw far and felt
+passionately and put their reason to noble uses. Yet the fulness of our
+grief is softened by a certain greatness and solemnity in the event. The
+teachers of men are so few, the gift of intellectual fatherhood is so
+rare, it is surrounded by such singular gloriousness. The loss of a
+powerful and generous statesman, or of a great master in letters or art,
+touches us with many a vivid regret. The Teacher, the man who has
+talents and has virtues, and yet has a further something which is
+neither talent nor virtue, and which gives him the mysterious secret of
+drawing men after him, leaves a deeper sense of emptiness than this; but
+lamentation is at once soothed and elevated by a sense of sacredness in
+the occasion. Even those whom Mr. Mill honoured with his friendship, and
+who must always bear to his memory the affectionate veneration of sons,
+may yet feel their pain at the thought that they will see him no more,
+raised into a higher mood as they meditate on the loftiness of his task
+and the steadfastness and success with which he achieved it. If it is
+grievous to think that such richness of culture, such full maturity of
+wisdom, such passion for truth and justice, are now by a single stroke
+extinguished, at least we may find some not unworthy solace in the
+thought of the splendid purpose that they have served in keeping alive,
+and surrounding with new attractions, the difficult tradition of patient
+and accurate thinking in union with unselfish and magnanimous living.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much will one day have to be said as to the precise value of Mr. Mill's
+philosophical principles, the more or less of his triumphs as a
+dialectician, his skill as a critic and an expositor. However this trial
+may go, we shall at any rate be sure that with his reputation will
+stand or fall the intellectual repute of a whole generation of his
+countrymen. The most eminent of those who are now so fast becoming the
+front line, as death mows down the veterans, all bear traces of his
+influence, whether they are avowed disciples or avowed opponents. If
+they did not accept his method of thinking, at least he determined the
+questions which they should think about. For twenty years no one at all
+open to serious intellectual impressions has left Oxford without having
+undergone the influence of Mr. Mill's teaching, though it would be too
+much to say that in that gray temple where they are ever burnishing new
+idols, his throne is still unshaken. The professorial chairs there and
+elsewhere are more and more being filled with men whose minds have been
+trained in his principles. The universities only typify his influence on
+the less learned part of the world. The better sort of journalists
+educated themselves on his books, and even the baser sort acquired a
+habit of quoting from them. He is the only writer in the world whose
+treatises on highly abstract subjects have been printed during his
+lifetime in editions for the people, and sold at the price of railway
+novels. Foreigners from all countries read his books as attentively as
+his most eager English disciples, and sought his opinion as to their own
+questions with as much reverence as if he had been a native oracle. An
+eminent American who came over on an official mission which brought him
+into contact with most of the leading statesmen throughout Europe, said
+to the present writer:--'The man who impressed me most of them all was
+Stuart Mill; you placed before him the facts on which you sought his
+opinion. He took them, gave you the different ways in which they might
+fairly be looked at, balanced the opposing considerations, and then
+handed you a final judgment in which nothing was left out. His mind
+worked like a splendid piece of machinery; you supply it with raw
+material, and it turns you out a perfectly finished product.' Of such a
+man England has good reason to be very proud.
+
+He was stamped in many respects with specially English quality. He is
+the latest chief of a distinctively English school of philosophy, in
+which, as has been said, the names of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, and
+Bentham (and Mr. Mill would have added James Mill) mark the line of
+succession--the school whose method subordinates imagination to
+observation, and whose doctrine lays the foundations of knowledge in
+experience, and the tests of conduct in utility. Yet, for all this, one
+of his most remarkable characteristics was less English than French; his
+constant admission of an ideal and imaginative element in social
+speculation, and a glowing persuasion that the effort and wisdom and
+ingenuity of men are capable, if free opportunity be given by social
+arrangements, of raising human destiny to a pitch that is at present
+beyond our powers of conception. Perhaps the sum of all his distinction
+lies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of
+rigorous sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminous
+hope. He told one who was speaking of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, that
+in his younger days whenever he was inclined to be discouraged, he was
+in the habit of turning to this book, and that he never did so without
+recovering possession of himself. To the same friend, who had printed
+something comparing Mr. Mill's repulse at Westminster with the dismissal
+of the great minister of Lewis the Sixteenth, he wrote:--'I never
+received so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to Turgot;
+it is indeed an honour to me that such an assimilation should have
+occurred to you.' Those who have studied the character of one whom even
+the rigid Austin thought worthy to be called 'the godlike Turgot,' know
+both the nobleness and the rarity of this type.
+
+Its force lies not in single elements, but in that combination of an
+ardent interest in human improvement with a reasoned attention to the
+law of its conditions, which alone deserves to be honoured with the high
+name of wisdom. This completeness was one of the secrets of Mr. Mill's
+peculiar attraction for young men, and for the comparatively few women
+whose intellectual interest was strong enough to draw them to his books.
+He satisfied the ingenuous moral ardour which is instinctive in the best
+natures, until the dust of daily life dulls or extinguishes it, and at
+the same time he satisfied the rationalistic qualities, which are not
+less marked in the youthful temperament of those who by and by do the
+work of the world. This mixture of intellectual gravity with a
+passionate love of improvement in all the aims and instruments of life,
+made many intelligences alive who would otherwise have slumbered, or
+sunk either into a dry pedantry on the one hand, or a windy, mischievous
+philanthropy on the other. He showed himself so wholly free from the
+vulgarity of the sage. He could hope for the future without taking his
+eye from the realities of the present. He recognised the social
+destination of knowledge, and kept the elevation of the great art of
+social existence ever before him, as the ultimate end of all speculative
+activity.
+
+Another side of this rare combination was his union of courage with
+patience, of firm nonconformity with silent conformity. Compliance is
+always a question of degree, depending on time, circumstance, and
+subject. Mr. Mill hit the exact mean, equally distant from timorous
+caution and self-indulgent violence. He was unrivalled in the difficult
+art of conciliating as much support as was possible and alienating as
+little sympathy as possible, for novel and extremely unpopular opinions.
+He was not one of those who strive to spread new faiths by brilliant
+swordplay with buttoned foils, and he was not one of those who run amuck
+among the idols of the tribe and the market-place and the theatre. He
+knew how to kindle the energy of all who were likely to be persuaded by
+his reasoning, without stimulating in a corresponding degree the energy
+of persons whose convictions he attacked. Thus he husbanded the
+strength of truth, and avoided wasteful friction. Probably no English
+writer that ever lived has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the very
+root of the theological spirit, yet there is only one passage in the
+writings published during his lifetime--I mean a well-known passage in
+the Liberty--which could give any offence to the most devout person. His
+conformity, one need hardly say, never went beyond the negative degree,
+nor ever passed beyond the conformity of silence. That guilty and
+grievously common pusillanimity which leads men to make or act
+hypocritical professions, always moved his deepest abhorrence. And he
+did not fear publicly to testify his interest in the return of an
+atheist to parliament.
+
+His courage was not of the spurious kinds arising from anger, or
+ignorance of the peril, or levity, or a reckless confidence. These are
+all very easy. His distinction was that he knew all the danger to
+himself, was anxious to save pain to others, was buoyed up by no rash
+hope that the world was to be permanently bettered at a stroke, and yet
+for all this he knew how to present an undaunted front to a majority.
+The only fear he ever knew was fear lest a premature or excessive
+utterance should harm a good cause. He had measured the prejudices of
+men, and his desire to arouse this obstructive force in the least degree
+compatible with effective advocacy of any improvement, set the single
+limit to his intrepidity. Prejudices were to him like physical
+predispositions, with which you have to make your account. He knew,
+too, that they are often bound up with the most valuable elements in
+character and life, and hence he feared that violent surgery which in
+eradicating a false opinion fatally bruises at the same time a true and
+wholesome feeling that may cling to it. The patience which with some men
+is an instinct, and with others a fair name for indifference, was with
+him an acquisition of reason and conscience.
+
+The value of this wise and virtuous mixture of boldness with tolerance,
+of courageous speech with courageous reserve, has been enormous. Along
+with his direct pleas for freedom of thought and freedom of speech, it
+has been the chief source of that liberty of expressing unpopular
+opinions in this country without social persecution, which is now so
+nearly complete, that he himself was at last astonished by it. The
+manner of his dialectic, firm and vigorous as the dialectic was in
+matter, has gradually introduced mitigating elements into the atmosphere
+of opinion. Partly, no doubt, the singular tolerance of free discussion
+which now prevails in England--I do not mean that it is at all
+perfect--arises from the prevalent scepticism, from indifference, and
+from the influence of some of the more high-minded of the clergy. But
+Mr. Mill's steadfast abstinence from drawing wholesale indictments
+against persons or classes whose opinions he controverted, his generous
+candour, his scrupulous respect for any germ of good in whatever company
+it was found, and his large allowances, contributed positive elements to
+what might otherwise have been the negative tolerance that comes of
+moral stagnation. Tolerance of distasteful notions in others became
+associated in his person at once with the widest enlightenment, and the
+strongest conviction of the truth of our own notions.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His career, beside all else, was a protest of the simplest and loftiest
+kind against some of the most degrading features of our society. No one
+is more alive than he was to the worth of all that adds grace and
+dignity to human life; but the sincerity of this feeling filled him with
+aversion for the make-believe dignity of a luxurious and artificial
+community. Without either arrogance or bitterness, he stood aloof from
+that conventional intercourse which is misnamed social duty. Without
+either discourtesy or cynicism, he refused to play a part in that dance
+of mimes which passes for life among the upper classes. In him, to
+extraordinary intellectual attainments was added the gift of a firm and
+steadfast self-respect, which unfortunately does not always go with
+them. He felt the reality of things, and it was easier for a workman
+than for a princess to obtain access to him. It is not always the men
+who talk most affectingly about our being all of one flesh and blood,
+who are proof against those mysterious charms of superior rank, which do
+so much to foster unworthy conceptions of life in English society; and
+there are many people capable of accepting Mr. Mill's social
+principles, and the theoretical corollaries they contain, who yet would
+condemn his manly plainness and austere consistency in acting on them.
+The too common tendency in us all to moral slovenliness, and a lazy
+contentment with a little flaccid protest against evil, finds a constant
+rebuke in his career. The indomitable passion for justice which made him
+strive so long and so tenaciously to bring to judgment a public
+official, whom he conceived to be a great criminal, was worthy of one of
+the stoutest patriots in our seventeenth-century history. The same moral
+thoroughness stirred the same indignation in him on a more recent
+occasion, when he declared it 'a permanent disgrace to the Government
+that the iniquitous sentence on the gas-stokers was not remitted as soon
+as passed.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much of his most striking quality was owing to the exceptional degree in
+which he was alive to the constant tendency of society to lose some
+excellence of aim, to relapse at some point from the standard of truth
+and right which had been reached by long previous effort, to fall back
+in height of moral ideal. He was keenly sensible that it is only by
+persistent striving after improvement in our conceptions of duty, and
+improvement in the external means for realising them, that even the
+acquisitions of past generations are retained. He knew the intense
+difficulty of making life better by ever so little. Hence at once the
+exaltation of his own ideas of truth and right, and his eagerness to
+conciliate anything like virtuous social feeling, in whatever
+intellectual or political association he found it. Hence also the
+vehemence of his passion for the unfettered and unchecked development of
+new ideas on all subjects, of originality in moral and social points of
+view; because repression, whether by public opinion or in any other way,
+may be the means of untold waste of gifts that might have conferred on
+mankind unspeakable benefits. The discipline and vigour of his
+understanding made him the least indulgent of judges to anything like
+charlatanry, and effectually prevented his unwillingness to let the
+smallest good element be lost, from degenerating into that weak kind of
+universalism which nullifies some otherwise good men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some great men seize upon us by the force of an imposing and majestic
+authority; their thoughts impress the imagination, their words are
+winged, they are as prophets bearing high testimony that cannot be
+gainsaid. Bossuet, for instance, or Pascal. Others, and of these Mr.
+Mill was one, acquire disciples not by a commanding authority, but by a
+moderate and impersonal kind of persuasion. He appeals not to our sense
+of greatness and power in a teacher, which is noble, but to our love of
+finding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. People
+who like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with herald
+and trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitual
+effacement of his own personality marked a delicate and very rare shade
+in his reverence for the sacred purity of truth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meditation on the influence of one who has been the foremost instructor
+of his time in wisdom and goodness quickly breaks off, in this hour when
+his loss is fresh upon us; it changes into affectionate reminiscences
+for which silence is more fitting. In such an hour thought turns rather
+to the person than the work of the master whom we mourn. We recall his
+simplicity, gentleness, heroic self-abnegation; his generosity in
+encouraging, his eager readiness in helping; the warm kindliness of his
+accost, the friendly brightening of the eye. The last time I saw him was
+a few days before he left England.[1] He came to spend a day with me in
+the country, of which the following brief notes happened to be written
+at the time in a letter to a friend:--
+
+     'He came down by the morning train to Guildford 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.
+
+[Footnote 1: April 5, 1873.]
+
+'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 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 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 hothouse.
+
+'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 cheeked 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 that of 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.
+
+'Spoke of the modern tendency to pure theism, and met the objection that
+it retards improvement by turning the minds of some of the best men from
+social affairs, by the counter-proposition that it is useful to society,
+apart from the question of its truth,--useful as a provisional belief,
+because people will identify serviceable ministry to men with service of
+God. Thinks we cannot with any sort of precision define the coming
+modification of religion, but anticipates that it will undoubtedly rest
+upon the solidarity of mankind, as Comte said, and as you and I believe.
+Perceives two things, at any rate, which are likely to lead men to
+invest this with the moral authority of a religion; first, they will
+become more and more impressed by the awful fact that a piece of conduct
+to-day may prove a curse to men and women scores and even hundreds of
+years after the author of it is dead; and second, they will more and
+more feel that they can only satisfy their sentiment of gratitude to
+seen or unseen benefactors, can only repay the untold benefits they have
+inherited, by diligently maintaining the traditions of service.
+
+'And so forth, full of interest and suggestiveness all through. When he
+got here, he chatted to R---- over our lunch, with something of the
+simple 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 little roadside station, and one of
+the most delightful days of my life came to its end, like all other
+days, delightful and sorrowful.'
+
+Alas, the sorrowful day which ever dogs our delight followed very
+quickly. The nightingale that he longed for fills the darkness with
+music, but not for the ear of the dead master: he rests in the deeper
+darkness where the silence is unbroken for ever. We may console
+ourselves with the reflection offered by the dying Socrates to his
+sorrowful companions: he who has arrayed the soul in her own proper
+jewels of moderation and justice and courage and nobleness and truth, is
+ever ready for the journey when his time comes. We have lost a great
+teacher and example of knowledge and virtue, but men will long feel the
+presence of his character about them, making them ashamed of what is
+indolent or selfish, and encouraging them to all disinterested labour,
+both in trying to do good and in trying to find out what the good
+is,--which is harder.
+
+
+
+
+MR. MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
+
+
+_Chercher en gémissant_--search with many sighs--that was Pascal's
+notion of praiseworthy living and choosing the better part. Search, and
+search with much travail, strikes us as the chief intellectual ensign
+and device of that eminent man whose record of his own mental nurture
+and growth we have all been reading. Everybody endowed with energetic
+intelligence has a measure of the spirit of search poured out upon him.
+All such persons act on the Socratic maxim that the life without inquiry
+is a life to be lived by no man. But it is the rare distinction of a
+very few to accept the maxim in its full significance, to insist on an
+open mind as the true secret of wisdom, to press the examination and
+testing of our convictions as the true way at once to stability and
+growth of character, and thus to make of life what it is so good for us
+that it should be, a continual building up, a ceaseless fortifying and
+enlargement and multiplication of the treasures of the spirit. To make 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,'[2]--to thrust out the spirit of party, of sect, of
+creed, of the poorer sort of self-esteem, of futile contentiousness, and
+so to seek and again seek with undeviating singleness of mind the right
+interpretation of our experiences--here is the genuine seal of
+intellectual mastery and the true stamp of a perfect rationality.
+
+[Footnote 2: Mill's _Autobiography_, 242.]
+
+The men to whom this is the ideal of the life of the reason, and who
+have done anything considerable towards spreading a desire after it,
+deserve to have their memories gratefully cherished even by those who do
+not agree with all their positive opinions. We need only to reflect a
+little on the conditions of human existence; on the urgent demand which
+material necessities inevitably make on so immense a proportion of our
+time and thought; on the space which is naturally filled up by the
+activity of absorbing affections; on the fatal power of mere tradition
+and report over the indifferent, and the fatal power of inveterate
+prejudice over so many even of the best of those who are not
+indifferent. Then we shall know better how to value such a type of
+character and life as Mr. Mill has now told us the story of, in which
+intellectual impressionableness on the most important subjects of human
+thought was so cultivated as almost to acquire the strength and quick
+responsiveness of emotional sensibility. And this, without the too
+common drawback to great openness of mind. This drawback consists in
+loose beliefs, taken up to-day and silently dropped to-morrow;
+vacillating opinions, constantly being exchanged for their contraries;
+feeble convictions, appearing, shifting, vanishing, in the quicksands of
+an unstable mind.
+
+Nobody will impute any of these disastrous weaknesses to Mr. Mill. His
+impressionableness was of the valuable positive kind, which adds and
+assimilates new elements from many quarters, without disturbing the
+organic structure of the whole. What he says of one stage in his growth
+remained generally true of him until the very end:--'I found the fabric
+of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places, and I
+never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in
+weaving it anew. I never in the course of my transition was content to
+remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I had
+taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its
+relations to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect
+ought to extend in modifying or superseding them' (p. 156). This careful
+and conscientious recognition of the duty of having ordered opinions,
+and of responsibility for these opinions being both as true and as
+consistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could make
+them, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly from
+doctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point to
+point in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from those
+sensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights of
+rationalism suddenly into the pit of an infallible church; and from
+those who, like La Mennais, move violently between faith and reason,
+between tradition and inquiry, between the fulness of deference to
+authority and the fulness of individual self-assertion.
+
+All minds of the first quality move and grow; they have a susceptibility
+to many sorts of new impressions, a mobility, a feeling outwards, which
+makes it impossible for them to remain in the stern fixity of an early
+implanted set of dogmas, whether philosophic or religious. In stoical
+tenacity of character, as well as in intellectual originality and
+concentrated force of understanding, some of those who knew both tell us
+that Mr. Mill was inferior to his father. But who does not feel in the
+son the serious charm of a power of adaptation and pliableness which we
+can never associate with the hardy and more rigorous nature of the
+other? And it was just because he had this sensibility of the intellect,
+that the history of what it did for him is so edifying a performance for
+a people like ourselves, among whom that quality is so extremely
+uncommon. For it was the sensibility of strength and not of weakness,
+nor of mere over-refinement and subtlety. We may estimate the
+significance of such a difference, when we think how little, after all,
+the singular gifts of a Newman or a Maurice have done for their
+contemporaries, simply because these two eminent men allowed
+consciousness of their own weakness to 'sickly over' the spontaneous
+impulses of their strength.
+
+The wonder is that the reaction against such an education as that
+through which James Mill brought his son,--an education so intense, so
+purely analytical, doing so much for the reason and so little for the
+satisfaction of the affections,--was not of the most violent kind. The
+wonder is that the crisis through which nearly every youth of good
+quality has to pass, and from which Mr. Mill, as he has told us, by no
+means escaped, did not land him in some of the extreme forms of
+transcendentalism. If it had done so the record of the journey would no
+doubt have been more abundant in melodramatic incidents. It would have
+done more to tickle the fancy of 'the present age of loud disputes but
+weak convictions.' And it might have been found more touching by the
+large numbers of talkers and writers who seem to think that a history of
+a careful man's opinions on grave and difficult subjects ought to have
+all the rapid movements and unexpected turns of a romance, and that a
+book without rapture and effusion and a great many capital letters must
+be joyless and disappointing. Those of us who dislike literary hysteria
+as much as we dislike the coarseness that mistakes itself for force, may
+well be glad to follow the mental history of a man who knew how to move
+and grow without any of these reactions and leaps on the one hand, or
+any of that overdone realism on the other, which may all make a more
+striking picture, but which do assuredly more often than not mark the
+ruin of a mind and the nullification of a career.
+
+If we are now and then conscious in the book of a certain want of
+spacing, of changing perspectives and long vistas; if we have perhaps a
+sense of being too narrowly enclosed; if we miss the relish of humour or
+the occasional relief of irony; we ought to remember that we are busy
+not with a work of imagination or art, but with the practical record of
+the formation of an eminent thinker's mental habits and the succession
+of his mental attitudes. The formation of such mental habits is not a
+romance, but the most arduous of real concerns. If we are led up to none
+of the enkindled summits of the soul, and plunged into none of its
+abysses, that is no reason why we should fail to be struck by the pale
+flame of strenuous self-possession, or touched by the ingenuousness and
+simplicity of the speaker's accents. A generation continually excited by
+narratives, as sterile as vehement, of storm and stress and spiritual
+shipwreck, might do well, if it knew the things that pertained to its
+peace, to ponder this unvarnished history--the history of a man who,
+though he was not one of the picturesque victims of the wasteful
+torments of an uneasy spiritual self-consciousness, yet laboured so
+patiently after the gifts of intellectual strength, and did so much
+permanently to widen the judgments of the world.
+
+If Mr. Mill's Autobiography has no literary grandeur, nor artistic
+variety, it has the rarer merit of presenting for our contemplation a
+character that was infested by none of the smaller passions, and warped
+by none of the more unintelligent attitudes of the human mind. We have
+to remember that it is exactly these, the smaller passions on the one
+hand, and slovenliness of intelligence on the other, which are even
+worse agencies in spoiling the worth of life and the advance of society
+than the more imposing vices either of thought or sentiment. Many have
+told the tale of a life of much external eventfulness. There is a rarer
+instructiveness in the quiet career of one whose life was an incessant
+education, a persistent strengthening of the mental habit of 'never
+accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning a
+puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up;
+never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored,
+because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly
+understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole' (p. 123).
+It is true that this mental habit is not so singular in itself, for it
+is the common and indispensable merit of every truly scientific thinker.
+Mr. Mill's distinction lay in the deliberate intention and the
+systematic patience with which he brought it to the consideration of
+moral and religious and social subjects. In this region hitherto, for
+reasons that are not difficult to seek, the empire of prejudice and
+passion has been so much stronger, so much harder to resist, than in the
+field of physical science.
+
+Sect is so ready to succeed sect, and school comes after school, with
+constant replacement of one sort of orthodoxy by another sort, until
+even the principle of relativity becomes the base of a set of absolute
+and final dogmas, and the very doctrine of uncertainty itself becomes
+fixed in a kind of authoritative nihilism. It is, therefore, a signal
+gain that we now have a new type, with the old wise device, [Greek:
+memnêso apistein]--_be sure that you distrust_. Distrust your own bias;
+distrust your supposed knowledge; constantly try, prove, fortify your
+firmest convictions. And all this, throughout the whole domain where the
+intelligence rules. It was characteristic of a man of this type that he
+should have been seized by that memorable passage in Condorcet's Life of
+Turgot to which Mr. Mill refers (p. 114), and which every man with an
+active interest in serious affairs should bind about his neck and write
+on the tablets of his heart.
+
+'Turgot,' says his wise biographer, 'always looked upon anything like a
+sect as mischievous.... From the moment that a sect comes into
+existence, all the individuals composing it become answerable for the
+faults and errors of each one of them. The obligation to remain united
+leads them to suppress or dissemble all truths that might wound anybody
+whose adhesion is useful to the sect. They are forced to establish in
+some form a body of doctrine, and the opinions which make a part of it,
+being adopted without inquiry, become in due time pure prejudices.
+Friendship stops with the individuals; but the hatred and envy that any
+of them may arouse extends to the whole sect. If this sect be formed by
+the most enlightened men of the nation, if the defence of truths of the
+greatest importance to the common happiness be the object of its zeal,
+the mischief is still worse. Everything true or useful which they
+propose is rejected without examination. Abuses and errors of every kind
+always have for their defenders that herd of presumptuous and mediocre
+mortals, who are the bitterest enemies of all celebrity and renown.
+Scarcely is a truth made clear, before those to whom it would be
+prejudicial crush it under the name of a sect that is sure to have
+already become odious, and are certain to keep it from obtaining so much
+as a hearing. Turgot, then, was persuaded that perhaps the greatest ill
+you can do to truth is to drive those who love it to form themselves
+into a sect, and that these in turn can commit no more fatal mistake
+than to have the vanity or the weakness to fall into the trap.'
+
+Yet we know that with Mr. Mill as with Turgot this deep distrust of sect
+was no hindrance to the most careful systematisation of opinion and
+conduct. He did not interpret many-sidedness in the flaccid watery sense
+which flatters the indolence of so many of our contemporaries, who like
+to have their ears amused with a new doctrine each morning, to be held
+for a day, and dropped in the evening, and who have little more
+seriousness in their intellectual life than the busy insects of a summer
+noon. He says that he looked forward 'to a future which shall unite the
+best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic
+periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual
+action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also convictions as to
+what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the
+feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so
+firmly grounded in reason and the true exigencies of life, that they
+shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and
+political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others'
+(p. 166). This was in some sort the type at which he aimed in the
+formation of his own character--a type that should combine organic with
+critical quality, the strength of an ordered set of convictions, with
+that pliability and that receptiveness in face of new truth, which are
+indispensable to these very convictions being held intelligently and in
+their best attainable form. We can understand the force of the eulogy on
+John Austin (p. 154), that he manifested 'an equal devotion to the two
+cardinal points of Liberty and Duty.' These are the correlatives in the
+sphere of action to the two cardinal points of Criticism and Belief in
+the sphere of thought.
+
+We can in the light of this double way of viewing the right balance of
+the mind, the better understand the combination of earnestness with
+tolerance which inconsiderate persons are apt to find so awkward a
+stumbling-block in the scheme of philosophic liberalism. Many people in
+our time have so ill understood the doctrine of liberty, that in some of
+the most active circles in society they now count you a bigot if you
+hold any proposition to be decidedly and unmistakably more true than any
+other. They pronounce you intemperate if you show anger and stern
+disappointment because men follow the wrong course instead of the right
+one. Mr. Mill's explanation of the vehemence and decision of his
+father's disapproval, when he did disapprove, and his refusal to allow
+honesty of purpose in the doer to soften his disapprobation of the deed,
+gives the reader a worthy and masculine notion of true tolerance. James
+Mill's 'aversion to many intellectual errors, or what he regarded as
+such, partook in a certain sense of the character of a moral feeling....
+None but those who do not care about opinions will confound this with
+intolerance. Those, who having opinions which they hold to be immensely
+important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have any
+deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a class
+and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right, and
+right what they think wrong: though they need not be, nor was my father,
+insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in their
+estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of by the
+whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person, being no more
+infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people on account of
+opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither himself does
+them any ill office, nor connives at its being done by others, he is not
+intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a conscientious sense
+of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom of all opinions is the
+only tolerance which is commendable, or to the highest moral order of
+minds, possible' (p. 51). This is another side of the co-ordination of
+Criticism and Belief, of Liberty and Duty, which attained in Mr. Mill
+himself a completeness that other men, less favoured in education and
+with less active power of self-control, are not likely to reach, but to
+reach it ought to be one of the prime objects of their mental
+discipline. The inculcation of this peculiar morality of the
+intelligence is one of the most urgently needed processes of our time.
+For the circumstance of our being in the very depths of a period of
+transition from one spiritual basis of thought to another, leads men not
+only to be content with holding a quantity of vague, confused, and
+contradictory opinions, but also to invest with the honourable name of
+candour a weak reluctance to hold any one of them earnestly.
+
+Mr. Mill experienced in the four or five last years of his life the
+disadvantage of trying to unite fairness towards the opinions from which
+he differed, with loyalty to the positive opinions which he accepted.
+'As I had showed in my political writings,' he says, 'that I was aware
+of the weak points in democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems,
+had not been without hopes of finding me an opponent of democracy: as I
+was able to see the Conservative side of the question, they presumed
+that like them I could not see any other side. Yet if they had really
+read my writings, they would have known that after giving full weight to
+all that appeared to me well grounded in the arguments against
+democracy, I unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while recommending
+that it should be accompanied by such institutions as were consistent
+with its principle and calculated to ward off its inconveniences' (p.
+309). This was only one illustration of what constantly happened, until
+at length, it is hardly too much to say, a man who had hitherto enjoyed
+a singular measure of general reverence because he was supposed to see
+truth in every doctrine, became downright unpopular among many classes
+in the community, because he saw more truth in one doctrine than
+another, and brought the propositions for whose acceptance he was most
+in earnest eagerly before the public.
+
+In a similar way the Autobiography shows us the picture of a man uniting
+profound self-respect with a singular neutrality where his own claims
+are concerned, a singular self-mastery and justice of mind, in matters
+where with most men the sense of their own personality is wont to be so
+exacting and so easily irritated. The history of intellectual eminence
+is too often a history of immoderate egoism. It has perhaps hardly ever
+been given to any one who exerted such influence as Mr. Mill did over
+his contemporaries, to view his own share in it with such discrimination
+and equity as marks every page of his book, and as used to mark every
+word of his conversation. Knowing as we all do the last infirmity of
+even noble minds, and how deep the desire to erect himself Pope and Sir
+Oracle lies in the spirit of a man with strong convictions, we may value
+the more highly, as well for its rarity as for its intrinsic worth, Mr.
+Mill's quality of self-effacement, and his steadfast care to look
+anywhere rather than in his own personal merits, for the source of any
+of those excellences which he was never led by false modesty to
+dissemble.
+
+Many people seem to find the most interesting figure in the book that
+stoical father, whose austere, energetic, imperious, and relentless
+character showed the temperament of the Scotch Covenanter of the
+seventeenth century, inspired by the principles and philosophy of France
+in the eighteenth. No doubt, for those in search of strong dramatic
+effects, the lines of this strenuous indomitable nature are full of
+impressiveness.[3] But one ought to be able to appreciate the
+distinction and strength of the father, and yet also be able to see that
+the distinction of the son's strength was in truth more really
+impressive still. We encounter a modesty that almost speaks the language
+of fatalism. Pieces of good fortune that most people would assuredly
+have either explained as due to their own penetration, or to the
+recognition of their worth by others, or else would have refrained from
+dwelling upon, as being no more than events of secondary importance, are
+by Mr. Mill invariably recognised at their full worth or even above it,
+and invariably spoken of as fortunate accidents, happy turns in the
+lottery of life, or in some other quiet fatalistic phrase, expressive of
+his deep feeling how much we owe to influences over which we have no
+control and for which we have no right to take any credit. His saying
+that 'it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be
+believed by all _quoad_ the characters of others, and disbelieved in
+regard to their own' (p. 169), went even further than that, for he
+teaches us to accept the doctrine of necessity _quoad_ the most marked
+felicities of life and character, and to lean lightly or not at all
+upon it in regard to our demerits. Humility is a rationalistic, no less
+than a Christian grace--not humility in face of error or arrogant
+pretensions or selfishness, nor a humility that paralyses energetic
+effort, but a steadfast consciousness of all the good gifts which our
+forerunners have made ready for us, and of the weight of our
+responsibility for transmitting these helpful forces to a new
+generation, not diminished but augmented.
+
+[Footnote 3: In an interesting volume (_The Minor Works of George
+Grote_, edited by Alexander Bain. London: Murray), we find Grote
+confirming Mr. Mill's estimate of his father's psychagogic quality. 'His
+unpremeditated oral exposition,' says Grote of James Mill, 'was hardly
+less effective than his prepared work with the pen; his colloquial
+fertility in philosophical subjects, his power of discussing himself,
+and stimulating others to discuss, his ready responsive inspirations
+through all the shifts and windings of a sort of Platonic dialogue,--all
+these accomplishments 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 observant intelligence. Of
+all persons whom we have known, Mr. James Mill was the one who stood
+least remote from the lofty Platonic ideal of Dialectic--[Greek: tou
+didonai kai dechesthai logon] (the giving and receiving of
+reasons)--competent alike to examine others or to be examined by them in
+philosophy. When to this we add a strenuous character, earnest
+convictions, and single-minded devotion to truth, with an utter disdain
+of mere paradox, it may be conceived that such a man exercised powerful
+intellectual ascendancy over youthful minds,' etc.--_Minor Works of
+George Grote_, p. 284.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In more than one remarkable place the Autobiography shows us distinctly
+what all careful students of Mr. Mill's books supposed, that with him
+the social aim, the repayment of the services of the past by devotion to
+the services of present and future, was predominant over any merely
+speculative curiosity or abstract interest. His preference for deeply
+reserved ways of expressing even his strongest feelings prevented him
+from making any expansive show of this governing sentiment. Though no
+man was ever more free from any taint of that bad habit of us English,
+of denying or palliating an abuse or a wrong, unless we are prepared
+with an instant remedy for it, yet he had a strong aversion to mere
+socialistic declamation. Perhaps, if one may say so without presumption,
+he was not indulgent enough in this respect. I remember once pressing
+him with some enthusiasm for Victor Hugo,--an enthusiasm, one is glad to
+think, which time does nothing to weaken. Mr. Mill, admitting, though
+not too lavishly, the superb imaginative power of this poetic master of
+our time, still counted it a fatal drawback to Hugo's worth and claim to
+recognition that 'he has not brought forward one single practical
+proposal for the improvement of the society against which he is
+incessantly thundering.' I ventured to urge that it is unreasonable to
+ask a poet to draft acts of parliament; and that by bringing all the
+strength of his imagination and all the majestic fulness of his sympathy
+to bear on the social horrors and injustices which still lie so thick
+about us, he kindled an inextinguishable fire in the hearts of men of
+weaker initiative and less imperial gifts alike of imagination and
+sympathy, and so prepared the forces out of which practical proposals
+and specific improvements may be expected to issue. That so obvious a
+kind of reflection should not have previously interested Mr. Mill's
+judgment in favour of the writer of the _Outcasts_, the _Legend of the
+Ages_, the _Contemplations_, only shows how strong was his dislike to
+all that savoured of the grandiose, and how afraid he always was of
+everything that seemed to dissociate emotion from rationally directed
+effort. That he was himself inspired by this emotion of pity for the
+common people, of divine rage against the injustice of the strong to the
+weak, in a degree not inferior to Victor Hugo himself, his whole career
+most effectually demonstrates.
+
+It is this devotion to the substantial good of the many, though
+practised without the noisy or ostentatious professions of more egoistic
+thinkers, which binds together all the parts of his work, from the
+_System of Logic_ down to his last speech on the Land Question. One of
+the most striking pages in the Autobiography is that in which he gives
+his reasons for composing the refutation of Hamilton, and as some of
+these especially valuable passages in the book seem to be running the
+risk of neglect in favour of those which happen to furnish material for
+the idle, pitiful gossip of London society, it may be well to reproduce
+it.
+
+'The difference,' he says, 'between these two schools of philosophy,
+that of Intuition and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere
+matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences,
+and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical
+opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to
+demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful
+and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and
+indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable
+part of his argument to show how those powerful feelings had their
+origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible.
+There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy
+which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by
+circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
+elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up
+favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the
+voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that
+of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing
+tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as
+innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs
+that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between
+individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally
+would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief
+hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one
+of the greatest stumbling-blocks to human improvement. This tendency has
+its source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterised the
+reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is a
+tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative
+interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure
+to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by the
+more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy.... Considering then
+the writings and fame of Sir W. Hamilton as the great fortress of the
+intuitional philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formidable
+from the imposing character, and the, in many respects, great personal
+merits and mental endowments of the man, I thought it might be a real
+service to philosophy to attempt a thorough examination of all his most
+important doctrines, and an estimate of his general claims to eminence
+as a philosopher; and I was confirmed in this resolution by observing
+that in the writings of at least one, and him one of the ablest, of Sir
+W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the
+justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly
+immoral--that it is our duty to bow down and worship before a Being
+whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be
+perhaps extremely different from those which, when speaking of our
+fellow-creatures, we call by the same name' (pp. 273-275).
+
+Thus we see that even where the distance between the object of his
+inquiry and the practical wellbeing of mankind seemed farthest, still
+the latter was his starting point, and the doing 'a real service to
+philosophy' only occurred to him in connection with a still greater and
+more real service to those social causes for which, and which only,
+philosophy is worth cultivating. In the _System of Logic_ the
+inspiration had been the same.
+
+'The notion that truths external to the mind,' he writes, 'may be known
+by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and
+experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual
+support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this
+theory every inveterate belief and every intense feeling of which the
+origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of
+justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient
+voucher and justification. There never was an instrument better devised
+for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength of
+this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the
+appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics
+and of the cognate branches of physical science. To expel it from these
+is to drive it from its stronghold.... In attempting to clear up the
+real nature of the evidence of mathematical and physical truth, the
+_System of Logic_ met the intuitive philosophers on ground on which they
+had previously been deemed unassailable; and gave its own explanation
+from experience and association of that peculiar character of what are
+called necessary truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidence
+must come from a deeper source than experience. Whether this has been
+done effectually is still _sub judice_; and even then, to deprive a mode
+of thought so strongly rooted in human prejudices and partialities of
+its mere speculative support, goes but a very little way towards
+overcoming it; but though only a step, it is a quite indispensable one;
+for since, after all, prejudice can only be successfully combated by
+philosophy, no way can really be made against it permanently, until it
+has been shown not to have philosophy on its side' (pp. 225-227).
+
+This was to lay the basis of a true positivism by the only means through
+which it can be laid firmly. It was to establish at the bottom of men's
+minds the habit of seeking explanations of all phenomena in experience,
+and building up from the beginning the great positive principle that we
+can only know phenomena, and can only know them experientially. We see,
+from such passages as the two that have been quoted, that with Mr. Mill,
+no less than with Comte, the ultimate object was to bring people to
+extend positive modes of thinking to the master subjects of morals,
+politics, and religion. Mr. Mill, however, with a wisdom which Comte
+unfortunately did not share, refrained from any rash and premature
+attempt to decide what would be the results of this much-needed
+extension. He knew that we were as yet only just coming in sight of the
+stage where these most complex of all phenomena can be fruitfully
+studied on positive methods, and he was content with doing as much as he
+could to expel other methods from men's minds, and to engender the
+positive spirit and temper. Comte, on the other hand, presumed at once
+to draw up a minute plan of social reconstruction, which contains some
+ideas of great beauty and power, some of extreme absurdity, and some
+which would be very mischievous if there were the smallest chance of
+their ever being realised. 'His book stands,' Mr. Mill truly says of the
+_System of Positive Polity_, 'a monumental warning to thinkers on
+society and politics of what happens when once men lose sight in their
+speculations of the value of Liberty and Individuality' (p. 213).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was his own sense of the value of Liberty which led to the production
+of the little tractate which Mr. Mill himself thought likely to survive
+longer than anything else that he had written, 'with the possible
+exception of the _Logic_,' as being 'a kind of philosophic text-book of
+a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern
+society tend to bring out into ever 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' (p. 253). It seems to us, however, that Mr.
+Mill's plea for Liberty in the abstract, invaluable as it is, still is
+less important than the memorable application of this plea, and of all
+the arguments supporting it, to that half of the human race whose
+individuality has hitherto been blindly and most wastefully repressed.
+The little book on the _Subjection of Women_, though not a capital
+performance like the _Logic_, was the capital illustration of the modes
+of reasoning about human character set forth in his _Logic_ applied to
+the case in which the old metaphysical notion of innate and indelible
+differences is still nearly as strong as ever it was, and in which its
+moral and social consequences are so inexpressibly disastrous, so
+superlatively powerful in keeping the ordinary level of the aims and
+achievements of life low and meagre. The accurate and unanswerable
+reasoning no less than the noble elevation of this great argument; the
+sagacity of a hundred of its maxims on individual conduct and character,
+no less than the combined rationality and beauty of its aspirations for
+the improvement of collective social life, make this piece probably the
+best illustration of all the best and richest qualities of its author's
+mind, and it is fortunate that a subject of such incomparable importance
+should have been first effectively presented for discussion in so
+worthy and pregnant a form.
+
+It is interesting to know definitely from the Autobiography, what is
+implied in the opening of the book itself, that a zealous belief in the
+advantages of abolishing the legal and social inequalities of women was
+not due to the accident of personal intimacy with one or two more women
+of exceptional distinction of character. What has been ignorantly
+supposed in our own day to be a crotchet of Mr. Mill's was the common
+doctrine of the younger proselytes of the Benthamite school, and Bentham
+himself was wholly with them (_Autobiography_, p. 105, and also 244);
+as, of course, were other thinkers of an earlier date, Condorcet for
+instance.[4] In this as in other subjects Mr. Mill did not go beyond his
+modest definition of his own originality--the application of old ideas
+in new forms and connections (p. 119), or the originality 'which every
+thoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressing
+truths which are common property' (p. 254). Or shall we say that he had
+an originality of a more genuine kind, which made him first diligently
+acquire what in an excellent phrase he calls _plenary possession_ of
+truths, and then transfuse them with a sympathetic and contagious
+enthusiasm?
+
+[Footnote 4: Condorcet's arguments the reader will find in vol. i. of
+the present series of these _Critical Miscellanies_, p. 249.]
+
+It is often complained that the book on Women has the radical
+imperfection of not speaking plainly on the question of the limitations
+proper to divorce. The present writer once ventured to ask Mr. Mill why
+he had left this important point undiscussed. Mr. Mill replied that it
+seemed to him impossible to settle the expediency of more liberal
+conditions of divorce, 'first, without hearing much more fully than we
+could possibly do at present the ideas held by women in the matter;
+second, until the experiment of marriage with entire equality between
+man and wife had been properly tried.' People who are in a hurry to get
+rid of their partners may find this very halting kind of work, and a man
+who wants to take a new wife before sunset, may well be irritated by a
+philosopher who tells him that the question may possibly be capable of
+useful discussion towards the middle of the next century. But Mr. Mill's
+argument is full of force and praiseworthy patience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The union of boundless patience with unshaken hope was one of Mr. Mill's
+most conspicuous distinctions. There are two crises in the history of
+grave and sensitive natures. One on the threshold of manhood, when the
+youth defines his purpose, his creed, his aspirations; the other towards
+the later part of middle life, when circumstance has strained his
+purpose, and tested his creed, and given to his aspirations a cold and
+practical measure. The second crisis, though less stirring, less vivid,
+less coloured to the imagination, is the weightier probation of the two,
+for it is final and decisive; it marks not the mere unresisted force of
+youthful impulse and implanted predispositions, as the earlier crisis
+does, but rather the resisting quality, the strength, the purity, the
+depth, of the native character, after the many princes of the power of
+the air have had time and chance of fighting their hardest against it.
+It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or
+five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or
+the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral
+climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial
+cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous
+resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the
+burning fiery furnace of circumstance.
+
+Mr. Mill did not escape the second crisis, any more than he had escaped
+the first, though he dismisses it in a far more summary manner. The
+education, he tells us, which his father had given him with such fine
+solicitude, had taught him to look for the greatest and surest source of
+happiness in sympathy with the good of mankind on a large scale, and had
+fitted him to work for this good of mankind in various ways. By the time
+he was twenty, his sympathies and passive susceptibilities had been so
+little cultivated, his analytic quality had been developed with so
+little balance in the shape of developed feelings, that he suddenly
+found himself unable to take pleasure in those thoughts of virtue and
+benevolence which had hitherto only been associated with logical
+demonstration and not with sympathetic sentiment. This dejection was
+dispelled mainly by the influence of Wordsworth--a poet austere yet
+gracious, energetic yet sober, penetrated with feeling for nature, yet
+penetrated with feeling for the homely lot of man. Here was the
+emotional synthesis, binding together the energies of the speculative
+and active mind by sympathetic interest in the common feelings and
+common destiny of human beings.
+
+For some ten years more (1826-1836) Mr. Mill hoped the greatest things
+for the good of society from reformed institutions. That was the period
+of parliamentary changes, and such hope was natural and universal. Then
+a shadow came over this confidence, and Mr. Mill advanced to the
+position that the choice of political institutions is subordinate to the
+question, 'what great improvement in life and culture stands next in
+order for the people concerned, as the condition of their further
+progress?' (p. 170). In this period he composed the _Logic_ (published
+1843) and the _Political Economy_ (1848). Then he saw what all ardent
+lovers of improvement are condemned to see, that their hopes have
+outstripped the rate of progress; that fulfilment of social aspiration
+is tardy and very slow of foot; and that the leaders of human thought
+are never permitted to enter into that Promised Land whither they are
+conducting others. Changes for which he had worked and from which he
+expected most, came to pass, but, after they had come to pass, they were
+'attended with much less benefit to human wellbeing than I should
+formerly have anticipated, because they had produced very little
+improvement in that which all real amelioration in the lot of mankind
+depends on, their intellectual and moral state.... I had learnt from
+experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones,
+without in the least altering the habit of mind of which false opinions
+are the result' (p. 239). This discovery appears to have brought on no
+recurrence of the dejection which had clouded a portion of his youth. It
+only set him to consider the root of so disappointing a conclusion, and
+led to the conviction that a great change in the fundamental
+constitution of men's modes of thought must precede any marked
+improvement in their lot. He perceived that society is now passing
+through a transitional period 'of weak convictions, paralysed
+intellects, and growing laxity of principle,' the consequence of the
+discredit in the more reflective minds of the old opinions on the
+cardinal subjects of religion, morals, and politics, which have now lost
+most of their efficacy for good, though still possessed of life enough
+to present formidable obstacles to the growth of better opinion on those
+subjects (p. 239).
+
+Thus the crisis of disappointment which breaks up the hope and effort of
+so many men who start well, or else throws them into poor and sterile
+courses, proved in this grave, fervent, and most reasonable spirit only
+the beginning of more serious endeavours in a new and more arduous vein.
+Hitherto he had been, as he says, 'more willing to be content with
+seconding the superficial improvements which had begun to take place in
+the common opinions of society and the world.' Henceforth he kept less
+and less in abeyance the more heretical part of his opinions, which he
+began more and more clearly to discern as 'almost the only ones, the
+assertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society' (p. 230). The
+crisis of middle age developed a new fortitude, a more earnest
+intrepidity, a greater boldness of expression about the deeper things,
+an interest profounder than ever in the improvement of the human lot.
+The book on the _Subjection of Women_, the _Liberty_, and probably some
+pieces that have not yet been given to the world, are the notable result
+of this ripest, loftiest, and most inspiring part of his life.
+
+This judgment does not appear to be shared by the majority of those who
+have hitherto published their opinions upon Mr. Mill's life and works.
+Perhaps it would have been odd if such a judgment had been common.
+People who think seriously of life and its conditions either are content
+with those conditions as they exist, or else they find them empty and
+deeply unsatisfying. Well, the former class, who naturally figure
+prominently in the public press, because the press is the more or less
+flattering mirror of the prevailing doctrines of the day, think that Mr.
+Mill's views of a better social future are chimerical, utopian, and
+sentimental. The latter class compensate themselves for the pinchedness
+of the real world about them by certain rapturous ideals, centring in
+God, a future life, and the long companionship of the blessed. The
+consequence of this absorption either in the immediate interests and
+aims of the hour, or in the interests and aims of an imaginary world
+which is supposed to await us after death, has been a hasty inclination
+to look on such a life and such purposes as are set forth in the
+Autobiography as essentially jejune and dreary. It is not in the least
+surprising that such a feeling should prevail. If it were otherwise, if
+the majority of thoughtful men and women were already in a condition to
+be penetrated by sympathy for the life of 'search with many sighs,' then
+we should have already gone far on our way towards the goal which a
+Turgot or a Mill set for human progress. If society had at once
+recognised the full attractiveness of a life arduously passed in
+consideration of the means by which the race may take its next step
+forward in the improvement of character and the amelioration of the
+common lot,--and this not from love of God nor hope of recompense in a
+world to come, and still less from hope of recompense or even any very
+firm assurance of fulfilled aspiration in this world,--then that
+fundamental renovation of conviction for which Mr. Mill sighed, and that
+evolution of a new faith to which he had looked forward in the far
+distance, would already have come to pass.
+
+Mr. Mill has been ungenerously ridiculed for the eagerness and
+enthusiasm of his contemplation of a new and better state of human
+society. Yet we have always been taught to consider it the mark of the
+loftiest and most spiritual character, for one to be capable of
+rapturous contemplation of a new and better state in a future life. Why,
+then, do you not recognise the loftiness and spirituality of those who
+make their heaven in the thought of the wider light and purer happiness
+that, in the immensity of the ages, may be brought to new generations of
+men, by long force of vision and endeavour? What great element is
+wanting in a life guided by such a hope? Is it not disinterested, and
+magnanimous, and purifying, and elevating? The countless beauties of
+association which cluster round the older faith may make the new seem
+bleak and chilly. But when what is now the old faith was itself new,
+that too may well have struck, as we know that it did strike, the
+adherent of the mellowed pagan philosophy as crude, meagre, jejune,
+dreary.
+
+Then Mr. Mill's life as disclosed to us in these pages has been called
+joyless, by that sect of religious partisans whose peculiarity is to
+mistake boisterousness for unction. Was the life of Christ himself,
+then, so particularly joyful? Can the life of any man be joyful who sees
+and feels the tragic miseries and hardly less tragic follies of the
+earth? The old Preacher, when he considered all the oppressions that are
+done under the sun, and beheld the tears of such as were oppressed and
+had no comforter, therefore praised the dead which are already dead more
+than the living which are yet alive, and declared him better than both,
+which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done
+under the sun. Those who are willing to trick their understandings and
+play fast and loose with words may, if they please, console themselves
+with the fatuous commonplaces of a philosophic optimism. They may, with
+eyes tight shut, cling to the notion that they live in the best of all
+possible worlds, or discerning all the anguish that may be compressed
+into threescore years and ten, still try to accept the Stoic's paradox
+that pain is not an evil. Or, most wonderful and most common of all,
+they may find this joy of which they talk, in meditating on the moral
+perfections of the omnipotent Being for whose diversion the dismal
+panorama of all the evil work done under the sun was bidden to unfold
+itself, and who sees that it is very good. Those who are capable of a
+continuity of joyous emotion on these terms may well complain of Mr.
+Mill's story as dreary; and so may the school of Solomon, who commended
+mirth because a man hath no better thing than to eat and to drink and to
+be merry. People, however, who are prohibited by their intellectual
+conditions from finding full satisfaction either in spiritual raptures
+or in pleasures of sense, may think the standard of happiness which Mr.
+Mill sought and reached, not unacceptable and not unworthy of being
+diligently striven after.
+
+Mr. Mill's conception of happiness in life is more intelligible if we
+contrast it with his father's. The Cynic element in James Mill, as his
+son now tells us (pg. 48), was that he had scarcely any belief in
+pleasures; he thought few of them worth the price which has to be paid
+for them; and he set down the greater number of the miscarriages in life
+as due to an excessive estimate of them. 'He thought human life a poor
+thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity
+had gone by.... He would sometimes say that if life were made what it
+might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth
+having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that
+possibility.' We should shrink from calling even this theory dreary,
+associated as it is with the rigorous enforcement of the heroic virtues
+of temperance and moderation, and the strenuous and careful bracing up
+of every faculty to face the inevitable and make the best of it. At
+bottom it is the theory of many of the bravest souls, who fare grimly
+through life in the mood of leaders of forlorn hopes, denying pleasures,
+yet very sensible of the stern delight of fortitude. We can have no
+difficulty in understanding that, when the elder Mill lay dying, 'his
+interest in all things and persons that had interested him through life
+was undiminished, nor did the approach of death cause the smallest
+wavering (as in so strong and firm a mind it was impossible that it
+should), in his convictions on the subject of religion. His principal
+satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, seemed to be the
+thought of what he had done to make the world better than he found it;
+and his chief regret in not living longer, that he had not had time to
+do more' (p. 203).[5]
+
+[Footnote 5: For the mood in which death was faced by another person who
+had renounced theology and the doctrine of a future state of
+consciousness, see Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, ii. 435, etc.]
+
+Mr. Mill, however, went beyond this conception. He had a belief in
+pleasures, and thought human life by no means a poor thing to those who
+know how to make the best of it. It was essential both to the stability
+of his utilitarian philosophy, and to the contentment of his own
+temperament, that the reality of happiness should be vindicated, and he
+did both vindicate and attain it. A highly pleasurable excitement that
+should have no end, of course he did not think possible; but he regarded
+the two constituents of a satisfied life, much tranquillity and some
+excitement, as perfectly attainable by many men, and as ultimately
+attainable by very many more. The ingredients of this satisfaction he
+set forth as follows:--a willingness not to expect more from life than
+life is capable of bestowing; an intelligent interest in the objects of
+mental culture; genuine private affections; and a sincere interest in
+the public good. What, on the other hand, are the hindrances which
+prevent these elements from being in the possession of every one born in
+a civilised country? Ignorance; bad laws or customs, debarring a man or
+woman from the sources of happiness within reach; and 'the positive
+evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering--such
+as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature
+loss of objects of affection.'[6] But every one of these calamitous
+impediments is susceptible of the weightiest modification, and some of
+them of final removal. Mr. Mill had learnt from Turgot and
+Condorcet--two of the wisest and noblest of men, as he justly calls them
+(113)--among many other lessons, this of the boundless improvableness of
+the human lot, and we may believe that he read over many a time the
+pages in which Condorcet delineated the Tenth Epoch in the history of
+human perfectibility, and traced out in words of finely reserved
+enthusiasm the operation of the forces which should consummate the
+progress of the race. 'All the grand sources of human suffering,' Mr.
+Mill thought, 'are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely,
+conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal is
+grievously slow--though a long succession of generations will perish in
+the breach before the conquest is completed, and this world becomes all
+that, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily be
+made--yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear a
+part, however small and unconspicuous, in the endeavour, will draw a
+noble enjoyment from the contest itself, which he would not for any
+bribe in the form of selfish indulgence consent to be without'
+(_Utilitarianism_, 22).
+
+[Footnote 6: For this exposition see _Utilitarianism_, pp. 18-24.]
+
+We thus see how far from dreary this wise and benign man actually found
+his own life; how full it was of cheerfulness, of animation, of
+persevering search, of a tranquillity lighted up at wholesome intervals
+by flashes of intellectual and moral excitement. That it was not seldom
+crossed by moods of despondency is likely enough, but we may at least be
+sure that these moods had nothing in common with the vulgar despondency
+of those whose hopes are centred in material prosperity in this world
+and spiritual prosperity in some other. They were, at least, the
+dejection of a magnanimous spirit, that could only be cast down by some
+new hindrance to the spread of reason and enlightenment among men, or
+some new weakening of their incentives to right doing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much has been said against Mr. Mill's strictures on society, and his
+withdrawal from it. If we realise the full force of all that he says of
+his own purpose in life, it is hard to see how either his opinion or his
+practice could have been different. He ceased to be content with
+'seconding the superficial improvements' in common ways of thinking, and
+saw the necessity of working at a fundamental reconstitution of accepted
+modes of thought. This in itself implies a condemnation of a social
+intercourse that rests on the base of conventional ways of looking at
+things. The better kind of society, it is true, appears to contain two
+classes; not only the class that will hear nothing said hostile to the
+greater social conventions, including among these the popular theology,
+but also another class who will tolerate or even encourage attack on
+the greater social conventions, and a certain mild discussion of
+improvements in them--provided only neither attack nor discussion be
+conducted in too serious a vein. A new idea about God, or property, or
+the family, is handed round among the company, as ladies of quality in
+Queen Anne's time handed round a black page or a China monster. In
+Bishop Butler's phrase, these people only want to know what is said, not
+what is true. To be in earnest, to show that you mean what you say, to
+think of drawing blood in the encounter, is thought, and perhaps very
+naturally thought, to be a piece of bad manners. Social intercourse can
+only exist either pleasantly or profitably among people who share a
+great deal of common ground in opinion and feeling. Mr. Mill, no doubt,
+was always anxious to find as much common ground as he honestly could,
+for this was one of the most characteristic maxims of his propagandism.
+But a man who had never been brought up in the popular religion, and who
+had been brought up in habits of the most scrupulous fair dealing with
+his own understanding; who had never closed his mind to new truths from
+likely sources, but whose character was formed, and whose mind was made
+up, on the central points of opinion, was not in a position to derive
+much benefit from those who in all respects represent a less advanced
+stage of mental development. On the other hand, all the benefit which
+they were in a position to derive from him could be adequately secured
+by reading what he wrote. Perhaps there is nothing wiser among the wise
+things written in the Autobiography than the remarks on the fact that
+persons of any mental superiority, who greatly frequent society, are
+greatly deteriorated by it. 'Not to mention loss of time, the tone of
+their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those of
+their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society
+they frequent: they come to look on their most elevated objects as
+unpractical, or at least too remote from realisation to be more than a
+vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their
+higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and
+affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and
+judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep'
+(p. 228). That a man loses something, nay, that he loses much, by being
+deprived of animating intercourse with other men, Mr. Mill would
+probably have been the first to admit. Where that intercourse can be
+had, nothing is more fit to make the judgment robust, nothing more fit
+to freshen and revive our interests, and to clothe them with reality.
+Even second-rate companionship has some clear advantages. The question
+is, whether these advantages outweigh the equally clear disadvantages.
+Mr. Mill was persuaded that they do not.
+
+Those whom disgust at the aimlessness and insignificance of most of our
+social intercourse may dispose to withdrawal from it--and their number
+will probably increase as the reaction against intellectual flippancy
+goes on--will do well to remember that Mr. Mill's retirement and his
+vindication of it sprang from no moral valetudinarianism. He did not
+retire to gratify any self-indulgent whim, but only in order to work the
+more uninterruptedly _and definitely_. The Autobiography tells us what
+pains he took to keep himself informed of all that was going on in every
+part of the world. 'In truth, the modern facilities of communication
+have not only removed all the disadvantages, to a political writer in
+tolerably easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of political
+action, but have converted them into advantages. The immediate and
+regular receipt of newspapers and periodicals keeps him _au courant_ of
+even the most temporary politics, and gives him a much more correct view
+of the state and progress of opinion than he could acquire by personal
+contact with individuals; for every one's social intercourse is more or
+less limited to particular sets or classes, whose impressions and no
+others reach him through that channel; and experience has taught me that
+those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called
+society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the
+organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either
+of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a
+recluse who reads the newspapers need be. There are, no doubt,
+disadvantages in too long a separation from one's country--in not
+occasionally renewing one's impressions of the light in which men and
+things appear when seen from a position in the midst of them; but the
+deliberate judgment formed at a distance, and undisturbed by
+inequalities of perspective, is the most to be depended on, even for
+application in practice. Alternating between the two positions, I
+combined the advantages of both.' Those who knew him will perhaps agree
+that he was more widely and precisely informed of the transactions of
+the day, in every department of activity all over the world, than any
+other person of their acquaintance. People should remember, further,
+that though Mr. Mill saw comparatively little of men after a certain
+time, yet he was for many years of his life in constant and active
+relations with men. It was to his experience in the Indian Office that
+he attributed some of his most serviceable qualities, especially this:
+'I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain
+everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not
+have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have
+the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with
+complete equanimity the being overruled altogether' (pp. 85, 86). In
+these words we seem almost to hear the modest and simple tones of the
+writer's own voice.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3), by 
+John Morley
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+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol 3, Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill
+       and Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography, by John Morley.
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3)
+       Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2007 [EBook #20887]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+ <h1>CRITICAL<br /><br />
+  MISCELLANIES</h1>
+
+  <h4>BY</h4>
+
+  <h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+
+  <h3>VOL. III.</h3>
+
+<h3>ESSAY 2: THE DEATH OF MR MILL<br /><br />
+ESSAY 3: MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY</h3>
+
+
+<p class="center">London<br />
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+
+1904
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><th align='center'>THE DEATH OF MR. MILL.</th></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Peculiar office of the Teacher</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_37'><b>37</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Mill's influence in the universities and the press</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_39'><b>39</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His union of science with aspiration</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_40'><b>40</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And of courage with patience</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_42'><b>42</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His abstinence from society</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_45'><b>45</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Sense of the tendency of society to relapse</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_46'><b>46</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Peculiar trait of his authority</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_47'><b>47</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The writer's last day with him</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_48'><b>48</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><th align='center'>MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY</th></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The spirit of search</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_53'><b>53</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Key to Mill's type of character and its value</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_54'><b>54</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Sensibility of his intellect</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_56'><b>56</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Yet no reaction against his peculiar education</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_57'><b>57</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Quality of the Autobiography</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_58'><b>58</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>One of its lessons&mdash;&#956;&#7953;&#956;&#957;&#951;&#963;&#959; &#7937;&#960;&#953;&#963;&#964;&#949;&#953;&#957;</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_60'><b>60</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Mill's aversion to the spirit of sect</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_60'><b>60</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Not a hindrance to systematisation</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_61'><b>61</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Criticism united with belief</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_63'><b>63</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Practical difficulties in the union of loyalty with tolerance</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_64'><b>64</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Impressiveness of Mill's self-effacement</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_65'><b>65</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His contempt for socialistic declamation</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_68'><b>68</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Yet the social aim paramount in him</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_69'><b>69</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Illustrated in his attack on Hamilton</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_71'><b>71</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And in the Logic</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_72'><b>72</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The book on the Subjection of Women</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_75'><b>75</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The two crises of life</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_77'><b>77</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Mill did not escape the second of them</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_78'><b>78</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Influence of Wordsworth</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_79'><b>79</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Hope from reformed institutions</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_79'><b>79</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>This hope replaced by efforts in a deeper vein</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_80'><b>80</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Popular opinion of such efforts</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_81'><b>81</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Irrational disparagement of Mill's hope</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_82'><b>82</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Mill's conception of happiness contrasted with his father's</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_84'><b>84</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Remarks on his withdrawal from society</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_88'><b>88</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>It arose from no moral valetudinarianism</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_91'><b>91</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_DEATH_OF_MR_MILL" id="THE_DEATH_OF_MR_MILL"></a>THE DEATH OF MR. MILL.</h2>
+
+<h3>(<i>May 1873.</i>)</h3>
+
+
+<p>The tragic commonplaces of the grave sound a fuller note as we mourn for
+one of the greater among the servants of humanity. A strong and pure
+light is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficent
+purpose. One of those high and most worthy spirits who arise from time
+to time to stir their generation with new mental impulses in the deeper
+things, has perished from among us. The death of one who did so much to
+impress on his contemporaries that physical law works independently of
+moral law, marks with profounder emphasis the ever ancient and ever
+fresh decree that there is one end to the just and the unjust, and that
+the same strait tomb awaits alike the poor dead whom nature or
+circumstance imprisoned in mean horizons, and those who saw far and felt
+passionately and put their reason to noble uses. Yet the fulness of our
+grief is softened by a certain greatness and solemnity in the event. The
+teachers of men are so few, the gift of intellectual fatherhood is so
+rare, it is surrounded by such singular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> gloriousness. The loss of a
+powerful and generous statesman, or of a great master in letters or art,
+touches us with many a vivid regret. The Teacher, the man who has
+talents and has virtues, and yet has a further something which is
+neither talent nor virtue, and which gives him the mysterious secret of
+drawing men after him, leaves a deeper sense of emptiness than this; but
+lamentation is at once soothed and elevated by a sense of sacredness in
+the occasion. Even those whom Mr. Mill honoured with his friendship, and
+who must always bear to his memory the affectionate veneration of sons,
+may yet feel their pain at the thought that they will see him no more,
+raised into a higher mood as they meditate on the loftiness of his task
+and the steadfastness and success with which he achieved it. If it is
+grievous to think that such richness of culture, such full maturity of
+wisdom, such passion for truth and justice, are now by a single stroke
+extinguished, at least we may find some not unworthy solace in the
+thought of the splendid purpose that they have served in keeping alive,
+and surrounding with new attractions, the difficult tradition of patient
+and accurate thinking in union with unselfish and magnanimous living.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Much will one day have to be said as to the precise value of Mr. Mill's
+philosophical principles, the more or less of his triumphs as a
+dialectician, his skill as a critic and an expositor. However this trial
+may go, we shall at any rate be sure that with his reputa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>tion will
+stand or fall the intellectual repute of a whole generation of his
+countrymen. The most eminent of those who are now so fast becoming the
+front line, as death mows down the veterans, all bear traces of his
+influence, whether they are avowed disciples or avowed opponents. If
+they did not accept his method of thinking, at least he determined the
+questions which they should think about. For twenty years no one at all
+open to serious intellectual impressions has left Oxford without having
+undergone the influence of Mr. Mill's teaching, though it would be too
+much to say that in that gray temple where they are ever burnishing new
+idols, his throne is still unshaken. The professorial chairs there and
+elsewhere are more and more being filled with men whose minds have been
+trained in his principles. The universities only typify his influence on
+the less learned part of the world. The better sort of journalists
+educated themselves on his books, and even the baser sort acquired a
+habit of quoting from them. He is the only writer in the world whose
+treatises on highly abstract subjects have been printed during his
+lifetime in editions for the people, and sold at the price of railway
+novels. Foreigners from all countries read his books as attentively as
+his most eager English disciples, and sought his opinion as to their own
+questions with as much reverence as if he had been a native oracle. An
+eminent American who came over on an official mission which brought him
+into contact with most of the leading statesmen throughout Europe,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> said
+to the present writer:&mdash;'The man who impressed me most of them all was
+Stuart Mill; you placed before him the facts on which you sought his
+opinion. He took them, gave you the different ways in which they might
+fairly be looked at, balanced the opposing considerations, and then
+handed you a final judgment in which nothing was left out. His mind
+worked like a splendid piece of machinery; you supply it with raw
+material, and it turns you out a perfectly finished product.' Of such a
+man England has good reason to be very proud.</p>
+
+<p>He was stamped in many respects with specially English quality. He is
+the latest chief of a distinctively English school of philosophy, in
+which, as has been said, the names of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, and
+Bentham (and Mr. Mill would have added James Mill) mark the line of
+succession&mdash;the school whose method subordinates imagination to
+observation, and whose doctrine lays the foundations of knowledge in
+experience, and the tests of conduct in utility. Yet, for all this, one
+of his most remarkable characteristics was less English than French; his
+constant admission of an ideal and imaginative element in social
+speculation, and a glowing persuasion that the effort and wisdom and
+ingenuity of men are capable, if free opportunity be given by social
+arrangements, of raising human destiny to a pitch that is at present
+beyond our powers of conception. Perhaps the sum of all his distinction
+lies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of
+rigorous sense of what is real<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> and practicable with bright and luminous
+hope. He told one who was speaking of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, that
+in his younger days whenever he was inclined to be discouraged, he was
+in the habit of turning to this book, and that he never did so without
+recovering possession of himself. To the same friend, who had printed
+something comparing Mr. Mill's repulse at Westminster with the dismissal
+of the great minister of Lewis the Sixteenth, he wrote:&mdash;'I never
+received so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to Turgot;
+it is indeed an honour to me that such an assimilation should have
+occurred to you.' Those who have studied the character of one whom even
+the rigid Austin thought worthy to be called 'the godlike Turgot,' know
+both the nobleness and the rarity of this type.</p>
+
+<p>Its force lies not in single elements, but in that combination of an
+ardent interest in human improvement with a reasoned attention to the
+law of its conditions, which alone deserves to be honoured with the high
+name of wisdom. This completeness was one of the secrets of Mr. Mill's
+peculiar attraction for young men, and for the comparatively few women
+whose intellectual interest was strong enough to draw them to his books.
+He satisfied the ingenuous moral ardour which is instinctive in the best
+natures, until the dust of daily life dulls or extinguishes it, and at
+the same time he satisfied the rationalistic qualities, which are not
+less marked in the youthful temperament of those who by and by do the
+work of the world. This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> mixture of intellectual gravity with a
+passionate love of improvement in all the aims and instruments of life,
+made many intelligences alive who would otherwise have slumbered, or
+sunk either into a dry pedantry on the one hand, or a windy, mischievous
+philanthropy on the other. He showed himself so wholly free from the
+vulgarity of the sage. He could hope for the future without taking his
+eye from the realities of the present. He recognised the social
+destination of knowledge, and kept the elevation of the great art of
+social existence ever before him, as the ultimate end of all speculative
+activity.</p>
+
+<p>Another side of this rare combination was his union of courage with
+patience, of firm nonconformity with silent conformity. Compliance is
+always a question of degree, depending on time, circumstance, and
+subject. Mr. Mill hit the exact mean, equally distant from timorous
+caution and self-indulgent violence. He was unrivalled in the difficult
+art of conciliating as much support as was possible and alienating as
+little sympathy as possible, for novel and extremely unpopular opinions.
+He was not one of those who strive to spread new faiths by brilliant
+swordplay with buttoned foils, and he was not one of those who run amuck
+among the idols of the tribe and the market-place and the theatre. He
+knew how to kindle the energy of all who were likely to be persuaded by
+his reasoning, without stimulating in a corresponding degree the energy
+of persons whose convictions he attacked. Thus he husbanded the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+strength of truth, and avoided wasteful friction. Probably no English
+writer that ever lived has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the very
+root of the theological spirit, yet there is only one passage in the
+writings published during his lifetime&mdash;I mean a well-known passage in
+the Liberty&mdash;which could give any offence to the most devout person. His
+conformity, one need hardly say, never went beyond the negative degree,
+nor ever passed beyond the conformity of silence. That guilty and
+grievously common pusillanimity which leads men to make or act
+hypocritical professions, always moved his deepest abhorrence. And he
+did not fear publicly to testify his interest in the return of an
+atheist to parliament.</p>
+
+<p>His courage was not of the spurious kinds arising from anger, or
+ignorance of the peril, or levity, or a reckless confidence. These are
+all very easy. His distinction was that he knew all the danger to
+himself, was anxious to save pain to others, was buoyed up by no rash
+hope that the world was to be permanently bettered at a stroke, and yet
+for all this he knew how to present an undaunted front to a majority.
+The only fear he ever knew was fear lest a premature or excessive
+utterance should harm a good cause. He had measured the prejudices of
+men, and his desire to arouse this obstructive force in the least degree
+compatible with effective advocacy of any improvement, set the single
+limit to his intrepidity. Prejudices were to him like physical
+predispositions, with which you have to make your account. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> knew,
+too, that they are often bound up with the most valuable elements in
+character and life, and hence he feared that violent surgery which in
+eradicating a false opinion fatally bruises at the same time a true and
+wholesome feeling that may cling to it. The patience which with some men
+is an instinct, and with others a fair name for indifference, was with
+him an acquisition of reason and conscience.</p>
+
+<p>The value of this wise and virtuous mixture of boldness with tolerance,
+of courageous speech with courageous reserve, has been enormous. Along
+with his direct pleas for freedom of thought and freedom of speech, it
+has been the chief source of that liberty of expressing unpopular
+opinions in this country without social persecution, which is now so
+nearly complete, that he himself was at last astonished by it. The
+manner of his dialectic, firm and vigorous as the dialectic was in
+matter, has gradually introduced mitigating elements into the atmosphere
+of opinion. Partly, no doubt, the singular tolerance of free discussion
+which now prevails in England&mdash;I do not mean that it is at all
+perfect&mdash;arises from the prevalent scepticism, from indifference, and
+from the influence of some of the more high-minded of the clergy. But
+Mr. Mill's steadfast abstinence from drawing wholesale indictments
+against persons or classes whose opinions he controverted, his generous
+candour, his scrupulous respect for any germ of good in whatever company
+it was found, and his large allowances, contributed positive elements to
+what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> might otherwise have been the negative tolerance that comes of
+moral stagnation. Tolerance of distasteful notions in others became
+associated in his person at once with the widest enlightenment, and the
+strongest conviction of the truth of our own notions.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>His career, beside all else, was a protest of the simplest and loftiest
+kind against some of the most degrading features of our society. No one
+is more alive than he was to the worth of all that adds grace and
+dignity to human life; but the sincerity of this feeling filled him with
+aversion for the make-believe dignity of a luxurious and artificial
+community. Without either arrogance or bitterness, he stood aloof from
+that conventional intercourse which is misnamed social duty. Without
+either discourtesy or cynicism, he refused to play a part in that dance
+of mimes which passes for life among the upper classes. In him, to
+extraordinary intellectual attainments was added the gift of a firm and
+steadfast self-respect, which unfortunately does not always go with
+them. He felt the reality of things, and it was easier for a workman
+than for a princess to obtain access to him. It is not always the men
+who talk most affectingly about our being all of one flesh and blood,
+who are proof against those mysterious charms of superior rank, which do
+so much to foster unworthy conceptions of life in English society; and
+there are many people capable of accepting Mr. Mill's social<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+principles, and the theoretical corollaries they contain, who yet would
+condemn his manly plainness and austere consistency in acting on them.
+The too common tendency in us all to moral slovenliness, and a lazy
+contentment with a little flaccid protest against evil, finds a constant
+rebuke in his career. The indomitable passion for justice which made him
+strive so long and so tenaciously to bring to judgment a public
+official, whom he conceived to be a great criminal, was worthy of one of
+the stoutest patriots in our seventeenth-century history. The same moral
+thoroughness stirred the same indignation in him on a more recent
+occasion, when he declared it 'a permanent disgrace to the Government
+that the iniquitous sentence on the gas-stokers was not remitted as soon
+as passed.'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Much of his most striking quality was owing to the exceptional degree in
+which he was alive to the constant tendency of society to lose some
+excellence of aim, to relapse at some point from the standard of truth
+and right which had been reached by long previous effort, to fall back
+in height of moral ideal. He was keenly sensible that it is only by
+persistent striving after improvement in our conceptions of duty, and
+improvement in the external means for realising them, that even the
+acquisitions of past generations are retained. He knew the intense
+difficulty of making life better by ever so little. Hence at once the
+exaltation of his own ideas of truth and right,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> and his eagerness to
+conciliate anything like virtuous social feeling, in whatever
+intellectual or political association he found it. Hence also the
+vehemence of his passion for the unfettered and unchecked development of
+new ideas on all subjects, of originality in moral and social points of
+view; because repression, whether by public opinion or in any other way,
+may be the means of untold waste of gifts that might have conferred on
+mankind unspeakable benefits. The discipline and vigour of his
+understanding made him the least indulgent of judges to anything like
+charlatanry, and effectually prevented his unwillingness to let the
+smallest good element be lost, from degenerating into that weak kind of
+universalism which nullifies some otherwise good men.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Some great men seize upon us by the force of an imposing and majestic
+authority; their thoughts impress the imagination, their words are
+winged, they are as prophets bearing high testimony that cannot be
+gainsaid. Bossuet, for instance, or Pascal. Others, and of these Mr.
+Mill was one, acquire disciples not by a commanding authority, but by a
+moderate and impersonal kind of persuasion. He appeals not to our sense
+of greatness and power in a teacher, which is noble, but to our love of
+finding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. People
+who like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with herald
+and trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitual
+effacement of his own<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> personality marked a delicate and very rare shade
+in his reverence for the sacred purity of truth.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Meditation on the influence of one who has been the foremost instructor
+of his time in wisdom and goodness quickly breaks off, in this hour when
+his loss is fresh upon us; it changes into affectionate reminiscences
+for which silence is more fitting. In such an hour thought turns rather
+to the person than the work of the master whom we mourn. We recall his
+simplicity, gentleness, heroic self-abnegation; his generosity in
+encouraging, his eager readiness in helping; the warm kindliness of his
+accost, the friendly brightening of the eye. The last time I saw him was
+a few days before he left England.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> He came to spend a day with me in
+the country, of which the following brief notes happened to be written
+at the time in a letter to a friend:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'He came down by the morning train to Guildford 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. </p></div>
+
+
+<p>'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 <i>Wilhelm Meister</i>, should yet have behaved so
+systematically ill to women. Goethe 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 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 hothouse.</p>
+
+<p>'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.</p>
+
+<p>'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 cheeked by the
+active competition of life with men trained in more enlightened systems.
+Spoke of Home Rule.</p>
+
+<p>'Made remarks on the difference in the feeling of modern refusers of
+Christianity as compared with that of 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&mdash;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.
+"Words<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>worth," 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.</p>
+
+<p>'Spoke of the modern tendency to pure theism, and met the objection that
+it retards improvement by turning the minds of some of the best men from
+social affairs, by the counter-proposition that it is useful to society,
+apart from the question of its truth,&mdash;useful as a provisional belief,
+because people will identify serviceable ministry to men with service of
+God. Thinks we cannot with any sort of precision define the coming
+modification of religion, but anticipates that it will undoubtedly rest
+upon the solidarity of mankind, as Comte said, and as you and I believe.
+Perceives two things, at any rate, which are likely to lead men to
+invest this with the moral authority of a religion; first, they will
+become more and more impressed by the awful fact that a piece of conduct
+to-day may prove a curse to men and women scores and even hundreds of
+years after the author of it is dead; and second, they will more and
+more feel that they can only satisfy their sentiment of gratitude to
+seen or unseen benefactors, can only repay the untold benefits they have
+inherited, by diligently maintaining the traditions of service.</p>
+
+<p>'And so forth, full of interest and suggestiveness all through. When he
+got here, he chatted to R&mdash;&mdash; over our lunch, with something of the
+simple 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 little roadside station, and one of
+the most delightful days of my life came to its end, like all other
+days, delightful and sorrowful.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Alas, the sorrowful day which ever dogs our delight followed very
+quickly. The nightingale that he longed for fills the darkness with
+music, but not for the ear of the dead master: he rests in the deeper
+darkness where the silence is unbroken for ever. We may console
+ourselves with the reflection offered by the dying Socrates to his
+sorrowful companions: he who has arrayed the soul in her own proper
+jewels of moderation and justice and courage and nobleness and truth, is
+ever ready for the journey when his time comes. We have lost a great
+teacher and example of knowledge and virtue, but men will long feel the
+presence of his character about them, making them ashamed of what is
+indolent or selfish, and encouraging them to all disinterested labour,
+both in trying to do good and in trying to find out what the good
+is,&mdash;which is harder.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="MR_MILLS_AUTOBIOGRAPHY" id="MR_MILLS_AUTOBIOGRAPHY"></a>MR. MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>Chercher en g&eacute;missant</i>&mdash;search with many sighs&mdash;that was Pascal's
+notion of praiseworthy living and choosing the better part. Search, and
+search with much travail, strikes us as the chief intellectual ensign
+and device of that eminent man whose record of his own mental nurture
+and growth we have all been reading. Everybody endowed with energetic
+intelligence has a measure of the spirit of search poured out upon him.
+All such persons act on the Socratic maxim that the life without inquiry
+is a life to be lived by no man. But it is the rare distinction of a
+very few to accept the maxim in its full significance, to insist on an
+open mind as the true secret of wisdom, to press the examination and
+testing of our convictions as the true way at once to stability and
+growth of character, and thus to make of life what it is so good for us
+that it should be, a continual building up, a ceaseless fortifying and
+enlargement and multiplication of the treasures of the spirit. To make 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> underneath them, and that in any
+case the discovery of what it was that made them plausible would be a
+benefit to truth,'<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>&mdash;to thrust out the spirit of party, of sect, of
+creed, of the poorer sort of self-esteem, of futile contentiousness, and
+so to seek and again seek with undeviating singleness of mind the right
+interpretation of our experiences&mdash;here is the genuine seal of
+intellectual mastery and the true stamp of a perfect rationality.</p>
+
+<p>The men to whom this is the ideal of the life of the reason, and who
+have done anything considerable towards spreading a desire after it,
+deserve to have their memories gratefully cherished even by those who do
+not agree with all their positive opinions. We need only to reflect a
+little on the conditions of human existence; on the urgent demand which
+material necessities inevitably make on so immense a proportion of our
+time and thought; on the space which is naturally filled up by the
+activity of absorbing affections; on the fatal power of mere tradition
+and report over the indifferent, and the fatal power of inveterate
+prejudice over so many even of the best of those who are not
+indifferent. Then we shall know better how to value such a type of
+character and life as Mr. Mill has now told us the story of, in which
+intellectual impressionableness on the most important subjects of human
+thought was so cultivated as almost to acquire the strength and quick
+responsiveness of emotional sensibility. And this,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> without the too
+common drawback to great openness of mind. This drawback consists in
+loose beliefs, taken up to-day and silently dropped to-morrow;
+vacillating opinions, constantly being exchanged for their contraries;
+feeble convictions, appearing, shifting, vanishing, in the quicksands of
+an unstable mind.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody will impute any of these disastrous weaknesses to Mr. Mill. His
+impressionableness was of the valuable positive kind, which adds and
+assimilates new elements from many quarters, without disturbing the
+organic structure of the whole. What he says of one stage in his growth
+remained generally true of him until the very end:&mdash;'I found the fabric
+of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places, and I
+never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in
+weaving it anew. I never in the course of my transition was content to
+remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I had
+taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its
+relations to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect
+ought to extend in modifying or superseding them' (p. 156). This careful
+and conscientious recognition of the duty of having ordered opinions,
+and of responsibility for these opinions being both as true and as
+consistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could make
+them, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly from
+doctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point to
+point in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+sensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights of
+rationalism suddenly into the pit of an infallible church; and from
+those who, like La Mennais, move violently between faith and reason,
+between tradition and inquiry, between the fulness of deference to
+authority and the fulness of individual self-assertion.</p>
+
+<p>All minds of the first quality move and grow; they have a susceptibility
+to many sorts of new impressions, a mobility, a feeling outwards, which
+makes it impossible for them to remain in the stern fixity of an early
+implanted set of dogmas, whether philosophic or religious. In stoical
+tenacity of character, as well as in intellectual originality and
+concentrated force of understanding, some of those who knew both tell us
+that Mr. Mill was inferior to his father. But who does not feel in the
+son the serious charm of a power of adaptation and pliableness which we
+can never associate with the hardy and more rigorous nature of the
+other? And it was just because he had this sensibility of the intellect,
+that the history of what it did for him is so edifying a performance for
+a people like ourselves, among whom that quality is so extremely
+uncommon. For it was the sensibility of strength and not of weakness,
+nor of mere over-refinement and subtlety. We may estimate the
+significance of such a difference, when we think how little, after all,
+the singular gifts of a Newman or a Maurice have done for their
+contemporaries, simply because these two eminent men allowed
+consciousness of their own weakness to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> 'sickly over' the spontaneous
+impulses of their strength.</p>
+
+<p>The wonder is that the reaction against such an education as that
+through which James Mill brought his son,&mdash;an education so intense, so
+purely analytical, doing so much for the reason and so little for the
+satisfaction of the affections,&mdash;was not of the most violent kind. The
+wonder is that the crisis through which nearly every youth of good
+quality has to pass, and from which Mr. Mill, as he has told us, by no
+means escaped, did not land him in some of the extreme forms of
+transcendentalism. If it had done so the record of the journey would no
+doubt have been more abundant in melodramatic incidents. It would have
+done more to tickle the fancy of 'the present age of loud disputes but
+weak convictions.' And it might have been found more touching by the
+large numbers of talkers and writers who seem to think that a history of
+a careful man's opinions on grave and difficult subjects ought to have
+all the rapid movements and unexpected turns of a romance, and that a
+book without rapture and effusion and a great many capital letters must
+be joyless and disappointing. Those of us who dislike literary hysteria
+as much as we dislike the coarseness that mistakes itself for force, may
+well be glad to follow the mental history of a man who knew how to move
+and grow without any of these reactions and leaps on the one hand, or
+any of that overdone realism on the other, which may all make a more
+striking picture, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> which do assuredly more often than not mark the
+ruin of a mind and the nullification of a career.</p>
+
+<p>If we are now and then conscious in the book of a certain want of
+spacing, of changing perspectives and long vistas; if we have perhaps a
+sense of being too narrowly enclosed; if we miss the relish of humour or
+the occasional relief of irony; we ought to remember that we are busy
+not with a work of imagination or art, but with the practical record of
+the formation of an eminent thinker's mental habits and the succession
+of his mental attitudes. The formation of such mental habits is not a
+romance, but the most arduous of real concerns. If we are led up to none
+of the enkindled summits of the soul, and plunged into none of its
+abysses, that is no reason why we should fail to be struck by the pale
+flame of strenuous self-possession, or touched by the ingenuousness and
+simplicity of the speaker's accents. A generation continually excited by
+narratives, as sterile as vehement, of storm and stress and spiritual
+shipwreck, might do well, if it knew the things that pertained to its
+peace, to ponder this unvarnished history&mdash;the history of a man who,
+though he was not one of the picturesque victims of the wasteful
+torments of an uneasy spiritual self-consciousness, yet laboured so
+patiently after the gifts of intellectual strength, and did so much
+permanently to widen the judgments of the world.</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Mill's Autobiography has no literary grandeur, nor artistic
+variety, it has the rarer merit of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> presenting for our contemplation a
+character that was infested by none of the smaller passions, and warped
+by none of the more unintelligent attitudes of the human mind. We have
+to remember that it is exactly these, the smaller passions on the one
+hand, and slovenliness of intelligence on the other, which are even
+worse agencies in spoiling the worth of life and the advance of society
+than the more imposing vices either of thought or sentiment. Many have
+told the tale of a life of much external eventfulness. There is a rarer
+instructiveness in the quiet career of one whose life was an incessant
+education, a persistent strengthening of the mental habit of 'never
+accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning a
+puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up;
+never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored,
+because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly
+understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole' (p. 123).
+It is true that this mental habit is not so singular in itself, for it
+is the common and indispensable merit of every truly scientific thinker.
+Mr. Mill's distinction lay in the deliberate intention and the
+systematic patience with which he brought it to the consideration of
+moral and religious and social subjects. In this region hitherto, for
+reasons that are not difficult to seek, the empire of prejudice and
+passion has been so much stronger, so much harder to resist, than in the
+field of physical science.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sect is so ready to succeed sect, and school comes after school, with
+constant replacement of one sort of orthodoxy by another sort, until
+even the principle of relativity becomes the base of a set of absolute
+and final dogmas, and the very doctrine of uncertainty itself becomes
+fixed in a kind of authoritative nihilism. It is, therefore, a signal
+gain that we now have a new type, with the old wise device, &#956;&#7953;&#956;&#957;&#951;&#963;&#959; &#7937;&#960;&#953;&#963;&#964;&#949;&#953;&#957;&mdash;<i>be sure that you distrust</i>. Distrust your own bias;
+distrust your supposed knowledge; constantly try, prove, fortify your
+firmest convictions. And all this, throughout the whole domain where the
+intelligence rules. It was characteristic of a man of this type that he
+should have been seized by that memorable passage in Condorcet's Life of
+Turgot to which Mr. Mill refers (p. 114), and which every man with an
+active interest in serious affairs should bind about his neck and write
+on the tablets of his heart.</p>
+
+<p>'Turgot,' says his wise biographer, 'always looked upon anything like a
+sect as mischievous.... From the moment that a sect comes into
+existence, all the individuals composing it become answerable for the
+faults and errors of each one of them. The obligation to remain united
+leads them to suppress or dissemble all truths that might wound anybody
+whose adhesion is useful to the sect. They are forced to establish in
+some form a body of doctrine, and the opinions which make a part of it,
+being adopted without inquiry, become in due time pure prejudices.
+Friendship stops with the individuals; but the hatred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> and envy that any
+of them may arouse extends to the whole sect. If this sect be formed by
+the most enlightened men of the nation, if the defence of truths of the
+greatest importance to the common happiness be the object of its zeal,
+the mischief is still worse. Everything true or useful which they
+propose is rejected without examination. Abuses and errors of every kind
+always have for their defenders that herd of presumptuous and mediocre
+mortals, who are the bitterest enemies of all celebrity and renown.
+Scarcely is a truth made clear, before those to whom it would be
+prejudicial crush it under the name of a sect that is sure to have
+already become odious, and are certain to keep it from obtaining so much
+as a hearing. Turgot, then, was persuaded that perhaps the greatest ill
+you can do to truth is to drive those who love it to form themselves
+into a sect, and that these in turn can commit no more fatal mistake
+than to have the vanity or the weakness to fall into the trap.'</p>
+
+<p>Yet we know that with Mr. Mill as with Turgot this deep distrust of sect
+was no hindrance to the most careful systematisation of opinion and
+conduct. He did not interpret many-sidedness in the flaccid watery sense
+which flatters the indolence of so many of our contemporaries, who like
+to have their ears amused with a new doctrine each morning, to be held
+for a day, and dropped in the evening, and who have little more
+seriousness in their intellectual life than the busy insects of a summer
+noon. He says that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> he looked forward 'to a future which shall unite the
+best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic
+periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual
+action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also convictions as to
+what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the
+feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so
+firmly grounded in reason and the true exigencies of life, that they
+shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and
+political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others'
+(p. 166). This was in some sort the type at which he aimed in the
+formation of his own character&mdash;a type that should combine organic with
+critical quality, the strength of an ordered set of convictions, with
+that pliability and that receptiveness in face of new truth, which are
+indispensable to these very convictions being held intelligently and in
+their best attainable form. We can understand the force of the eulogy on
+John Austin (p. 154), that he manifested 'an equal devotion to the two
+cardinal points of Liberty and Duty.' These are the correlatives in the
+sphere of action to the two cardinal points of Criticism and Belief in
+the sphere of thought.</p>
+
+<p>We can in the light of this double way of viewing the right balance of
+the mind, the better understand the combination of earnestness with
+tolerance which inconsiderate persons are apt to find so awkward a
+stumbling-block in the scheme of philosophic liberal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>ism. Many people in
+our time have so ill understood the doctrine of liberty, that in some of
+the most active circles in society they now count you a bigot if you
+hold any proposition to be decidedly and unmistakably more true than any
+other. They pronounce you intemperate if you show anger and stern
+disappointment because men follow the wrong course instead of the right
+one. Mr. Mill's explanation of the vehemence and decision of his
+father's disapproval, when he did disapprove, and his refusal to allow
+honesty of purpose in the doer to soften his disapprobation of the deed,
+gives the reader a worthy and masculine notion of true tolerance. James
+Mill's 'aversion to many intellectual errors, or what he regarded as
+such, partook in a certain sense of the character of a moral feeling....
+None but those who do not care about opinions will confound this with
+intolerance. Those, who having opinions which they hold to be immensely
+important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have any
+deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a class
+and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right, and
+right what they think wrong: though they need not be, nor was my father,
+insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in their
+estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of by the
+whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person, being no more
+infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people on account of
+opinions which do not merit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> dislike; but if he neither himself does
+them any ill office, nor connives at its being done by others, he is not
+intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a conscientious sense
+of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom of all opinions is the
+only tolerance which is commendable, or to the highest moral order of
+minds, possible' (p. 51). This is another side of the co-ordination of
+Criticism and Belief, of Liberty and Duty, which attained in Mr. Mill
+himself a completeness that other men, less favoured in education and
+with less active power of self-control, are not likely to reach, but to
+reach it ought to be one of the prime objects of their mental
+discipline. The inculcation of this peculiar morality of the
+intelligence is one of the most urgently needed processes of our time.
+For the circumstance of our being in the very depths of a period of
+transition from one spiritual basis of thought to another, leads men not
+only to be content with holding a quantity of vague, confused, and
+contradictory opinions, but also to invest with the honourable name of
+candour a weak reluctance to hold any one of them earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mill experienced in the four or five last years of his life the
+disadvantage of trying to unite fairness towards the opinions from which
+he differed, with loyalty to the positive opinions which he accepted.
+'As I had showed in my political writings,' he says, 'that I was aware
+of the weak points in democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems,
+had not been without hopes of finding me an opponent of demo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>cracy: as I
+was able to see the Conservative side of the question, they presumed
+that like them I could not see any other side. Yet if they had really
+read my writings, they would have known that after giving full weight to
+all that appeared to me well grounded in the arguments against
+democracy, I unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while recommending
+that it should be accompanied by such institutions as were consistent
+with its principle and calculated to ward off its inconveniences' (p.
+309). This was only one illustration of what constantly happened, until
+at length, it is hardly too much to say, a man who had hitherto enjoyed
+a singular measure of general reverence because he was supposed to see
+truth in every doctrine, became downright unpopular among many classes
+in the community, because he saw more truth in one doctrine than
+another, and brought the propositions for whose acceptance he was most
+in earnest eagerly before the public.</p>
+
+<p>In a similar way the Autobiography shows us the picture of a man uniting
+profound self-respect with a singular neutrality where his own claims
+are concerned, a singular self-mastery and justice of mind, in matters
+where with most men the sense of their own personality is wont to be so
+exacting and so easily irritated. The history of intellectual eminence
+is too often a history of immoderate egoism. It has perhaps hardly ever
+been given to any one who exerted such influence as Mr. Mill did over
+his contemporaries, to view his own share in it with such discrimination
+and equity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> as marks every page of his book, and as used to mark every
+word of his conversation. Knowing as we all do the last infirmity of
+even noble minds, and how deep the desire to erect himself Pope and Sir
+Oracle lies in the spirit of a man with strong convictions, we may value
+the more highly, as well for its rarity as for its intrinsic worth, Mr.
+Mill's quality of self-effacement, and his steadfast care to look
+anywhere rather than in his own personal merits, for the source of any
+of those excellences which he was never led by false modesty to
+dissemble.</p>
+
+<p>Many people seem to find the most interesting figure in the book that
+stoical father, whose austere, energetic, imperious, and relentless
+character showed the temperament of the Scotch Covenanter of the
+seventeenth century, inspired by the principles and philosophy of France
+in the eighteenth. No doubt, for those in search of strong dramatic
+effects, the lines of this strenuous indomitable nature are full of
+impressiveness.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> But one ought to be able to appreciate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> the
+distinction and strength of the father, and yet also be able to see that
+the distinction of the son's strength was in truth more really
+impressive still. We encounter a modesty that almost speaks the language
+of fatalism. Pieces of good fortune that most people would assuredly
+have either explained as due to their own penetration, or to the
+recognition of their worth by others, or else would have refrained from
+dwelling upon, as being no more than events of secondary importance, are
+by Mr. Mill invariably recognised at their full worth or even above it,
+and invariably spoken of as fortunate accidents, happy turns in the
+lottery of life, or in some other quiet fatalistic phrase, expressive of
+his deep feeling how much we owe to influences over which we have no
+control and for which we have no right to take any credit. His saying
+that 'it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be
+believed by all <i>quoad</i> the characters of others, and disbelieved in
+regard to their own' (p. 169), went even further than that, for he
+teaches us to accept the doctrine of necessity <i>quoad</i> the most marked
+felicities of life and character, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> to lean lightly or not at all
+upon it in regard to our demerits. Humility is a rationalistic, no less
+than a Christian grace&mdash;not humility in face of error or arrogant
+pretensions or selfishness, nor a humility that paralyses energetic
+effort, but a steadfast consciousness of all the good gifts which our
+forerunners have made ready for us, and of the weight of our
+responsibility for transmitting these helpful forces to a new
+generation, not diminished but augmented.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In more than one remarkable place the Autobiography shows us distinctly
+what all careful students of Mr. Mill's books supposed, that with him
+the social aim, the repayment of the services of the past by devotion to
+the services of present and future, was predominant over any merely
+speculative curiosity or abstract interest. His preference for deeply
+reserved ways of expressing even his strongest feelings prevented him
+from making any expansive show of this governing sentiment. Though no
+man was ever more free from any taint of that bad habit of us English,
+of denying or palliating an abuse or a wrong, unless we are prepared
+with an instant remedy for it, yet he had a strong aversion to mere
+socialistic declamation. Perhaps, if one may say so without presumption,
+he was not indulgent enough in this respect. I remember once pressing
+him with some enthusiasm for Victor Hugo,&mdash;an enthusiasm, one is glad to
+think, which time does nothing to weaken. Mr. Mill, admitting, though
+not too lavishly, the superb imaginative power<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> of this poetic master of
+our time, still counted it a fatal drawback to Hugo's worth and claim to
+recognition that 'he has not brought forward one single practical
+proposal for the improvement of the society against which he is
+incessantly thundering.' I ventured to urge that it is unreasonable to
+ask a poet to draft acts of parliament; and that by bringing all the
+strength of his imagination and all the majestic fulness of his sympathy
+to bear on the social horrors and injustices which still lie so thick
+about us, he kindled an inextinguishable fire in the hearts of men of
+weaker initiative and less imperial gifts alike of imagination and
+sympathy, and so prepared the forces out of which practical proposals
+and specific improvements may be expected to issue. That so obvious a
+kind of reflection should not have previously interested Mr. Mill's
+judgment in favour of the writer of the <i>Outcasts</i>, the <i>Legend of the
+Ages</i>, the <i>Contemplations</i>, only shows how strong was his dislike to
+all that savoured of the grandiose, and how afraid he always was of
+everything that seemed to dissociate emotion from rationally directed
+effort. That he was himself inspired by this emotion of pity for the
+common people, of divine rage against the injustice of the strong to the
+weak, in a degree not inferior to Victor Hugo himself, his whole career
+most effectually demonstrates.</p>
+
+<p>It is this devotion to the substantial good of the many, though
+practised without the noisy or ostentatious professions of more egoistic
+thinkers, which binds together all the parts of his work, from the
+<i>System of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> Logic</i> down to his last speech on the Land Question. One of
+the most striking pages in the Autobiography is that in which he gives
+his reasons for composing the refutation of Hamilton, and as some of
+these especially valuable passages in the book seem to be running the
+risk of neglect in favour of those which happen to furnish material for
+the idle, pitiful gossip of London society, it may be well to reproduce
+it.</p>
+
+<p>'The difference,' he says, 'between these two schools of philosophy,
+that of Intuition and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere
+matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences,
+and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical
+opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to
+demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful
+and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and
+indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable
+part of his argument to show how those powerful feelings had their
+origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible.
+There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy
+which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by
+circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
+elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up
+favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the
+voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that
+of our reason. In particular, I have long felt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> that the prevailing
+tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as
+innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs
+that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between
+individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally
+would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief
+hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one
+of the greatest stumbling-blocks to human improvement. This tendency has
+its source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterised the
+reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is a
+tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative
+interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure
+to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by the
+more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy.... Considering then
+the writings and fame of Sir W. Hamilton as the great fortress of the
+intuitional philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formidable
+from the imposing character, and the, in many respects, great personal
+merits and mental endowments of the man, I thought it might be a real
+service to philosophy to attempt a thorough examination of all his most
+important doctrines, and an estimate of his general claims to eminence
+as a philosopher; and I was confirmed in this resolution by observing
+that in the writings of at least one, and him one of the ablest, of Sir
+W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the
+justification of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> view of religion which I hold to be profoundly
+immoral&mdash;that it is our duty to bow down and worship before a Being
+whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be
+perhaps extremely different from those which, when speaking of our
+fellow-creatures, we call by the same name' (pp. 273-275).</p>
+
+<p>Thus we see that even where the distance between the object of his
+inquiry and the practical wellbeing of mankind seemed farthest, still
+the latter was his starting point, and the doing 'a real service to
+philosophy' only occurred to him in connection with a still greater and
+more real service to those social causes for which, and which only,
+philosophy is worth cultivating. In the <i>System of Logic</i> the
+inspiration had been the same.</p>
+
+<p>'The notion that truths external to the mind,' he writes, 'may be known
+by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and
+experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual
+support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this
+theory every inveterate belief and every intense feeling of which the
+origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of
+justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient
+voucher and justification. There never was an instrument better devised
+for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength of
+this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the
+appeal which it is accustomed to make to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> the evidence of mathematics
+and of the cognate branches of physical science. To expel it from these
+is to drive it from its stronghold.... In attempting to clear up the
+real nature of the evidence of mathematical and physical truth, the
+<i>System of Logic</i> met the intuitive philosophers on ground on which they
+had previously been deemed unassailable; and gave its own explanation
+from experience and association of that peculiar character of what are
+called necessary truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidence
+must come from a deeper source than experience. Whether this has been
+done effectually is still <i>sub judice</i>; and even then, to deprive a mode
+of thought so strongly rooted in human prejudices and partialities of
+its mere speculative support, goes but a very little way towards
+overcoming it; but though only a step, it is a quite indispensable one;
+for since, after all, prejudice can only be successfully combated by
+philosophy, no way can really be made against it permanently, until it
+has been shown not to have philosophy on its side' (pp. 225-227).</p>
+
+<p>This was to lay the basis of a true positivism by the only means through
+which it can be laid firmly. It was to establish at the bottom of men's
+minds the habit of seeking explanations of all phenomena in experience,
+and building up from the beginning the great positive principle that we
+can only know phenomena, and can only know them experientially. We see,
+from such passages as the two that have been quoted, that with Mr. Mill,
+no less than with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> Comte, the ultimate object was to bring people to
+extend positive modes of thinking to the master subjects of morals,
+politics, and religion. Mr. Mill, however, with a wisdom which Comte
+unfortunately did not share, refrained from any rash and premature
+attempt to decide what would be the results of this much-needed
+extension. He knew that we were as yet only just coming in sight of the
+stage where these most complex of all phenomena can be fruitfully
+studied on positive methods, and he was content with doing as much as he
+could to expel other methods from men's minds, and to engender the
+positive spirit and temper. Comte, on the other hand, presumed at once
+to draw up a minute plan of social reconstruction, which contains some
+ideas of great beauty and power, some of extreme absurdity, and some
+which would be very mischievous if there were the smallest chance of
+their ever being realised. 'His book stands,' Mr. Mill truly says of the
+<i>System of Positive Polity</i>, 'a monumental warning to thinkers on
+society and politics of what happens when once men lose sight in their
+speculations of the value of Liberty and Individuality' (p. 213).</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It was his own sense of the value of Liberty which led to the production
+of the little tractate which Mr. Mill himself thought likely to survive
+longer than anything else that he had written, 'with the possible
+exception of the <i>Logic</i>,' as being 'a kind of philosophic text-book of
+a single truth, which the changes pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>gressively taking place in modern
+society tend to bring out into ever 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' (p. 253). It seems to us, however, that Mr.
+Mill's plea for Liberty in the abstract, invaluable as it is, still is
+less important than the memorable application of this plea, and of all
+the arguments supporting it, to that half of the human race whose
+individuality has hitherto been blindly and most wastefully repressed.
+The little book on the <i>Subjection of Women</i>, though not a capital
+performance like the <i>Logic</i>, was the capital illustration of the modes
+of reasoning about human character set forth in his <i>Logic</i> applied to
+the case in which the old metaphysical notion of innate and indelible
+differences is still nearly as strong as ever it was, and in which its
+moral and social consequences are so inexpressibly disastrous, so
+superlatively powerful in keeping the ordinary level of the aims and
+achievements of life low and meagre. The accurate and unanswerable
+reasoning no less than the noble elevation of this great argument; the
+sagacity of a hundred of its maxims on individual conduct and character,
+no less than the combined rationality and beauty of its aspirations for
+the improvement of collective social life, make this piece probably the
+best illustration of all the best and richest qualities of its author's
+mind, and it is fortunate that a subject of such incomparable importance
+should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> have been first effectively presented for discussion in so
+worthy and pregnant a form.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to know definitely from the Autobiography, what is
+implied in the opening of the book itself, that a zealous belief in the
+advantages of abolishing the legal and social inequalities of women was
+not due to the accident of personal intimacy with one or two more women
+of exceptional distinction of character. What has been ignorantly
+supposed in our own day to be a crotchet of Mr. Mill's was the common
+doctrine of the younger proselytes of the Benthamite school, and Bentham
+himself was wholly with them (<i>Autobiography</i>, p. 105, and also 244);
+as, of course, were other thinkers of an earlier date, Condorcet for
+instance.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> In this as in other subjects Mr. Mill did not go beyond his
+modest definition of his own originality&mdash;the application of old ideas
+in new forms and connections (p. 119), or the originality 'which every
+thoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressing
+truths which are common property' (p. 254). Or shall we say that he had
+an originality of a more genuine kind, which made him first diligently
+acquire what in an excellent phrase he calls <i>plenary possession</i> of
+truths, and then transfuse them with a sympathetic and contagious
+enthusiasm?</p>
+
+<p>It is often complained that the book on Women has the radical
+imperfection of not speaking plainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> on the question of the limitations
+proper to divorce. The present writer once ventured to ask Mr. Mill why
+he had left this important point undiscussed. Mr. Mill replied that it
+seemed to him impossible to settle the expediency of more liberal
+conditions of divorce, 'first, without hearing much more fully than we
+could possibly do at present the ideas held by women in the matter;
+second, until the experiment of marriage with entire equality between
+man and wife had been properly tried.' People who are in a hurry to get
+rid of their partners may find this very halting kind of work, and a man
+who wants to take a new wife before sunset, may well be irritated by a
+philosopher who tells him that the question may possibly be capable of
+useful discussion towards the middle of the next century. But Mr. Mill's
+argument is full of force and praiseworthy patience.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The union of boundless patience with unshaken hope was one of Mr. Mill's
+most conspicuous distinctions. There are two crises in the history of
+grave and sensitive natures. One on the threshold of manhood, when the
+youth defines his purpose, his creed, his aspirations; the other towards
+the later part of middle life, when circumstance has strained his
+purpose, and tested his creed, and given to his aspirations a cold and
+practical measure. The second crisis, though less stirring, less vivid,
+less coloured to the imagination, is the weightier probation of the two,
+for it is final and decisive; it marks not the mere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> unresisted force of
+youthful impulse and implanted predispositions, as the earlier crisis
+does, but rather the resisting quality, the strength, the purity, the
+depth, of the native character, after the many princes of the power of
+the air have had time and chance of fighting their hardest against it.
+It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or
+five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or
+the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral
+climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial
+cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous
+resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the
+burning fiery furnace of circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mill did not escape the second crisis, any more than he had escaped
+the first, though he dismisses it in a far more summary manner. The
+education, he tells us, which his father had given him with such fine
+solicitude, had taught him to look for the greatest and surest source of
+happiness in sympathy with the good of mankind on a large scale, and had
+fitted him to work for this good of mankind in various ways. By the time
+he was twenty, his sympathies and passive susceptibilities had been so
+little cultivated, his analytic quality had been developed with so
+little balance in the shape of developed feelings, that he suddenly
+found himself unable to take pleasure in those thoughts of virtue and
+benevolence which had hitherto only been associated with logical
+demonstration and not with sympathetic sentiment. This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> dejection was
+dispelled mainly by the influence of Wordsworth&mdash;a poet austere yet
+gracious, energetic yet sober, penetrated with feeling for nature, yet
+penetrated with feeling for the homely lot of man. Here was the
+emotional synthesis, binding together the energies of the speculative
+and active mind by sympathetic interest in the common feelings and
+common destiny of human beings.</p>
+
+<p>For some ten years more (1826-1836) Mr. Mill hoped the greatest things
+for the good of society from reformed institutions. That was the period
+of parliamentary changes, and such hope was natural and universal. Then
+a shadow came over this confidence, and Mr. Mill advanced to the
+position that the choice of political institutions is subordinate to the
+question, 'what great improvement in life and culture stands next in
+order for the people concerned, as the condition of their further
+progress?' (p. 170). In this period he composed the <i>Logic</i> (published
+1843) and the <i>Political Economy</i> (1848). Then he saw what all ardent
+lovers of improvement are condemned to see, that their hopes have
+outstripped the rate of progress; that fulfilment of social aspiration
+is tardy and very slow of foot; and that the leaders of human thought
+are never permitted to enter into that Promised Land whither they are
+conducting others. Changes for which he had worked and from which he
+expected most, came to pass, but, after they had come to pass, they were
+'attended with much less benefit to human wellbeing than I should
+formerly have anticipated,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> because they had produced very little
+improvement in that which all real amelioration in the lot of mankind
+depends on, their intellectual and moral state.... I had learnt from
+experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones,
+without in the least altering the habit of mind of which false opinions
+are the result' (p. 239). This discovery appears to have brought on no
+recurrence of the dejection which had clouded a portion of his youth. It
+only set him to consider the root of so disappointing a conclusion, and
+led to the conviction that a great change in the fundamental
+constitution of men's modes of thought must precede any marked
+improvement in their lot. He perceived that society is now passing
+through a transitional period 'of weak convictions, paralysed
+intellects, and growing laxity of principle,' the consequence of the
+discredit in the more reflective minds of the old opinions on the
+cardinal subjects of religion, morals, and politics, which have now lost
+most of their efficacy for good, though still possessed of life enough
+to present formidable obstacles to the growth of better opinion on those
+subjects (p. 239).</p>
+
+<p>Thus the crisis of disappointment which breaks up the hope and effort of
+so many men who start well, or else throws them into poor and sterile
+courses, proved in this grave, fervent, and most reasonable spirit only
+the beginning of more serious endeavours in a new and more arduous vein.
+Hitherto he had been, as he says, 'more willing to be content with
+seconding the superficial improvements which had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> begun to take place in
+the common opinions of society and the world.' Henceforth he kept less
+and less in abeyance the more heretical part of his opinions, which he
+began more and more clearly to discern as 'almost the only ones, the
+assertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society' (p. 230). The
+crisis of middle age developed a new fortitude, a more earnest
+intrepidity, a greater boldness of expression about the deeper things,
+an interest profounder than ever in the improvement of the human lot.
+The book on the <i>Subjection of Women</i>, the <i>Liberty</i>, and probably some
+pieces that have not yet been given to the world, are the notable result
+of this ripest, loftiest, and most inspiring part of his life.</p>
+
+<p>This judgment does not appear to be shared by the majority of those who
+have hitherto published their opinions upon Mr. Mill's life and works.
+Perhaps it would have been odd if such a judgment had been common.
+People who think seriously of life and its conditions either are content
+with those conditions as they exist, or else they find them empty and
+deeply unsatisfying. Well, the former class, who naturally figure
+prominently in the public press, because the press is the more or less
+flattering mirror of the prevailing doctrines of the day, think that Mr.
+Mill's views of a better social future are chimerical, utopian, and
+sentimental. The latter class compensate themselves for the pinchedness
+of the real world about them by certain rapturous ideals, centring in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+God, a future life, and the long companionship of the blessed. The
+consequence of this absorption either in the immediate interests and
+aims of the hour, or in the interests and aims of an imaginary world
+which is supposed to await us after death, has been a hasty inclination
+to look on such a life and such purposes as are set forth in the
+Autobiography as essentially jejune and dreary. It is not in the least
+surprising that such a feeling should prevail. If it were otherwise, if
+the majority of thoughtful men and women were already in a condition to
+be penetrated by sympathy for the life of 'search with many sighs,' then
+we should have already gone far on our way towards the goal which a
+Turgot or a Mill set for human progress. If society had at once
+recognised the full attractiveness of a life arduously passed in
+consideration of the means by which the race may take its next step
+forward in the improvement of character and the amelioration of the
+common lot,&mdash;and this not from love of God nor hope of recompense in a
+world to come, and still less from hope of recompense or even any very
+firm assurance of fulfilled aspiration in this world,&mdash;then that
+fundamental renovation of conviction for which Mr. Mill sighed, and that
+evolution of a new faith to which he had looked forward in the far
+distance, would already have come to pass.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mill has been ungenerously ridiculed for the eagerness and
+enthusiasm of his contemplation of a new and better state of human
+society. Yet we have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> always been taught to consider it the mark of the
+loftiest and most spiritual character, for one to be capable of
+rapturous contemplation of a new and better state in a future life. Why,
+then, do you not recognise the loftiness and spirituality of those who
+make their heaven in the thought of the wider light and purer happiness
+that, in the immensity of the ages, may be brought to new generations of
+men, by long force of vision and endeavour? What great element is
+wanting in a life guided by such a hope? Is it not disinterested, and
+magnanimous, and purifying, and elevating? The countless beauties of
+association which cluster round the older faith may make the new seem
+bleak and chilly. But when what is now the old faith was itself new,
+that too may well have struck, as we know that it did strike, the
+adherent of the mellowed pagan philosophy as crude, meagre, jejune,
+dreary.</p>
+
+<p>Then Mr. Mill's life as disclosed to us in these pages has been called
+joyless, by that sect of religious partisans whose peculiarity is to
+mistake boisterousness for unction. Was the life of Christ himself,
+then, so particularly joyful? Can the life of any man be joyful who sees
+and feels the tragic miseries and hardly less tragic follies of the
+earth? The old Preacher, when he considered all the oppressions that are
+done under the sun, and beheld the tears of such as were oppressed and
+had no comforter, therefore praised the dead which are already dead more
+than the living which are yet alive, and declared him better than both,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done
+under the sun. Those who are willing to trick their understandings and
+play fast and loose with words may, if they please, console themselves
+with the fatuous commonplaces of a philosophic optimism. They may, with
+eyes tight shut, cling to the notion that they live in the best of all
+possible worlds, or discerning all the anguish that may be compressed
+into threescore years and ten, still try to accept the Stoic's paradox
+that pain is not an evil. Or, most wonderful and most common of all,
+they may find this joy of which they talk, in meditating on the moral
+perfections of the omnipotent Being for whose diversion the dismal
+panorama of all the evil work done under the sun was bidden to unfold
+itself, and who sees that it is very good. Those who are capable of a
+continuity of joyous emotion on these terms may well complain of Mr.
+Mill's story as dreary; and so may the school of Solomon, who commended
+mirth because a man hath no better thing than to eat and to drink and to
+be merry. People, however, who are prohibited by their intellectual
+conditions from finding full satisfaction either in spiritual raptures
+or in pleasures of sense, may think the standard of happiness which Mr.
+Mill sought and reached, not unacceptable and not unworthy of being
+diligently striven after.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mill's conception of happiness in life is more intelligible if we
+contrast it with his father's. The Cynic element in James Mill, as his
+son now tells us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> (pg. 48), was that he had scarcely any belief in
+pleasures; he thought few of them worth the price which has to be paid
+for them; and he set down the greater number of the miscarriages in life
+as due to an excessive estimate of them. 'He thought human life a poor
+thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity
+had gone by.... He would sometimes say that if life were made what it
+might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth
+having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that
+possibility.' We should shrink from calling even this theory dreary,
+associated as it is with the rigorous enforcement of the heroic virtues
+of temperance and moderation, and the strenuous and careful bracing up
+of every faculty to face the inevitable and make the best of it. At
+bottom it is the theory of many of the bravest souls, who fare grimly
+through life in the mood of leaders of forlorn hopes, denying pleasures,
+yet very sensible of the stern delight of fortitude. We can have no
+difficulty in understanding that, when the elder Mill lay dying, 'his
+interest in all things and persons that had interested him through life
+was undiminished, nor did the approach of death cause the smallest
+wavering (as in so strong and firm a mind it was impossible that it
+should), in his convictions on the subject of religion. His principal
+satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, seemed to be the
+thought of what he had done to make the world better than he found it;
+and his chief regret<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> in not living longer, that he had not had time to
+do more' (p. 203).<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mill, however, went beyond this conception. He had a belief in
+pleasures, and thought human life by no means a poor thing to those who
+know how to make the best of it. It was essential both to the stability
+of his utilitarian philosophy, and to the contentment of his own
+temperament, that the reality of happiness should be vindicated, and he
+did both vindicate and attain it. A highly pleasurable excitement that
+should have no end, of course he did not think possible; but he regarded
+the two constituents of a satisfied life, much tranquillity and some
+excitement, as perfectly attainable by many men, and as ultimately
+attainable by very many more. The ingredients of this satisfaction he
+set forth as follows:&mdash;a willingness not to expect more from life than
+life is capable of bestowing; an intelligent interest in the objects of
+mental culture; genuine private affections; and a sincere interest in
+the public good. What, on the other hand, are the hindrances which
+prevent these elements from being in the possession of every one born in
+a civilised country? Ignorance; bad laws or customs, debarring a man or
+woman from the sources of happiness within reach; and 'the positive
+evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering&mdash;such
+as indigence,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature
+loss of objects of affection.'<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> But every one of these calamitous
+impediments is susceptible of the weightiest modification, and some of
+them of final removal. Mr. Mill had learnt from Turgot and
+Condorcet&mdash;two of the wisest and noblest of men, as he justly calls them
+(113)&mdash;among many other lessons, this of the boundless improvableness of
+the human lot, and we may believe that he read over many a time the
+pages in which Condorcet delineated the Tenth Epoch in the history of
+human perfectibility, and traced out in words of finely reserved
+enthusiasm the operation of the forces which should consummate the
+progress of the race. 'All the grand sources of human suffering,' Mr.
+Mill thought, 'are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely,
+conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal is
+grievously slow&mdash;though a long succession of generations will perish in
+the breach before the conquest is completed, and this world becomes all
+that, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily be
+made&mdash;yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear a
+part, however small and unconspicuous, in the endeavour, will draw a
+noble enjoyment from the contest itself, which he would not for any
+bribe in the form of selfish indulgence consent to be without'
+(<i>Utilitarianism</i>, 22).</p>
+
+<p>We thus see how far from dreary this wise and benign man actually found
+his own life; how full it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> was of cheerfulness, of animation, of
+persevering search, of a tranquillity lighted up at wholesome intervals
+by flashes of intellectual and moral excitement. That it was not seldom
+crossed by moods of despondency is likely enough, but we may at least be
+sure that these moods had nothing in common with the vulgar despondency
+of those whose hopes are centred in material prosperity in this world
+and spiritual prosperity in some other. They were, at least, the
+dejection of a magnanimous spirit, that could only be cast down by some
+new hindrance to the spread of reason and enlightenment among men, or
+some new weakening of their incentives to right doing.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Much has been said against Mr. Mill's strictures on society, and his
+withdrawal from it. If we realise the full force of all that he says of
+his own purpose in life, it is hard to see how either his opinion or his
+practice could have been different. He ceased to be content with
+'seconding the superficial improvements' in common ways of thinking, and
+saw the necessity of working at a fundamental reconstitution of accepted
+modes of thought. This in itself implies a condemnation of a social
+intercourse that rests on the base of conventional ways of looking at
+things. The better kind of society, it is true, appears to contain two
+classes; not only the class that will hear nothing said hostile to the
+greater social conventions, including among these the popular theology,
+but also another<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> class who will tolerate or even encourage attack on
+the greater social conventions, and a certain mild discussion of
+improvements in them&mdash;provided only neither attack nor discussion be
+conducted in too serious a vein. A new idea about God, or property, or
+the family, is handed round among the company, as ladies of quality in
+Queen Anne's time handed round a black page or a China monster. In
+Bishop Butler's phrase, these people only want to know what is said, not
+what is true. To be in earnest, to show that you mean what you say, to
+think of drawing blood in the encounter, is thought, and perhaps very
+naturally thought, to be a piece of bad manners. Social intercourse can
+only exist either pleasantly or profitably among people who share a
+great deal of common ground in opinion and feeling. Mr. Mill, no doubt,
+was always anxious to find as much common ground as he honestly could,
+for this was one of the most characteristic maxims of his propagandism.
+But a man who had never been brought up in the popular religion, and who
+had been brought up in habits of the most scrupulous fair dealing with
+his own understanding; who had never closed his mind to new truths from
+likely sources, but whose character was formed, and whose mind was made
+up, on the central points of opinion, was not in a position to derive
+much benefit from those who in all respects represent a less advanced
+stage of mental development. On the other hand, all the benefit which
+they were in a position to derive from him could be adequately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> secured
+by reading what he wrote. Perhaps there is nothing wiser among the wise
+things written in the Autobiography than the remarks on the fact that
+persons of any mental superiority, who greatly frequent society, are
+greatly deteriorated by it. 'Not to mention loss of time, the tone of
+their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those of
+their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society
+they frequent: they come to look on their most elevated objects as
+unpractical, or at least too remote from realisation to be more than a
+vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their
+higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and
+affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and
+judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep'
+(p. 228). That a man loses something, nay, that he loses much, by being
+deprived of animating intercourse with other men, Mr. Mill would
+probably have been the first to admit. Where that intercourse can be
+had, nothing is more fit to make the judgment robust, nothing more fit
+to freshen and revive our interests, and to clothe them with reality.
+Even second-rate companionship has some clear advantages. The question
+is, whether these advantages outweigh the equally clear disadvantages.
+Mr. Mill was persuaded that they do not.</p>
+
+<p>Those whom disgust at the aimlessness and insignificance of most of our
+social intercourse may dispose to withdrawal from it&mdash;and their number
+will probably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> increase as the reaction against intellectual flippancy
+goes on&mdash;will do well to remember that Mr. Mill's retirement and his
+vindication of it sprang from no moral valetudinarianism. He did not
+retire to gratify any self-indulgent whim, but only in order to work the
+more uninterruptedly <i>and definitely</i>. The Autobiography tells us what
+pains he took to keep himself informed of all that was going on in every
+part of the world. 'In truth, the modern facilities of communication
+have not only removed all the disadvantages, to a political writer in
+tolerably easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of political
+action, but have converted them into advantages. The immediate and
+regular receipt of newspapers and periodicals keeps him <i>au courant</i> of
+even the most temporary politics, and gives him a much more correct view
+of the state and progress of opinion than he could acquire by personal
+contact with individuals; for every one's social intercourse is more or
+less limited to particular sets or classes, whose impressions and no
+others reach him through that channel; and experience has taught me that
+those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called
+society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the
+organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either
+of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a
+recluse who reads the newspapers need be. There are, no doubt,
+disadvantages in too long a separation from one's country&mdash;in not
+occasionally renewing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> one's impressions of the light in which men and
+things appear when seen from a position in the midst of them; but the
+deliberate judgment formed at a distance, and undisturbed by
+inequalities of perspective, is the most to be depended on, even for
+application in practice. Alternating between the two positions, I
+combined the advantages of both.' Those who knew him will perhaps agree
+that he was more widely and precisely informed of the transactions of
+the day, in every department of activity all over the world, than any
+other person of their acquaintance. People should remember, further,
+that though Mr. Mill saw comparatively little of men after a certain
+time, yet he was for many years of his life in constant and active
+relations with men. It was to his experience in the Indian Office that
+he attributed some of his most serviceable qualities, especially this:
+'I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain
+everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not
+have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have
+the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with
+complete equanimity the being overruled altogether' (pp. 85, 86). In
+these words we seem almost to hear the modest and simple tones of the
+writer's own voice.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class='footnotes'>
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> April 5, 1873.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Mill's <i>Autobiography</i>, 242.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> In an interesting volume (<i>The Minor Works of George
+Grote</i>, edited by Alexander Bain. London: Murray), we find Grote
+confirming Mr. Mill's estimate of his father's psychagogic quality. 'His
+unpremeditated oral exposition,' says Grote of James Mill, 'was hardly
+less effective than his prepared work with the pen; his colloquial
+fertility in philosophical subjects, his power of discussing himself,
+and stimulating others to discuss, his ready responsive inspirations
+through all the shifts and windings of a sort of Platonic dialogue,&mdash;all
+these accomplishments 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 observant intelligence. Of
+all persons whom we have known, Mr. James Mill was the one who stood
+least remote from the lofty Platonic ideal of Dialectic&mdash;&#964;&#959;&#965; &#948;&#953;&#948;&#8001;&#957;&#945;&#953; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#948;&#7953;&#967;&#949;&#963;&#952;&#945;&#953; &#955;&#8001;&#947;&#959;&#957; (the giving and receiving of
+reasons)&mdash;competent alike to examine others or to be examined by them in
+philosophy. When to this we add a strenuous character, earnest
+convictions, and single-minded devotion to truth, with an utter disdain
+of mere paradox, it may be conceived that such a man exercised powerful
+intellectual ascendancy over youthful minds,' etc.&mdash;<i>Minor Works of
+George Grote</i>, p. 284.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Condorcet's arguments the reader will find in vol. i. of
+the present series of these <i>Critical Miscellanies</i>, p. 249.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> For the mood in which death was faced by another person who
+had renounced theology and the doctrine of a future state of
+consciousness, see Miss Martineau's <i>Autobiography</i>, ii. 435, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> For this exposition see <i>Utilitarianism</i>, pp. 18-24.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3), by 
+John Morley
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3)
+       Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2007 [EBook #20887]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  CRITICAL
+  MISCELLANIES
+
+  BY
+  JOHN MORLEY
+
+  VOL. III.
+
+
+  ESSAY 2: THE DEATH OF MR MILL
+  ESSAY 3: MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+
+  London
+  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+  1904
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  THE DEATH OF MR. MILL.
+
+
+  Peculiar office of the Teacher                                      37
+
+  Mill's influence in the universities and the press                  39
+
+  His union of science with aspiration                                40
+
+  And of courage with patience                                        42
+
+  His abstinence from society                                         45
+
+  Sense of the tendency of society to relapse                         46
+
+  Peculiar trait of his authority                                     47
+
+  The writer's last day with him                                      48
+
+
+  MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+
+  The spirit of search                                                53
+
+  Key to Mill's type of character and its value                       54
+
+  Sensibility of his intellect                                        56
+
+  Yet no reaction against his peculiar education                      57
+
+  Quality of the Autobiography                                        58
+
+  One of its lessons--[Greek: memneso apistein]                       60
+
+  Mill's aversion to the spirit of sect                               60
+
+  Not a hindrance to systematisation                                  61
+
+  Criticism united with belief                                        63
+
+  Practical difficulties in the union of loyalty with tolerance       64
+
+  Impressiveness of Mill's self-effacement                            65
+
+  His contempt for socialistic declamation                            68
+
+  Yet the social aim paramount in him                                 69
+
+  Illustrated in his attack on Hamilton                               71
+
+  And in the Logic                                                    72
+
+  The book on the Subjection of Women                                 75
+
+  The two crises of life                                              77
+
+  Mill did not escape the second of them                              78
+
+  Influence of Wordsworth                                             79
+
+  Hope from reformed institutions                                     79
+
+  This hope replaced by efforts in a deeper vein                      80
+
+  Popular opinion of such efforts                                     81
+
+  Irrational disparagement of Mill's hope                             82
+
+  Mill's conception of happiness contrasted with his father's         84
+
+  Remarks on his withdrawal from society                              88
+
+  It arose from no moral valetudinarianism                            91
+
+
+
+
+THE DEATH OF MR. MILL.
+
+(_May 1873._)
+
+
+The tragic commonplaces of the grave sound a fuller note as we mourn for
+one of the greater among the servants of humanity. A strong and pure
+light is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficent
+purpose. One of those high and most worthy spirits who arise from time
+to time to stir their generation with new mental impulses in the deeper
+things, has perished from among us. The death of one who did so much to
+impress on his contemporaries that physical law works independently of
+moral law, marks with profounder emphasis the ever ancient and ever
+fresh decree that there is one end to the just and the unjust, and that
+the same strait tomb awaits alike the poor dead whom nature or
+circumstance imprisoned in mean horizons, and those who saw far and felt
+passionately and put their reason to noble uses. Yet the fulness of our
+grief is softened by a certain greatness and solemnity in the event. The
+teachers of men are so few, the gift of intellectual fatherhood is so
+rare, it is surrounded by such singular gloriousness. The loss of a
+powerful and generous statesman, or of a great master in letters or art,
+touches us with many a vivid regret. The Teacher, the man who has
+talents and has virtues, and yet has a further something which is
+neither talent nor virtue, and which gives him the mysterious secret of
+drawing men after him, leaves a deeper sense of emptiness than this; but
+lamentation is at once soothed and elevated by a sense of sacredness in
+the occasion. Even those whom Mr. Mill honoured with his friendship, and
+who must always bear to his memory the affectionate veneration of sons,
+may yet feel their pain at the thought that they will see him no more,
+raised into a higher mood as they meditate on the loftiness of his task
+and the steadfastness and success with which he achieved it. If it is
+grievous to think that such richness of culture, such full maturity of
+wisdom, such passion for truth and justice, are now by a single stroke
+extinguished, at least we may find some not unworthy solace in the
+thought of the splendid purpose that they have served in keeping alive,
+and surrounding with new attractions, the difficult tradition of patient
+and accurate thinking in union with unselfish and magnanimous living.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much will one day have to be said as to the precise value of Mr. Mill's
+philosophical principles, the more or less of his triumphs as a
+dialectician, his skill as a critic and an expositor. However this trial
+may go, we shall at any rate be sure that with his reputation will
+stand or fall the intellectual repute of a whole generation of his
+countrymen. The most eminent of those who are now so fast becoming the
+front line, as death mows down the veterans, all bear traces of his
+influence, whether they are avowed disciples or avowed opponents. If
+they did not accept his method of thinking, at least he determined the
+questions which they should think about. For twenty years no one at all
+open to serious intellectual impressions has left Oxford without having
+undergone the influence of Mr. Mill's teaching, though it would be too
+much to say that in that gray temple where they are ever burnishing new
+idols, his throne is still unshaken. The professorial chairs there and
+elsewhere are more and more being filled with men whose minds have been
+trained in his principles. The universities only typify his influence on
+the less learned part of the world. The better sort of journalists
+educated themselves on his books, and even the baser sort acquired a
+habit of quoting from them. He is the only writer in the world whose
+treatises on highly abstract subjects have been printed during his
+lifetime in editions for the people, and sold at the price of railway
+novels. Foreigners from all countries read his books as attentively as
+his most eager English disciples, and sought his opinion as to their own
+questions with as much reverence as if he had been a native oracle. An
+eminent American who came over on an official mission which brought him
+into contact with most of the leading statesmen throughout Europe, said
+to the present writer:--'The man who impressed me most of them all was
+Stuart Mill; you placed before him the facts on which you sought his
+opinion. He took them, gave you the different ways in which they might
+fairly be looked at, balanced the opposing considerations, and then
+handed you a final judgment in which nothing was left out. His mind
+worked like a splendid piece of machinery; you supply it with raw
+material, and it turns you out a perfectly finished product.' Of such a
+man England has good reason to be very proud.
+
+He was stamped in many respects with specially English quality. He is
+the latest chief of a distinctively English school of philosophy, in
+which, as has been said, the names of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, and
+Bentham (and Mr. Mill would have added James Mill) mark the line of
+succession--the school whose method subordinates imagination to
+observation, and whose doctrine lays the foundations of knowledge in
+experience, and the tests of conduct in utility. Yet, for all this, one
+of his most remarkable characteristics was less English than French; his
+constant admission of an ideal and imaginative element in social
+speculation, and a glowing persuasion that the effort and wisdom and
+ingenuity of men are capable, if free opportunity be given by social
+arrangements, of raising human destiny to a pitch that is at present
+beyond our powers of conception. Perhaps the sum of all his distinction
+lies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of
+rigorous sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminous
+hope. He told one who was speaking of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, that
+in his younger days whenever he was inclined to be discouraged, he was
+in the habit of turning to this book, and that he never did so without
+recovering possession of himself. To the same friend, who had printed
+something comparing Mr. Mill's repulse at Westminster with the dismissal
+of the great minister of Lewis the Sixteenth, he wrote:--'I never
+received so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to Turgot;
+it is indeed an honour to me that such an assimilation should have
+occurred to you.' Those who have studied the character of one whom even
+the rigid Austin thought worthy to be called 'the godlike Turgot,' know
+both the nobleness and the rarity of this type.
+
+Its force lies not in single elements, but in that combination of an
+ardent interest in human improvement with a reasoned attention to the
+law of its conditions, which alone deserves to be honoured with the high
+name of wisdom. This completeness was one of the secrets of Mr. Mill's
+peculiar attraction for young men, and for the comparatively few women
+whose intellectual interest was strong enough to draw them to his books.
+He satisfied the ingenuous moral ardour which is instinctive in the best
+natures, until the dust of daily life dulls or extinguishes it, and at
+the same time he satisfied the rationalistic qualities, which are not
+less marked in the youthful temperament of those who by and by do the
+work of the world. This mixture of intellectual gravity with a
+passionate love of improvement in all the aims and instruments of life,
+made many intelligences alive who would otherwise have slumbered, or
+sunk either into a dry pedantry on the one hand, or a windy, mischievous
+philanthropy on the other. He showed himself so wholly free from the
+vulgarity of the sage. He could hope for the future without taking his
+eye from the realities of the present. He recognised the social
+destination of knowledge, and kept the elevation of the great art of
+social existence ever before him, as the ultimate end of all speculative
+activity.
+
+Another side of this rare combination was his union of courage with
+patience, of firm nonconformity with silent conformity. Compliance is
+always a question of degree, depending on time, circumstance, and
+subject. Mr. Mill hit the exact mean, equally distant from timorous
+caution and self-indulgent violence. He was unrivalled in the difficult
+art of conciliating as much support as was possible and alienating as
+little sympathy as possible, for novel and extremely unpopular opinions.
+He was not one of those who strive to spread new faiths by brilliant
+swordplay with buttoned foils, and he was not one of those who run amuck
+among the idols of the tribe and the market-place and the theatre. He
+knew how to kindle the energy of all who were likely to be persuaded by
+his reasoning, without stimulating in a corresponding degree the energy
+of persons whose convictions he attacked. Thus he husbanded the
+strength of truth, and avoided wasteful friction. Probably no English
+writer that ever lived has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the very
+root of the theological spirit, yet there is only one passage in the
+writings published during his lifetime--I mean a well-known passage in
+the Liberty--which could give any offence to the most devout person. His
+conformity, one need hardly say, never went beyond the negative degree,
+nor ever passed beyond the conformity of silence. That guilty and
+grievously common pusillanimity which leads men to make or act
+hypocritical professions, always moved his deepest abhorrence. And he
+did not fear publicly to testify his interest in the return of an
+atheist to parliament.
+
+His courage was not of the spurious kinds arising from anger, or
+ignorance of the peril, or levity, or a reckless confidence. These are
+all very easy. His distinction was that he knew all the danger to
+himself, was anxious to save pain to others, was buoyed up by no rash
+hope that the world was to be permanently bettered at a stroke, and yet
+for all this he knew how to present an undaunted front to a majority.
+The only fear he ever knew was fear lest a premature or excessive
+utterance should harm a good cause. He had measured the prejudices of
+men, and his desire to arouse this obstructive force in the least degree
+compatible with effective advocacy of any improvement, set the single
+limit to his intrepidity. Prejudices were to him like physical
+predispositions, with which you have to make your account. He knew,
+too, that they are often bound up with the most valuable elements in
+character and life, and hence he feared that violent surgery which in
+eradicating a false opinion fatally bruises at the same time a true and
+wholesome feeling that may cling to it. The patience which with some men
+is an instinct, and with others a fair name for indifference, was with
+him an acquisition of reason and conscience.
+
+The value of this wise and virtuous mixture of boldness with tolerance,
+of courageous speech with courageous reserve, has been enormous. Along
+with his direct pleas for freedom of thought and freedom of speech, it
+has been the chief source of that liberty of expressing unpopular
+opinions in this country without social persecution, which is now so
+nearly complete, that he himself was at last astonished by it. The
+manner of his dialectic, firm and vigorous as the dialectic was in
+matter, has gradually introduced mitigating elements into the atmosphere
+of opinion. Partly, no doubt, the singular tolerance of free discussion
+which now prevails in England--I do not mean that it is at all
+perfect--arises from the prevalent scepticism, from indifference, and
+from the influence of some of the more high-minded of the clergy. But
+Mr. Mill's steadfast abstinence from drawing wholesale indictments
+against persons or classes whose opinions he controverted, his generous
+candour, his scrupulous respect for any germ of good in whatever company
+it was found, and his large allowances, contributed positive elements to
+what might otherwise have been the negative tolerance that comes of
+moral stagnation. Tolerance of distasteful notions in others became
+associated in his person at once with the widest enlightenment, and the
+strongest conviction of the truth of our own notions.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His career, beside all else, was a protest of the simplest and loftiest
+kind against some of the most degrading features of our society. No one
+is more alive than he was to the worth of all that adds grace and
+dignity to human life; but the sincerity of this feeling filled him with
+aversion for the make-believe dignity of a luxurious and artificial
+community. Without either arrogance or bitterness, he stood aloof from
+that conventional intercourse which is misnamed social duty. Without
+either discourtesy or cynicism, he refused to play a part in that dance
+of mimes which passes for life among the upper classes. In him, to
+extraordinary intellectual attainments was added the gift of a firm and
+steadfast self-respect, which unfortunately does not always go with
+them. He felt the reality of things, and it was easier for a workman
+than for a princess to obtain access to him. It is not always the men
+who talk most affectingly about our being all of one flesh and blood,
+who are proof against those mysterious charms of superior rank, which do
+so much to foster unworthy conceptions of life in English society; and
+there are many people capable of accepting Mr. Mill's social
+principles, and the theoretical corollaries they contain, who yet would
+condemn his manly plainness and austere consistency in acting on them.
+The too common tendency in us all to moral slovenliness, and a lazy
+contentment with a little flaccid protest against evil, finds a constant
+rebuke in his career. The indomitable passion for justice which made him
+strive so long and so tenaciously to bring to judgment a public
+official, whom he conceived to be a great criminal, was worthy of one of
+the stoutest patriots in our seventeenth-century history. The same moral
+thoroughness stirred the same indignation in him on a more recent
+occasion, when he declared it 'a permanent disgrace to the Government
+that the iniquitous sentence on the gas-stokers was not remitted as soon
+as passed.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much of his most striking quality was owing to the exceptional degree in
+which he was alive to the constant tendency of society to lose some
+excellence of aim, to relapse at some point from the standard of truth
+and right which had been reached by long previous effort, to fall back
+in height of moral ideal. He was keenly sensible that it is only by
+persistent striving after improvement in our conceptions of duty, and
+improvement in the external means for realising them, that even the
+acquisitions of past generations are retained. He knew the intense
+difficulty of making life better by ever so little. Hence at once the
+exaltation of his own ideas of truth and right, and his eagerness to
+conciliate anything like virtuous social feeling, in whatever
+intellectual or political association he found it. Hence also the
+vehemence of his passion for the unfettered and unchecked development of
+new ideas on all subjects, of originality in moral and social points of
+view; because repression, whether by public opinion or in any other way,
+may be the means of untold waste of gifts that might have conferred on
+mankind unspeakable benefits. The discipline and vigour of his
+understanding made him the least indulgent of judges to anything like
+charlatanry, and effectually prevented his unwillingness to let the
+smallest good element be lost, from degenerating into that weak kind of
+universalism which nullifies some otherwise good men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some great men seize upon us by the force of an imposing and majestic
+authority; their thoughts impress the imagination, their words are
+winged, they are as prophets bearing high testimony that cannot be
+gainsaid. Bossuet, for instance, or Pascal. Others, and of these Mr.
+Mill was one, acquire disciples not by a commanding authority, but by a
+moderate and impersonal kind of persuasion. He appeals not to our sense
+of greatness and power in a teacher, which is noble, but to our love of
+finding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. People
+who like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with herald
+and trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitual
+effacement of his own personality marked a delicate and very rare shade
+in his reverence for the sacred purity of truth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meditation on the influence of one who has been the foremost instructor
+of his time in wisdom and goodness quickly breaks off, in this hour when
+his loss is fresh upon us; it changes into affectionate reminiscences
+for which silence is more fitting. In such an hour thought turns rather
+to the person than the work of the master whom we mourn. We recall his
+simplicity, gentleness, heroic self-abnegation; his generosity in
+encouraging, his eager readiness in helping; the warm kindliness of his
+accost, the friendly brightening of the eye. The last time I saw him was
+a few days before he left England.[1] He came to spend a day with me in
+the country, of which the following brief notes happened to be written
+at the time in a letter to a friend:--
+
+     'He came down by the morning train to Guildford 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.
+
+[Footnote 1: April 5, 1873.]
+
+'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 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 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 hothouse.
+
+'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 cheeked 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 that of 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.
+
+'Spoke of the modern tendency to pure theism, and met the objection that
+it retards improvement by turning the minds of some of the best men from
+social affairs, by the counter-proposition that it is useful to society,
+apart from the question of its truth,--useful as a provisional belief,
+because people will identify serviceable ministry to men with service of
+God. Thinks we cannot with any sort of precision define the coming
+modification of religion, but anticipates that it will undoubtedly rest
+upon the solidarity of mankind, as Comte said, and as you and I believe.
+Perceives two things, at any rate, which are likely to lead men to
+invest this with the moral authority of a religion; first, they will
+become more and more impressed by the awful fact that a piece of conduct
+to-day may prove a curse to men and women scores and even hundreds of
+years after the author of it is dead; and second, they will more and
+more feel that they can only satisfy their sentiment of gratitude to
+seen or unseen benefactors, can only repay the untold benefits they have
+inherited, by diligently maintaining the traditions of service.
+
+'And so forth, full of interest and suggestiveness all through. When he
+got here, he chatted to R---- over our lunch, with something of the
+simple 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 little roadside station, and one of
+the most delightful days of my life came to its end, like all other
+days, delightful and sorrowful.'
+
+Alas, the sorrowful day which ever dogs our delight followed very
+quickly. The nightingale that he longed for fills the darkness with
+music, but not for the ear of the dead master: he rests in the deeper
+darkness where the silence is unbroken for ever. We may console
+ourselves with the reflection offered by the dying Socrates to his
+sorrowful companions: he who has arrayed the soul in her own proper
+jewels of moderation and justice and courage and nobleness and truth, is
+ever ready for the journey when his time comes. We have lost a great
+teacher and example of knowledge and virtue, but men will long feel the
+presence of his character about them, making them ashamed of what is
+indolent or selfish, and encouraging them to all disinterested labour,
+both in trying to do good and in trying to find out what the good
+is,--which is harder.
+
+
+
+
+MR. MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
+
+
+_Chercher en gemissant_--search with many sighs--that was Pascal's
+notion of praiseworthy living and choosing the better part. Search, and
+search with much travail, strikes us as the chief intellectual ensign
+and device of that eminent man whose record of his own mental nurture
+and growth we have all been reading. Everybody endowed with energetic
+intelligence has a measure of the spirit of search poured out upon him.
+All such persons act on the Socratic maxim that the life without inquiry
+is a life to be lived by no man. But it is the rare distinction of a
+very few to accept the maxim in its full significance, to insist on an
+open mind as the true secret of wisdom, to press the examination and
+testing of our convictions as the true way at once to stability and
+growth of character, and thus to make of life what it is so good for us
+that it should be, a continual building up, a ceaseless fortifying and
+enlargement and multiplication of the treasures of the spirit. To make 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,'[2]--to thrust out the spirit of party, of sect, of
+creed, of the poorer sort of self-esteem, of futile contentiousness, and
+so to seek and again seek with undeviating singleness of mind the right
+interpretation of our experiences--here is the genuine seal of
+intellectual mastery and the true stamp of a perfect rationality.
+
+[Footnote 2: Mill's _Autobiography_, 242.]
+
+The men to whom this is the ideal of the life of the reason, and who
+have done anything considerable towards spreading a desire after it,
+deserve to have their memories gratefully cherished even by those who do
+not agree with all their positive opinions. We need only to reflect a
+little on the conditions of human existence; on the urgent demand which
+material necessities inevitably make on so immense a proportion of our
+time and thought; on the space which is naturally filled up by the
+activity of absorbing affections; on the fatal power of mere tradition
+and report over the indifferent, and the fatal power of inveterate
+prejudice over so many even of the best of those who are not
+indifferent. Then we shall know better how to value such a type of
+character and life as Mr. Mill has now told us the story of, in which
+intellectual impressionableness on the most important subjects of human
+thought was so cultivated as almost to acquire the strength and quick
+responsiveness of emotional sensibility. And this, without the too
+common drawback to great openness of mind. This drawback consists in
+loose beliefs, taken up to-day and silently dropped to-morrow;
+vacillating opinions, constantly being exchanged for their contraries;
+feeble convictions, appearing, shifting, vanishing, in the quicksands of
+an unstable mind.
+
+Nobody will impute any of these disastrous weaknesses to Mr. Mill. His
+impressionableness was of the valuable positive kind, which adds and
+assimilates new elements from many quarters, without disturbing the
+organic structure of the whole. What he says of one stage in his growth
+remained generally true of him until the very end:--'I found the fabric
+of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places, and I
+never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in
+weaving it anew. I never in the course of my transition was content to
+remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I had
+taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its
+relations to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect
+ought to extend in modifying or superseding them' (p. 156). This careful
+and conscientious recognition of the duty of having ordered opinions,
+and of responsibility for these opinions being both as true and as
+consistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could make
+them, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly from
+doctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point to
+point in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from those
+sensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights of
+rationalism suddenly into the pit of an infallible church; and from
+those who, like La Mennais, move violently between faith and reason,
+between tradition and inquiry, between the fulness of deference to
+authority and the fulness of individual self-assertion.
+
+All minds of the first quality move and grow; they have a susceptibility
+to many sorts of new impressions, a mobility, a feeling outwards, which
+makes it impossible for them to remain in the stern fixity of an early
+implanted set of dogmas, whether philosophic or religious. In stoical
+tenacity of character, as well as in intellectual originality and
+concentrated force of understanding, some of those who knew both tell us
+that Mr. Mill was inferior to his father. But who does not feel in the
+son the serious charm of a power of adaptation and pliableness which we
+can never associate with the hardy and more rigorous nature of the
+other? And it was just because he had this sensibility of the intellect,
+that the history of what it did for him is so edifying a performance for
+a people like ourselves, among whom that quality is so extremely
+uncommon. For it was the sensibility of strength and not of weakness,
+nor of mere over-refinement and subtlety. We may estimate the
+significance of such a difference, when we think how little, after all,
+the singular gifts of a Newman or a Maurice have done for their
+contemporaries, simply because these two eminent men allowed
+consciousness of their own weakness to 'sickly over' the spontaneous
+impulses of their strength.
+
+The wonder is that the reaction against such an education as that
+through which James Mill brought his son,--an education so intense, so
+purely analytical, doing so much for the reason and so little for the
+satisfaction of the affections,--was not of the most violent kind. The
+wonder is that the crisis through which nearly every youth of good
+quality has to pass, and from which Mr. Mill, as he has told us, by no
+means escaped, did not land him in some of the extreme forms of
+transcendentalism. If it had done so the record of the journey would no
+doubt have been more abundant in melodramatic incidents. It would have
+done more to tickle the fancy of 'the present age of loud disputes but
+weak convictions.' And it might have been found more touching by the
+large numbers of talkers and writers who seem to think that a history of
+a careful man's opinions on grave and difficult subjects ought to have
+all the rapid movements and unexpected turns of a romance, and that a
+book without rapture and effusion and a great many capital letters must
+be joyless and disappointing. Those of us who dislike literary hysteria
+as much as we dislike the coarseness that mistakes itself for force, may
+well be glad to follow the mental history of a man who knew how to move
+and grow without any of these reactions and leaps on the one hand, or
+any of that overdone realism on the other, which may all make a more
+striking picture, but which do assuredly more often than not mark the
+ruin of a mind and the nullification of a career.
+
+If we are now and then conscious in the book of a certain want of
+spacing, of changing perspectives and long vistas; if we have perhaps a
+sense of being too narrowly enclosed; if we miss the relish of humour or
+the occasional relief of irony; we ought to remember that we are busy
+not with a work of imagination or art, but with the practical record of
+the formation of an eminent thinker's mental habits and the succession
+of his mental attitudes. The formation of such mental habits is not a
+romance, but the most arduous of real concerns. If we are led up to none
+of the enkindled summits of the soul, and plunged into none of its
+abysses, that is no reason why we should fail to be struck by the pale
+flame of strenuous self-possession, or touched by the ingenuousness and
+simplicity of the speaker's accents. A generation continually excited by
+narratives, as sterile as vehement, of storm and stress and spiritual
+shipwreck, might do well, if it knew the things that pertained to its
+peace, to ponder this unvarnished history--the history of a man who,
+though he was not one of the picturesque victims of the wasteful
+torments of an uneasy spiritual self-consciousness, yet laboured so
+patiently after the gifts of intellectual strength, and did so much
+permanently to widen the judgments of the world.
+
+If Mr. Mill's Autobiography has no literary grandeur, nor artistic
+variety, it has the rarer merit of presenting for our contemplation a
+character that was infested by none of the smaller passions, and warped
+by none of the more unintelligent attitudes of the human mind. We have
+to remember that it is exactly these, the smaller passions on the one
+hand, and slovenliness of intelligence on the other, which are even
+worse agencies in spoiling the worth of life and the advance of society
+than the more imposing vices either of thought or sentiment. Many have
+told the tale of a life of much external eventfulness. There is a rarer
+instructiveness in the quiet career of one whose life was an incessant
+education, a persistent strengthening of the mental habit of 'never
+accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning a
+puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up;
+never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored,
+because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly
+understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole' (p. 123).
+It is true that this mental habit is not so singular in itself, for it
+is the common and indispensable merit of every truly scientific thinker.
+Mr. Mill's distinction lay in the deliberate intention and the
+systematic patience with which he brought it to the consideration of
+moral and religious and social subjects. In this region hitherto, for
+reasons that are not difficult to seek, the empire of prejudice and
+passion has been so much stronger, so much harder to resist, than in the
+field of physical science.
+
+Sect is so ready to succeed sect, and school comes after school, with
+constant replacement of one sort of orthodoxy by another sort, until
+even the principle of relativity becomes the base of a set of absolute
+and final dogmas, and the very doctrine of uncertainty itself becomes
+fixed in a kind of authoritative nihilism. It is, therefore, a signal
+gain that we now have a new type, with the old wise device, [Greek:
+memneso apistein]--_be sure that you distrust_. Distrust your own bias;
+distrust your supposed knowledge; constantly try, prove, fortify your
+firmest convictions. And all this, throughout the whole domain where the
+intelligence rules. It was characteristic of a man of this type that he
+should have been seized by that memorable passage in Condorcet's Life of
+Turgot to which Mr. Mill refers (p. 114), and which every man with an
+active interest in serious affairs should bind about his neck and write
+on the tablets of his heart.
+
+'Turgot,' says his wise biographer, 'always looked upon anything like a
+sect as mischievous.... From the moment that a sect comes into
+existence, all the individuals composing it become answerable for the
+faults and errors of each one of them. The obligation to remain united
+leads them to suppress or dissemble all truths that might wound anybody
+whose adhesion is useful to the sect. They are forced to establish in
+some form a body of doctrine, and the opinions which make a part of it,
+being adopted without inquiry, become in due time pure prejudices.
+Friendship stops with the individuals; but the hatred and envy that any
+of them may arouse extends to the whole sect. If this sect be formed by
+the most enlightened men of the nation, if the defence of truths of the
+greatest importance to the common happiness be the object of its zeal,
+the mischief is still worse. Everything true or useful which they
+propose is rejected without examination. Abuses and errors of every kind
+always have for their defenders that herd of presumptuous and mediocre
+mortals, who are the bitterest enemies of all celebrity and renown.
+Scarcely is a truth made clear, before those to whom it would be
+prejudicial crush it under the name of a sect that is sure to have
+already become odious, and are certain to keep it from obtaining so much
+as a hearing. Turgot, then, was persuaded that perhaps the greatest ill
+you can do to truth is to drive those who love it to form themselves
+into a sect, and that these in turn can commit no more fatal mistake
+than to have the vanity or the weakness to fall into the trap.'
+
+Yet we know that with Mr. Mill as with Turgot this deep distrust of sect
+was no hindrance to the most careful systematisation of opinion and
+conduct. He did not interpret many-sidedness in the flaccid watery sense
+which flatters the indolence of so many of our contemporaries, who like
+to have their ears amused with a new doctrine each morning, to be held
+for a day, and dropped in the evening, and who have little more
+seriousness in their intellectual life than the busy insects of a summer
+noon. He says that he looked forward 'to a future which shall unite the
+best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic
+periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual
+action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also convictions as to
+what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the
+feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so
+firmly grounded in reason and the true exigencies of life, that they
+shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and
+political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others'
+(p. 166). This was in some sort the type at which he aimed in the
+formation of his own character--a type that should combine organic with
+critical quality, the strength of an ordered set of convictions, with
+that pliability and that receptiveness in face of new truth, which are
+indispensable to these very convictions being held intelligently and in
+their best attainable form. We can understand the force of the eulogy on
+John Austin (p. 154), that he manifested 'an equal devotion to the two
+cardinal points of Liberty and Duty.' These are the correlatives in the
+sphere of action to the two cardinal points of Criticism and Belief in
+the sphere of thought.
+
+We can in the light of this double way of viewing the right balance of
+the mind, the better understand the combination of earnestness with
+tolerance which inconsiderate persons are apt to find so awkward a
+stumbling-block in the scheme of philosophic liberalism. Many people in
+our time have so ill understood the doctrine of liberty, that in some of
+the most active circles in society they now count you a bigot if you
+hold any proposition to be decidedly and unmistakably more true than any
+other. They pronounce you intemperate if you show anger and stern
+disappointment because men follow the wrong course instead of the right
+one. Mr. Mill's explanation of the vehemence and decision of his
+father's disapproval, when he did disapprove, and his refusal to allow
+honesty of purpose in the doer to soften his disapprobation of the deed,
+gives the reader a worthy and masculine notion of true tolerance. James
+Mill's 'aversion to many intellectual errors, or what he regarded as
+such, partook in a certain sense of the character of a moral feeling....
+None but those who do not care about opinions will confound this with
+intolerance. Those, who having opinions which they hold to be immensely
+important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have any
+deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a class
+and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right, and
+right what they think wrong: though they need not be, nor was my father,
+insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in their
+estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of by the
+whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person, being no more
+infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people on account of
+opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither himself does
+them any ill office, nor connives at its being done by others, he is not
+intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a conscientious sense
+of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom of all opinions is the
+only tolerance which is commendable, or to the highest moral order of
+minds, possible' (p. 51). This is another side of the co-ordination of
+Criticism and Belief, of Liberty and Duty, which attained in Mr. Mill
+himself a completeness that other men, less favoured in education and
+with less active power of self-control, are not likely to reach, but to
+reach it ought to be one of the prime objects of their mental
+discipline. The inculcation of this peculiar morality of the
+intelligence is one of the most urgently needed processes of our time.
+For the circumstance of our being in the very depths of a period of
+transition from one spiritual basis of thought to another, leads men not
+only to be content with holding a quantity of vague, confused, and
+contradictory opinions, but also to invest with the honourable name of
+candour a weak reluctance to hold any one of them earnestly.
+
+Mr. Mill experienced in the four or five last years of his life the
+disadvantage of trying to unite fairness towards the opinions from which
+he differed, with loyalty to the positive opinions which he accepted.
+'As I had showed in my political writings,' he says, 'that I was aware
+of the weak points in democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems,
+had not been without hopes of finding me an opponent of democracy: as I
+was able to see the Conservative side of the question, they presumed
+that like them I could not see any other side. Yet if they had really
+read my writings, they would have known that after giving full weight to
+all that appeared to me well grounded in the arguments against
+democracy, I unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while recommending
+that it should be accompanied by such institutions as were consistent
+with its principle and calculated to ward off its inconveniences' (p.
+309). This was only one illustration of what constantly happened, until
+at length, it is hardly too much to say, a man who had hitherto enjoyed
+a singular measure of general reverence because he was supposed to see
+truth in every doctrine, became downright unpopular among many classes
+in the community, because he saw more truth in one doctrine than
+another, and brought the propositions for whose acceptance he was most
+in earnest eagerly before the public.
+
+In a similar way the Autobiography shows us the picture of a man uniting
+profound self-respect with a singular neutrality where his own claims
+are concerned, a singular self-mastery and justice of mind, in matters
+where with most men the sense of their own personality is wont to be so
+exacting and so easily irritated. The history of intellectual eminence
+is too often a history of immoderate egoism. It has perhaps hardly ever
+been given to any one who exerted such influence as Mr. Mill did over
+his contemporaries, to view his own share in it with such discrimination
+and equity as marks every page of his book, and as used to mark every
+word of his conversation. Knowing as we all do the last infirmity of
+even noble minds, and how deep the desire to erect himself Pope and Sir
+Oracle lies in the spirit of a man with strong convictions, we may value
+the more highly, as well for its rarity as for its intrinsic worth, Mr.
+Mill's quality of self-effacement, and his steadfast care to look
+anywhere rather than in his own personal merits, for the source of any
+of those excellences which he was never led by false modesty to
+dissemble.
+
+Many people seem to find the most interesting figure in the book that
+stoical father, whose austere, energetic, imperious, and relentless
+character showed the temperament of the Scotch Covenanter of the
+seventeenth century, inspired by the principles and philosophy of France
+in the eighteenth. No doubt, for those in search of strong dramatic
+effects, the lines of this strenuous indomitable nature are full of
+impressiveness.[3] But one ought to be able to appreciate the
+distinction and strength of the father, and yet also be able to see that
+the distinction of the son's strength was in truth more really
+impressive still. We encounter a modesty that almost speaks the language
+of fatalism. Pieces of good fortune that most people would assuredly
+have either explained as due to their own penetration, or to the
+recognition of their worth by others, or else would have refrained from
+dwelling upon, as being no more than events of secondary importance, are
+by Mr. Mill invariably recognised at their full worth or even above it,
+and invariably spoken of as fortunate accidents, happy turns in the
+lottery of life, or in some other quiet fatalistic phrase, expressive of
+his deep feeling how much we owe to influences over which we have no
+control and for which we have no right to take any credit. His saying
+that 'it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be
+believed by all _quoad_ the characters of others, and disbelieved in
+regard to their own' (p. 169), went even further than that, for he
+teaches us to accept the doctrine of necessity _quoad_ the most marked
+felicities of life and character, and to lean lightly or not at all
+upon it in regard to our demerits. Humility is a rationalistic, no less
+than a Christian grace--not humility in face of error or arrogant
+pretensions or selfishness, nor a humility that paralyses energetic
+effort, but a steadfast consciousness of all the good gifts which our
+forerunners have made ready for us, and of the weight of our
+responsibility for transmitting these helpful forces to a new
+generation, not diminished but augmented.
+
+[Footnote 3: In an interesting volume (_The Minor Works of George
+Grote_, edited by Alexander Bain. London: Murray), we find Grote
+confirming Mr. Mill's estimate of his father's psychagogic quality. 'His
+unpremeditated oral exposition,' says Grote of James Mill, 'was hardly
+less effective than his prepared work with the pen; his colloquial
+fertility in philosophical subjects, his power of discussing himself,
+and stimulating others to discuss, his ready responsive inspirations
+through all the shifts and windings of a sort of Platonic dialogue,--all
+these accomplishments 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 observant intelligence. Of
+all persons whom we have known, Mr. James Mill was the one who stood
+least remote from the lofty Platonic ideal of Dialectic--[Greek: tou
+didonai kai dechesthai logon] (the giving and receiving of
+reasons)--competent alike to examine others or to be examined by them in
+philosophy. When to this we add a strenuous character, earnest
+convictions, and single-minded devotion to truth, with an utter disdain
+of mere paradox, it may be conceived that such a man exercised powerful
+intellectual ascendancy over youthful minds,' etc.--_Minor Works of
+George Grote_, p. 284.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In more than one remarkable place the Autobiography shows us distinctly
+what all careful students of Mr. Mill's books supposed, that with him
+the social aim, the repayment of the services of the past by devotion to
+the services of present and future, was predominant over any merely
+speculative curiosity or abstract interest. His preference for deeply
+reserved ways of expressing even his strongest feelings prevented him
+from making any expansive show of this governing sentiment. Though no
+man was ever more free from any taint of that bad habit of us English,
+of denying or palliating an abuse or a wrong, unless we are prepared
+with an instant remedy for it, yet he had a strong aversion to mere
+socialistic declamation. Perhaps, if one may say so without presumption,
+he was not indulgent enough in this respect. I remember once pressing
+him with some enthusiasm for Victor Hugo,--an enthusiasm, one is glad to
+think, which time does nothing to weaken. Mr. Mill, admitting, though
+not too lavishly, the superb imaginative power of this poetic master of
+our time, still counted it a fatal drawback to Hugo's worth and claim to
+recognition that 'he has not brought forward one single practical
+proposal for the improvement of the society against which he is
+incessantly thundering.' I ventured to urge that it is unreasonable to
+ask a poet to draft acts of parliament; and that by bringing all the
+strength of his imagination and all the majestic fulness of his sympathy
+to bear on the social horrors and injustices which still lie so thick
+about us, he kindled an inextinguishable fire in the hearts of men of
+weaker initiative and less imperial gifts alike of imagination and
+sympathy, and so prepared the forces out of which practical proposals
+and specific improvements may be expected to issue. That so obvious a
+kind of reflection should not have previously interested Mr. Mill's
+judgment in favour of the writer of the _Outcasts_, the _Legend of the
+Ages_, the _Contemplations_, only shows how strong was his dislike to
+all that savoured of the grandiose, and how afraid he always was of
+everything that seemed to dissociate emotion from rationally directed
+effort. That he was himself inspired by this emotion of pity for the
+common people, of divine rage against the injustice of the strong to the
+weak, in a degree not inferior to Victor Hugo himself, his whole career
+most effectually demonstrates.
+
+It is this devotion to the substantial good of the many, though
+practised without the noisy or ostentatious professions of more egoistic
+thinkers, which binds together all the parts of his work, from the
+_System of Logic_ down to his last speech on the Land Question. One of
+the most striking pages in the Autobiography is that in which he gives
+his reasons for composing the refutation of Hamilton, and as some of
+these especially valuable passages in the book seem to be running the
+risk of neglect in favour of those which happen to furnish material for
+the idle, pitiful gossip of London society, it may be well to reproduce
+it.
+
+'The difference,' he says, 'between these two schools of philosophy,
+that of Intuition and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere
+matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences,
+and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical
+opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to
+demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful
+and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and
+indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable
+part of his argument to show how those powerful feelings had their
+origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible.
+There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy
+which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by
+circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
+elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up
+favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the
+voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that
+of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing
+tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as
+innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs
+that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between
+individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally
+would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief
+hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one
+of the greatest stumbling-blocks to human improvement. This tendency has
+its source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterised the
+reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is a
+tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative
+interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure
+to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by the
+more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy.... Considering then
+the writings and fame of Sir W. Hamilton as the great fortress of the
+intuitional philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formidable
+from the imposing character, and the, in many respects, great personal
+merits and mental endowments of the man, I thought it might be a real
+service to philosophy to attempt a thorough examination of all his most
+important doctrines, and an estimate of his general claims to eminence
+as a philosopher; and I was confirmed in this resolution by observing
+that in the writings of at least one, and him one of the ablest, of Sir
+W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the
+justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly
+immoral--that it is our duty to bow down and worship before a Being
+whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be
+perhaps extremely different from those which, when speaking of our
+fellow-creatures, we call by the same name' (pp. 273-275).
+
+Thus we see that even where the distance between the object of his
+inquiry and the practical wellbeing of mankind seemed farthest, still
+the latter was his starting point, and the doing 'a real service to
+philosophy' only occurred to him in connection with a still greater and
+more real service to those social causes for which, and which only,
+philosophy is worth cultivating. In the _System of Logic_ the
+inspiration had been the same.
+
+'The notion that truths external to the mind,' he writes, 'may be known
+by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and
+experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual
+support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this
+theory every inveterate belief and every intense feeling of which the
+origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of
+justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient
+voucher and justification. There never was an instrument better devised
+for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength of
+this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the
+appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics
+and of the cognate branches of physical science. To expel it from these
+is to drive it from its stronghold.... In attempting to clear up the
+real nature of the evidence of mathematical and physical truth, the
+_System of Logic_ met the intuitive philosophers on ground on which they
+had previously been deemed unassailable; and gave its own explanation
+from experience and association of that peculiar character of what are
+called necessary truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidence
+must come from a deeper source than experience. Whether this has been
+done effectually is still _sub judice_; and even then, to deprive a mode
+of thought so strongly rooted in human prejudices and partialities of
+its mere speculative support, goes but a very little way towards
+overcoming it; but though only a step, it is a quite indispensable one;
+for since, after all, prejudice can only be successfully combated by
+philosophy, no way can really be made against it permanently, until it
+has been shown not to have philosophy on its side' (pp. 225-227).
+
+This was to lay the basis of a true positivism by the only means through
+which it can be laid firmly. It was to establish at the bottom of men's
+minds the habit of seeking explanations of all phenomena in experience,
+and building up from the beginning the great positive principle that we
+can only know phenomena, and can only know them experientially. We see,
+from such passages as the two that have been quoted, that with Mr. Mill,
+no less than with Comte, the ultimate object was to bring people to
+extend positive modes of thinking to the master subjects of morals,
+politics, and religion. Mr. Mill, however, with a wisdom which Comte
+unfortunately did not share, refrained from any rash and premature
+attempt to decide what would be the results of this much-needed
+extension. He knew that we were as yet only just coming in sight of the
+stage where these most complex of all phenomena can be fruitfully
+studied on positive methods, and he was content with doing as much as he
+could to expel other methods from men's minds, and to engender the
+positive spirit and temper. Comte, on the other hand, presumed at once
+to draw up a minute plan of social reconstruction, which contains some
+ideas of great beauty and power, some of extreme absurdity, and some
+which would be very mischievous if there were the smallest chance of
+their ever being realised. 'His book stands,' Mr. Mill truly says of the
+_System of Positive Polity_, 'a monumental warning to thinkers on
+society and politics of what happens when once men lose sight in their
+speculations of the value of Liberty and Individuality' (p. 213).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was his own sense of the value of Liberty which led to the production
+of the little tractate which Mr. Mill himself thought likely to survive
+longer than anything else that he had written, 'with the possible
+exception of the _Logic_,' as being 'a kind of philosophic text-book of
+a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern
+society tend to bring out into ever 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' (p. 253). It seems to us, however, that Mr.
+Mill's plea for Liberty in the abstract, invaluable as it is, still is
+less important than the memorable application of this plea, and of all
+the arguments supporting it, to that half of the human race whose
+individuality has hitherto been blindly and most wastefully repressed.
+The little book on the _Subjection of Women_, though not a capital
+performance like the _Logic_, was the capital illustration of the modes
+of reasoning about human character set forth in his _Logic_ applied to
+the case in which the old metaphysical notion of innate and indelible
+differences is still nearly as strong as ever it was, and in which its
+moral and social consequences are so inexpressibly disastrous, so
+superlatively powerful in keeping the ordinary level of the aims and
+achievements of life low and meagre. The accurate and unanswerable
+reasoning no less than the noble elevation of this great argument; the
+sagacity of a hundred of its maxims on individual conduct and character,
+no less than the combined rationality and beauty of its aspirations for
+the improvement of collective social life, make this piece probably the
+best illustration of all the best and richest qualities of its author's
+mind, and it is fortunate that a subject of such incomparable importance
+should have been first effectively presented for discussion in so
+worthy and pregnant a form.
+
+It is interesting to know definitely from the Autobiography, what is
+implied in the opening of the book itself, that a zealous belief in the
+advantages of abolishing the legal and social inequalities of women was
+not due to the accident of personal intimacy with one or two more women
+of exceptional distinction of character. What has been ignorantly
+supposed in our own day to be a crotchet of Mr. Mill's was the common
+doctrine of the younger proselytes of the Benthamite school, and Bentham
+himself was wholly with them (_Autobiography_, p. 105, and also 244);
+as, of course, were other thinkers of an earlier date, Condorcet for
+instance.[4] In this as in other subjects Mr. Mill did not go beyond his
+modest definition of his own originality--the application of old ideas
+in new forms and connections (p. 119), or the originality 'which every
+thoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressing
+truths which are common property' (p. 254). Or shall we say that he had
+an originality of a more genuine kind, which made him first diligently
+acquire what in an excellent phrase he calls _plenary possession_ of
+truths, and then transfuse them with a sympathetic and contagious
+enthusiasm?
+
+[Footnote 4: Condorcet's arguments the reader will find in vol. i. of
+the present series of these _Critical Miscellanies_, p. 249.]
+
+It is often complained that the book on Women has the radical
+imperfection of not speaking plainly on the question of the limitations
+proper to divorce. The present writer once ventured to ask Mr. Mill why
+he had left this important point undiscussed. Mr. Mill replied that it
+seemed to him impossible to settle the expediency of more liberal
+conditions of divorce, 'first, without hearing much more fully than we
+could possibly do at present the ideas held by women in the matter;
+second, until the experiment of marriage with entire equality between
+man and wife had been properly tried.' People who are in a hurry to get
+rid of their partners may find this very halting kind of work, and a man
+who wants to take a new wife before sunset, may well be irritated by a
+philosopher who tells him that the question may possibly be capable of
+useful discussion towards the middle of the next century. But Mr. Mill's
+argument is full of force and praiseworthy patience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The union of boundless patience with unshaken hope was one of Mr. Mill's
+most conspicuous distinctions. There are two crises in the history of
+grave and sensitive natures. One on the threshold of manhood, when the
+youth defines his purpose, his creed, his aspirations; the other towards
+the later part of middle life, when circumstance has strained his
+purpose, and tested his creed, and given to his aspirations a cold and
+practical measure. The second crisis, though less stirring, less vivid,
+less coloured to the imagination, is the weightier probation of the two,
+for it is final and decisive; it marks not the mere unresisted force of
+youthful impulse and implanted predispositions, as the earlier crisis
+does, but rather the resisting quality, the strength, the purity, the
+depth, of the native character, after the many princes of the power of
+the air have had time and chance of fighting their hardest against it.
+It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or
+five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or
+the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral
+climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial
+cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous
+resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the
+burning fiery furnace of circumstance.
+
+Mr. Mill did not escape the second crisis, any more than he had escaped
+the first, though he dismisses it in a far more summary manner. The
+education, he tells us, which his father had given him with such fine
+solicitude, had taught him to look for the greatest and surest source of
+happiness in sympathy with the good of mankind on a large scale, and had
+fitted him to work for this good of mankind in various ways. By the time
+he was twenty, his sympathies and passive susceptibilities had been so
+little cultivated, his analytic quality had been developed with so
+little balance in the shape of developed feelings, that he suddenly
+found himself unable to take pleasure in those thoughts of virtue and
+benevolence which had hitherto only been associated with logical
+demonstration and not with sympathetic sentiment. This dejection was
+dispelled mainly by the influence of Wordsworth--a poet austere yet
+gracious, energetic yet sober, penetrated with feeling for nature, yet
+penetrated with feeling for the homely lot of man. Here was the
+emotional synthesis, binding together the energies of the speculative
+and active mind by sympathetic interest in the common feelings and
+common destiny of human beings.
+
+For some ten years more (1826-1836) Mr. Mill hoped the greatest things
+for the good of society from reformed institutions. That was the period
+of parliamentary changes, and such hope was natural and universal. Then
+a shadow came over this confidence, and Mr. Mill advanced to the
+position that the choice of political institutions is subordinate to the
+question, 'what great improvement in life and culture stands next in
+order for the people concerned, as the condition of their further
+progress?' (p. 170). In this period he composed the _Logic_ (published
+1843) and the _Political Economy_ (1848). Then he saw what all ardent
+lovers of improvement are condemned to see, that their hopes have
+outstripped the rate of progress; that fulfilment of social aspiration
+is tardy and very slow of foot; and that the leaders of human thought
+are never permitted to enter into that Promised Land whither they are
+conducting others. Changes for which he had worked and from which he
+expected most, came to pass, but, after they had come to pass, they were
+'attended with much less benefit to human wellbeing than I should
+formerly have anticipated, because they had produced very little
+improvement in that which all real amelioration in the lot of mankind
+depends on, their intellectual and moral state.... I had learnt from
+experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones,
+without in the least altering the habit of mind of which false opinions
+are the result' (p. 239). This discovery appears to have brought on no
+recurrence of the dejection which had clouded a portion of his youth. It
+only set him to consider the root of so disappointing a conclusion, and
+led to the conviction that a great change in the fundamental
+constitution of men's modes of thought must precede any marked
+improvement in their lot. He perceived that society is now passing
+through a transitional period 'of weak convictions, paralysed
+intellects, and growing laxity of principle,' the consequence of the
+discredit in the more reflective minds of the old opinions on the
+cardinal subjects of religion, morals, and politics, which have now lost
+most of their efficacy for good, though still possessed of life enough
+to present formidable obstacles to the growth of better opinion on those
+subjects (p. 239).
+
+Thus the crisis of disappointment which breaks up the hope and effort of
+so many men who start well, or else throws them into poor and sterile
+courses, proved in this grave, fervent, and most reasonable spirit only
+the beginning of more serious endeavours in a new and more arduous vein.
+Hitherto he had been, as he says, 'more willing to be content with
+seconding the superficial improvements which had begun to take place in
+the common opinions of society and the world.' Henceforth he kept less
+and less in abeyance the more heretical part of his opinions, which he
+began more and more clearly to discern as 'almost the only ones, the
+assertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society' (p. 230). The
+crisis of middle age developed a new fortitude, a more earnest
+intrepidity, a greater boldness of expression about the deeper things,
+an interest profounder than ever in the improvement of the human lot.
+The book on the _Subjection of Women_, the _Liberty_, and probably some
+pieces that have not yet been given to the world, are the notable result
+of this ripest, loftiest, and most inspiring part of his life.
+
+This judgment does not appear to be shared by the majority of those who
+have hitherto published their opinions upon Mr. Mill's life and works.
+Perhaps it would have been odd if such a judgment had been common.
+People who think seriously of life and its conditions either are content
+with those conditions as they exist, or else they find them empty and
+deeply unsatisfying. Well, the former class, who naturally figure
+prominently in the public press, because the press is the more or less
+flattering mirror of the prevailing doctrines of the day, think that Mr.
+Mill's views of a better social future are chimerical, utopian, and
+sentimental. The latter class compensate themselves for the pinchedness
+of the real world about them by certain rapturous ideals, centring in
+God, a future life, and the long companionship of the blessed. The
+consequence of this absorption either in the immediate interests and
+aims of the hour, or in the interests and aims of an imaginary world
+which is supposed to await us after death, has been a hasty inclination
+to look on such a life and such purposes as are set forth in the
+Autobiography as essentially jejune and dreary. It is not in the least
+surprising that such a feeling should prevail. If it were otherwise, if
+the majority of thoughtful men and women were already in a condition to
+be penetrated by sympathy for the life of 'search with many sighs,' then
+we should have already gone far on our way towards the goal which a
+Turgot or a Mill set for human progress. If society had at once
+recognised the full attractiveness of a life arduously passed in
+consideration of the means by which the race may take its next step
+forward in the improvement of character and the amelioration of the
+common lot,--and this not from love of God nor hope of recompense in a
+world to come, and still less from hope of recompense or even any very
+firm assurance of fulfilled aspiration in this world,--then that
+fundamental renovation of conviction for which Mr. Mill sighed, and that
+evolution of a new faith to which he had looked forward in the far
+distance, would already have come to pass.
+
+Mr. Mill has been ungenerously ridiculed for the eagerness and
+enthusiasm of his contemplation of a new and better state of human
+society. Yet we have always been taught to consider it the mark of the
+loftiest and most spiritual character, for one to be capable of
+rapturous contemplation of a new and better state in a future life. Why,
+then, do you not recognise the loftiness and spirituality of those who
+make their heaven in the thought of the wider light and purer happiness
+that, in the immensity of the ages, may be brought to new generations of
+men, by long force of vision and endeavour? What great element is
+wanting in a life guided by such a hope? Is it not disinterested, and
+magnanimous, and purifying, and elevating? The countless beauties of
+association which cluster round the older faith may make the new seem
+bleak and chilly. But when what is now the old faith was itself new,
+that too may well have struck, as we know that it did strike, the
+adherent of the mellowed pagan philosophy as crude, meagre, jejune,
+dreary.
+
+Then Mr. Mill's life as disclosed to us in these pages has been called
+joyless, by that sect of religious partisans whose peculiarity is to
+mistake boisterousness for unction. Was the life of Christ himself,
+then, so particularly joyful? Can the life of any man be joyful who sees
+and feels the tragic miseries and hardly less tragic follies of the
+earth? The old Preacher, when he considered all the oppressions that are
+done under the sun, and beheld the tears of such as were oppressed and
+had no comforter, therefore praised the dead which are already dead more
+than the living which are yet alive, and declared him better than both,
+which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done
+under the sun. Those who are willing to trick their understandings and
+play fast and loose with words may, if they please, console themselves
+with the fatuous commonplaces of a philosophic optimism. They may, with
+eyes tight shut, cling to the notion that they live in the best of all
+possible worlds, or discerning all the anguish that may be compressed
+into threescore years and ten, still try to accept the Stoic's paradox
+that pain is not an evil. Or, most wonderful and most common of all,
+they may find this joy of which they talk, in meditating on the moral
+perfections of the omnipotent Being for whose diversion the dismal
+panorama of all the evil work done under the sun was bidden to unfold
+itself, and who sees that it is very good. Those who are capable of a
+continuity of joyous emotion on these terms may well complain of Mr.
+Mill's story as dreary; and so may the school of Solomon, who commended
+mirth because a man hath no better thing than to eat and to drink and to
+be merry. People, however, who are prohibited by their intellectual
+conditions from finding full satisfaction either in spiritual raptures
+or in pleasures of sense, may think the standard of happiness which Mr.
+Mill sought and reached, not unacceptable and not unworthy of being
+diligently striven after.
+
+Mr. Mill's conception of happiness in life is more intelligible if we
+contrast it with his father's. The Cynic element in James Mill, as his
+son now tells us (pg. 48), was that he had scarcely any belief in
+pleasures; he thought few of them worth the price which has to be paid
+for them; and he set down the greater number of the miscarriages in life
+as due to an excessive estimate of them. 'He thought human life a poor
+thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity
+had gone by.... He would sometimes say that if life were made what it
+might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth
+having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that
+possibility.' We should shrink from calling even this theory dreary,
+associated as it is with the rigorous enforcement of the heroic virtues
+of temperance and moderation, and the strenuous and careful bracing up
+of every faculty to face the inevitable and make the best of it. At
+bottom it is the theory of many of the bravest souls, who fare grimly
+through life in the mood of leaders of forlorn hopes, denying pleasures,
+yet very sensible of the stern delight of fortitude. We can have no
+difficulty in understanding that, when the elder Mill lay dying, 'his
+interest in all things and persons that had interested him through life
+was undiminished, nor did the approach of death cause the smallest
+wavering (as in so strong and firm a mind it was impossible that it
+should), in his convictions on the subject of religion. His principal
+satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, seemed to be the
+thought of what he had done to make the world better than he found it;
+and his chief regret in not living longer, that he had not had time to
+do more' (p. 203).[5]
+
+[Footnote 5: For the mood in which death was faced by another person who
+had renounced theology and the doctrine of a future state of
+consciousness, see Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, ii. 435, etc.]
+
+Mr. Mill, however, went beyond this conception. He had a belief in
+pleasures, and thought human life by no means a poor thing to those who
+know how to make the best of it. It was essential both to the stability
+of his utilitarian philosophy, and to the contentment of his own
+temperament, that the reality of happiness should be vindicated, and he
+did both vindicate and attain it. A highly pleasurable excitement that
+should have no end, of course he did not think possible; but he regarded
+the two constituents of a satisfied life, much tranquillity and some
+excitement, as perfectly attainable by many men, and as ultimately
+attainable by very many more. The ingredients of this satisfaction he
+set forth as follows:--a willingness not to expect more from life than
+life is capable of bestowing; an intelligent interest in the objects of
+mental culture; genuine private affections; and a sincere interest in
+the public good. What, on the other hand, are the hindrances which
+prevent these elements from being in the possession of every one born in
+a civilised country? Ignorance; bad laws or customs, debarring a man or
+woman from the sources of happiness within reach; and 'the positive
+evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering--such
+as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature
+loss of objects of affection.'[6] But every one of these calamitous
+impediments is susceptible of the weightiest modification, and some of
+them of final removal. Mr. Mill had learnt from Turgot and
+Condorcet--two of the wisest and noblest of men, as he justly calls them
+(113)--among many other lessons, this of the boundless improvableness of
+the human lot, and we may believe that he read over many a time the
+pages in which Condorcet delineated the Tenth Epoch in the history of
+human perfectibility, and traced out in words of finely reserved
+enthusiasm the operation of the forces which should consummate the
+progress of the race. 'All the grand sources of human suffering,' Mr.
+Mill thought, 'are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely,
+conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal is
+grievously slow--though a long succession of generations will perish in
+the breach before the conquest is completed, and this world becomes all
+that, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily be
+made--yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear a
+part, however small and unconspicuous, in the endeavour, will draw a
+noble enjoyment from the contest itself, which he would not for any
+bribe in the form of selfish indulgence consent to be without'
+(_Utilitarianism_, 22).
+
+[Footnote 6: For this exposition see _Utilitarianism_, pp. 18-24.]
+
+We thus see how far from dreary this wise and benign man actually found
+his own life; how full it was of cheerfulness, of animation, of
+persevering search, of a tranquillity lighted up at wholesome intervals
+by flashes of intellectual and moral excitement. That it was not seldom
+crossed by moods of despondency is likely enough, but we may at least be
+sure that these moods had nothing in common with the vulgar despondency
+of those whose hopes are centred in material prosperity in this world
+and spiritual prosperity in some other. They were, at least, the
+dejection of a magnanimous spirit, that could only be cast down by some
+new hindrance to the spread of reason and enlightenment among men, or
+some new weakening of their incentives to right doing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much has been said against Mr. Mill's strictures on society, and his
+withdrawal from it. If we realise the full force of all that he says of
+his own purpose in life, it is hard to see how either his opinion or his
+practice could have been different. He ceased to be content with
+'seconding the superficial improvements' in common ways of thinking, and
+saw the necessity of working at a fundamental reconstitution of accepted
+modes of thought. This in itself implies a condemnation of a social
+intercourse that rests on the base of conventional ways of looking at
+things. The better kind of society, it is true, appears to contain two
+classes; not only the class that will hear nothing said hostile to the
+greater social conventions, including among these the popular theology,
+but also another class who will tolerate or even encourage attack on
+the greater social conventions, and a certain mild discussion of
+improvements in them--provided only neither attack nor discussion be
+conducted in too serious a vein. A new idea about God, or property, or
+the family, is handed round among the company, as ladies of quality in
+Queen Anne's time handed round a black page or a China monster. In
+Bishop Butler's phrase, these people only want to know what is said, not
+what is true. To be in earnest, to show that you mean what you say, to
+think of drawing blood in the encounter, is thought, and perhaps very
+naturally thought, to be a piece of bad manners. Social intercourse can
+only exist either pleasantly or profitably among people who share a
+great deal of common ground in opinion and feeling. Mr. Mill, no doubt,
+was always anxious to find as much common ground as he honestly could,
+for this was one of the most characteristic maxims of his propagandism.
+But a man who had never been brought up in the popular religion, and who
+had been brought up in habits of the most scrupulous fair dealing with
+his own understanding; who had never closed his mind to new truths from
+likely sources, but whose character was formed, and whose mind was made
+up, on the central points of opinion, was not in a position to derive
+much benefit from those who in all respects represent a less advanced
+stage of mental development. On the other hand, all the benefit which
+they were in a position to derive from him could be adequately secured
+by reading what he wrote. Perhaps there is nothing wiser among the wise
+things written in the Autobiography than the remarks on the fact that
+persons of any mental superiority, who greatly frequent society, are
+greatly deteriorated by it. 'Not to mention loss of time, the tone of
+their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those of
+their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society
+they frequent: they come to look on their most elevated objects as
+unpractical, or at least too remote from realisation to be more than a
+vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their
+higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and
+affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and
+judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep'
+(p. 228). That a man loses something, nay, that he loses much, by being
+deprived of animating intercourse with other men, Mr. Mill would
+probably have been the first to admit. Where that intercourse can be
+had, nothing is more fit to make the judgment robust, nothing more fit
+to freshen and revive our interests, and to clothe them with reality.
+Even second-rate companionship has some clear advantages. The question
+is, whether these advantages outweigh the equally clear disadvantages.
+Mr. Mill was persuaded that they do not.
+
+Those whom disgust at the aimlessness and insignificance of most of our
+social intercourse may dispose to withdrawal from it--and their number
+will probably increase as the reaction against intellectual flippancy
+goes on--will do well to remember that Mr. Mill's retirement and his
+vindication of it sprang from no moral valetudinarianism. He did not
+retire to gratify any self-indulgent whim, but only in order to work the
+more uninterruptedly _and definitely_. The Autobiography tells us what
+pains he took to keep himself informed of all that was going on in every
+part of the world. 'In truth, the modern facilities of communication
+have not only removed all the disadvantages, to a political writer in
+tolerably easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of political
+action, but have converted them into advantages. The immediate and
+regular receipt of newspapers and periodicals keeps him _au courant_ of
+even the most temporary politics, and gives him a much more correct view
+of the state and progress of opinion than he could acquire by personal
+contact with individuals; for every one's social intercourse is more or
+less limited to particular sets or classes, whose impressions and no
+others reach him through that channel; and experience has taught me that
+those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called
+society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the
+organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either
+of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a
+recluse who reads the newspapers need be. There are, no doubt,
+disadvantages in too long a separation from one's country--in not
+occasionally renewing one's impressions of the light in which men and
+things appear when seen from a position in the midst of them; but the
+deliberate judgment formed at a distance, and undisturbed by
+inequalities of perspective, is the most to be depended on, even for
+application in practice. Alternating between the two positions, I
+combined the advantages of both.' Those who knew him will perhaps agree
+that he was more widely and precisely informed of the transactions of
+the day, in every department of activity all over the world, than any
+other person of their acquaintance. People should remember, further,
+that though Mr. Mill saw comparatively little of men after a certain
+time, yet he was for many years of his life in constant and active
+relations with men. It was to his experience in the Indian Office that
+he attributed some of his most serviceable qualities, especially this:
+'I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain
+everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not
+have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have
+the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with
+complete equanimity the being overruled altogether' (pp. 85, 86). In
+these words we seem almost to hear the modest and simple tones of the
+writer's own voice.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3), by
+John Morley
+
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