The English Utilitarians
Volume Three: John Stuart Mill
by Leslie Stephen
1900


Chapter One

John Stuart Mill's Life (1*)

I. Childhood

    When James Mill died, the spirit of his followers was
entering upon a new phase. A certain chill was creeping over the
confidence of previous years. The Reform Bill had been hailed as
inaugurating a new era; the Utilitarians thought that they had
made a solid lodgment in the fortress, and looked forwards to
complete occupation. The world was going their way; their
doctrines were triumphing; and if those who accepted their
conclusions claimed the credit of originating the movement, the
true faith was advancing. Triumph by other hands should be a
sufficient reward for preachers who preferred solid success to
personal glory. Opinions long regarded with horror might now be
openly avowed, and might be expected to spread when the incubus
of the old repressive system was removed. The position, to
compare small things with great, resembled that in which
Protestantism seemed to be definitely triumphing over the Papacy;
and, as in that case, the latent strength of the old order was as
yet underestimated. The party which had been so hopeful when
bound together by external pressure seemed to lose its energy at
the moment of its greatest triumph; its disciples became languid;
its cherished plans were rejected or emasculated; and many of the
little band of enthusiasts abandoned or materially modified their
doctrine. The change, indeed, meant that many of the principles
for which they contended had won general acceptance; but, for
that reason, they had no longer a common war cry. The
consequences are illustrated in the career of John Stuart Mill,
who succeeded to the leadership of the sect. In certain respects,
as we shall see, Mill's great aim was to soften and qualify the
teaching of his predecessors. At the same time he adhered, even
more strictly than he was himself conscious of adhering, to their
fundamental tenets; and as a philosopher he gained in the later
years of his life a far wider authority than had ever been
exercised by his predecessors. The early disciples of Bentham and
of James Mill were few, and felt even painfully their isolation.
But in his later years John Stuart Mill had emerged. He had
become the most prominent of English thinkers; the political
liberals referred to him as the soundest expounder of their
principles; and even in the English universities, the strongholds
in his youth of all ancient prejudices, he had probably more
followers than any other teacher. In the following chapters I
must trace the history of the intellectual change. I begin by
considering Mill's personal history. No complete biography has
appeared, nor were the external events of his career of special
interest. Mill, however, left an autobiography which was intended
to supply what is of most importance for us, the history of his
intellectual and moral development. In that respect the book is
eminently deserving of study. I must indicate what appear to me
to be the most important of the influences there described.
    John Stuart Mill, born 20th May 1806, was twenty-six at the
death of Bentham and thirty at the death of his father. He was
therefore old enough to be deeply affected by their personal
influence; and his precocity had made the relation to his elders
far more intimate than is often possible. James Mill and Bentham
looked upon him from early years as their spiritual heir. In 1812
his father writes to Bentham:(2*) 'Should I die,' says James
Mill, 'one thought that would pinch me most sorely' would be
leaving the poor boy's 'mind unmade.' Therefore, 'I take your
offer quite seriously' -- an offer apparently to be John's
guardian -- 'and then we may perhaps leave him a successor worthy
of both of us.' John lived till his manhood almost exclusively in
their little circle; and no child was ever more elaborately and
strenuously indoctrinated with the views of a sect. Had James
Mill adhered to his early creed his son would probably have
become a fit subject for one of those edifying tracts which deal
with infantile conversions. From the earliest dawn of intellect
until the age of fourteen he was the subject of one of the most
singular educational experiments on record.
    He gives in his Autobiography an account of his course of
study.(3*) His memory did not go back to the time at which he
began Greek; but he was told that he was then three years old. By
his eighth year (1814) he had read all Herodotus, Xenophon's
Cyropædia and Memorabilia, part of Lucian, and six dialogues of
Plato, including the Theætetus, which, he, ventures to think,'
might have been better omitted, as it, was totally impossible
that he could understand it.' In the next three years he had read
Homer, Thucydides, parts of the plays of Sophocles, Euripides,
and Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Æschines. and Lysias, Theocritus,
Anacreon, and the Anthology, and (in 1817) Aristotle's Rhetoric,
the first, scientific treatise on any moral or psychological
subject, which he carefully analysed and tabulated. He did not
begin Latin till his eighth year, when he read Cornelius Nepos
and Cæsar's Commentaries. By his twelfth year he had read much of
Virgil, Horace, Livy, Sallust, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Terence,
Lucretius, and a great deal of Cicero. He had learned a little
arithmetic by his eighth year, and had afterwards gone on to
conic actions and trigonometry, and had begun the differential
calculus. His father's ignorance of the higher mathematics left
him to struggle by himself with the difficulties of his later
studies; but he was far in advance of most boys of his age. He
read, too, some books upon the experimental sciences, especially
chemistry, but had no opportunity of seeing actual experiments.
In English he had read histories, making notes, and discussing
the results with his father in morning walks through the green
lanes near Hornsey. He had read Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon;
Watson's Philip II and III, which particularly charmed him by the
accounts of the revolts in the Netherlands; Rollin's Ancient
History, Hooke's History of Rome, Langhorne's Plutarch, Burnet's
Own Time, the Annual Register, and Millar's English Government,
besides Mosheim, M'Crie's Knox, and Sewell's Quakers. His father
liked, he says, to put into his hands books illustrative of the
struggles of energetic men. He read Anson and other voyages for
this purpose. In a purely imaginative direction he was allowed
more scanty fare. He was, however, devoted to Robinson Crusoe,
read the Arabian Nights and don Quixote, Miss Edgeworth, and
Brooke's Fool of Quality; admired joanna Baillie's plays, and was
fascinated by Pope's Homer. He was attracted by Scott's lays, and
some of Campbell's lyrics, but cared little for Shakespeare, and
could make nothing of Spenser's Faery Queen. He attempted little
Latin and no Greek composition; but he wrote a few childish
'histories,' and a little English verse. In purely literary
training he was hardly above the average of clever boys. This
gives his intellectual state at the age of twelve. During his
thirteenth and fourteenth years he was initiated in philosophical
studies. He continued to read classical literature, but was now
expected to understand the thought as well as the words. He began
logic by reading Aristotle, some of the scholastic treatises, and
especially Hobbes's Computatio sive Logica. His father lectured
him upon the utility of the syllogism. He made a careful study of
Demosthenes, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Quintilian, and then advanced
to Plato. To Plato, as he considered, he owed an especial debt,
being greatly impressed by the logical method, though caring
little for the more mystical or poetical doctrines congenial to
those who are generally called Platonists. His faculties were
also stimulated by helping his father in the proofs of the
History of India, with whom also in the year 1819 he 'went
through a complete course of political economy,' first reducing
to writing his father's oral expositions, and then carefully
reading Ricardo and Adam Smith.
    This, he says, ended what could properly be called his
lessons. The whole narrative is curiously characteristic of
father and son. No one could have devoted himself more
unreservedly to the education of a son. While working hard for
the support of himself and his family, James Mill spared no
trouble to do also the whole work of a schoolmaster. The boy
prepared his lessons in the room in which the father was writing,
and was constantly interrupting him for help. The father
submitted, but unfortunately could not submit good-humouredly. He
was 'the most impatient of men,' and the most rigorous of
martinets. He did not, it seems, employ the birch, but found an
equivalent in sarcastic reproaches. He was angry when his pupil
failed to understand him for want -- not of industry but -- of
knowledge, and guarded against cherishing conceit by humiliating
language. When John was to leave the family, the father thought
it necessary to explain that he would find himself to have
learned more than other lads. But, he said, you are not to be
proud of it; for it would be the deepest disgrace if you had not
profited by the unusual advantage of a father willing and able to
teach you. Education, like other things, was evidently a matter
of sanctions; and the one sanction upon which the teacher relied
was the dread of his disapproval. The child was driven, rather
than attracted by sympathetic encouragement. John Mill had also
to teach his younger brothers and sisters, both at this and till
a much later period. Mill records his conviction that their plan
(suggested probably by the Lancasterian system, in which the
father was so much interested) was both inefficient and a bad
moral discipline for teacher and taught. When Place went to visit
Bentham and the Mills at Ford Abbey in 1814, he found the system
at work. The children were regularly kept at their lessons from
six to nine, and from ten to one. Their dinner had been delayed
one day till six, because the girls had mistaken a word, and
John, their teacher, had not detected the mistake. Place thinks
that John is a 'prodigy,' but fears that he will grow up 'morose
and selfish.'(4*) That anticipation was happily not verified. The
health of the other children, however, appears to have suffered;
and, although John speaks with the warmest appreciation of his
father's character, it is evident that he felt more respect than
filial affection, and that, in spite of close intellectual
intercourse, there was a want of such personal confidence as
gives a charm to the relation in happier cases. If I cannot say
that I, like his younger children, 'loved him tenderly,' says
John, 'I was always loyally devoted to him.'(5*) That loyalty is
shown unmistakably by every reference, and the references are
very frequent, that Mill made to his father in his writings.
Mill's own estimate of the result of his education is noteworthy.
The experiment proves, he says, the possibility of instilling
into a child an amount of knowledge such as is rarely acquired
before manhood. He was, he considers, rather below than above par
in quickness of apprehension, retentiveness of memory, and energy
of character. What he did, therefore, could be done by any child
of average health and capacity. His later achievements, he
thinks, were due to the fact that, among other favourable
circumstances, his father's training had given him the start of
his contemporaries by 'a quarter of a century.'(6*) His opinion
is probably coloured by his tendency to set down all differences
between men as due to external circumstances. He and his father,
as Professor Bain notes, inclined to the doctrine of Helvétius
that children all start alike.(7*) Mill, by those who dissent
from this view, will probably be held to have been endowed by
nature with an extraordinary power of acquiring and assimilating
knowledge, and presumably had from infancy whatever intellectual
qualities are implied in that gift. His experience in teaching
his own family might have taught him that the gift is not shared
by the average child. So far, however, as Mill's judgment refers
to his own case, it asserts what I take to be a truth not always
admitted. He is sometimes noticed as an example of the evils done
by excessive instruction. Yet, after all, he certainly became one
of the leading men of his generation, and, if this strenuous
education was not the sole cause, it must be reckoned as having
been one main condition of his success. His father's teaching had
clearly one, and that the highest, merit. The son had been taught
really to use his mind; he had been trained to argue closely; to
test conclusions instead of receiving them passively, and to
systematise his knowledge as he acquired it. The course of
strenuous mental gymnastics qualified him to appear in early
youth as a vigorous controversialist, and to achieve an immense
quantity of valuable work before he passed middle age. It seems
improbable that more could have been made of his faculties by any
other system; and he gave a rarely approached instance of a life
in which the waste of energy is reduced to a minimum.
    Mill's verdict must, however, be qualified upon another
ground, which he might have been expected to recognise. No one
was more anxious to assert in general that an education is good
in proportion as it stimulates the faculties instead of simply
storing the mind with facts. Undoubtedly Mill's knowledge was of
use to him. He became widely read and interested in a large
circle of subjects. But we cannot hold that the mere knowledge
gave him a 'quarter of a century' start. The, knowledge, which
can be acquired by a child of fourteen is necessarily crude; the
Theaetetus or the history of Thucydides could not represent real
thought for him; and one would rather say that a year's activity
at twenty would have enabled him, if he had read only a quarter
as much by fourteen, to make up the deficiency. The knowledge was
no doubt a useful foundation; but, so far as it was acquired at
the cost of excessive strain, the loss would greatly overbalance
the gain. It seems clear that Mill's health did in fact suffer;
and a loss of energy was far more serious than any childish
knowledge could compensate. I cannot help thinking, with the
stalled 'Philistine,' that a little cricket would have been an
excellent substitute for half the ancient literature instilled
into a lad who was not prepared really to appreciate either the
thought or the literary charm.
    The system had further and permanent results. Mill saw little
of other boys. His father was afraid of his being corrupted or at
least vulgarised by association with the average schoolboy. He
had leisure enough, he declares, though he was never allowed a
holiday; but his leisure was dedicated to quiet and 'even
bookish' amusements. He was unready and awkward; untrained in the
ordinary accomplishments which come from the society of
contemporaries. The result was -- besides the trifling loss of
mere physical accomplishments -- that Mill was a recluse even in
childhood. There was another special reason for this isolation.
Mill himself says that he was brought up without any religious
instruction; and though Professor Bain tells us that the boy went
to church in his infancy, it must have been at so early a period
as to leave no mark upon his memory.(8*) Up to the age of
fourteen, therefore, Mill, while kept apart from the ordinary
influences, was imbibing with astonishing rapidity a vast amount
of knowledge, and inevitably taking for granted the general
opinions of his father's party.
    At the end of his fourteenth year Mill went to the south of
France, and stayed for a year with Sir Samuel, the brother of
Jeremy, Bentham. There he learned French, attended various
courses of lectures, and carried on his study of mathematics and
of political economy. His intellectual appetite was still
voracious and his hours of study were probably excessive. The
period, however, was chiefly remarkable for the awakening of
other tastes. The lessons of fencing and riding masters seem to
have been thrown away; but he learned something of botany from
George, the son of Sir Samuel, afterwards eminently distinguished
in the science. Mill's taste, though it did not develop into a
scientific study, made him a good field botanist, and provided
him with almost his only recreation. It encouraged the love of
walking, which he shared with his father; and in a tour in the
Pyrenees he learned to enjoy grand natural scenery. He appears,
too, to have lost some of his boyish awkwardness in the new
society. The greatest advantage, however, according to himself,
was his, having breathed for a whole year the free and genial
atmosphere of continental life.'(9*) His comments upon this are
remarkable. He could not then, as he remarks, know much of
English society. He did not know its 'low moral tone,' the
'absence of high feelings' and 'sneering depreciation of all
demonstrations of them,' nor, therefore, perceive the contrast
with the French, who cultivate sentiments elevated by comparison
at least, and who, by the habitual exercise of the feelings,
encourage also a culture of the understanding, descending to the
less educated classes.(10*) Still, he was impressed by French
amiability and sociability, and the English habit of 'acting as
if everybody else was either an enemy or a bore.'
    I do not venture to pronounce any opinion upon this estimate
of the contrast between English and French society. Whatever
truth it contains would be intensified for Mill by the fact that
a large class of Englishmen clearly regarded the Utilitarians as
'enemies,' and all men felt them to be bores. The, practical,
Briton no doubt treated the views of the philosophical Radical
with an application of what he meant for humour and Mill received
as brutality. But the estimate is characteristic. Mill's Spartan
discipline was already rousing him to a dumb sense of the value
of the emotions. Though he, with his school, was bound to
denounce 'sentimentalism,' he was beginning to see that there was
another side to the question. And, in the next place, Mill's
appreciation of French courtesy fell in with a marked tendency of
his thought. He had, of course, at this time only laid the
foundation of an acquaintance with France and Frenchmen, which,
however, became much closer in the following years. He acquired a
cordial sympathy with the French liberals; he grew to be
thoroughly familiar with French politics, and followed the later
history of his friends with sympathy and admiration. In his early
essays, he is constantly insisting upon the merits of French
writers and lamenting the scandalous ignorance of their
achievements prevalent in England; the French philosophes of the
eighteenth century became his model;(11*) and he pushed his zeal,
as he thinks, even to excess; while, as we shall afterwards see,
some contemporary French writers exercised an influence upon his
own views of the highest importance. He did not learn German till
some time later, and never became a profound student of German
literature and philosophy. But France was a kind of second
country to him; and excited what may almost be called a patriotic
sentiment. Patriotism, indeed, was scarcely held to be a virtue
by the Utilitarians. It meant for them the state of mind of the
country squire or his hanger-on the parson; and is generally
mentioned as giving a sufficient explanation of unreasoning
prejudice. Mill's development, I doubt not, was furthered by this
enthusiasm; it gave him a wider outlook, and stimulated many
impulses which had been hampered by the narrowness of his party.
For many years, however, it contributed to make him something of
an alien; and I do not think that incapacity to sympathise even
with the stupid prejudices of one's countrymen is an unmixed
advantage.
    Mill returned to England in July 1821. He took up his old
studies, taught his brothers and sisters, read Condillac and a
history of the French revolution, of which, in spite of his
previous stay in France, he had known very little, and decided
that it would be, transcendent glory, to be 'a Girondist in an
English convention.' Meanwhile, a profession had to be chosen. He
was intended for the bar, and began to study Roman law under John
Austin. He set to work upon Bentham, and the reading of Dumont's
Traités de Législation formed an epoch in his life. His botanical
studies had fostered his early taste for classification, already
awaked by his early logical studies. He was now delighted to find
that human actions might be classified as well as plants, and,
moreover, classified by the principle of utility, that is to say,
by reference to a guiding rule for all known conduct. 'Utility'
took its place as 'the keystone which held together the detached
and fragmentary parts of his knowledge and beliefs.'(12*) He had
now a philosophy and even, 'in one of the best senses of the
word, a religion, the inculcation and diffusion of which could be
made the principal outward purpose of a life.' The very
moderation of the creed was among its claims. Mill was not
roused, like Shelley, to an enthusiastic vision of an abrupt
regeneration of man. His religion was strictly scientific; it
recognised the necessity of slow elaboration, but offered a
sufficiently wide vista of continuous improvement to be promoted
by unremitting labour. He now enlarged his philosophical reading;
he studied Locke, Helvétius, and Hartley, Berkeley, and Hume's
Essays, besides Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Brown's essay upon
Cause and Effect. These studies were carried on while he was
reading his father's analysis in manuscript, and no doubt
discussing with his father the points raised by the argument. The
last book which he mentions as affecting his early development is
'Philip Beauchamp's 'treatise upon the utility of religion. The
'searching character of its analysis,' he says, produced a great
effect upon him, of which some results will appear hereafter.

 II. EARLY PROPAGANDISM

    In 1822 -- at the age, that is, of sixteen -- Mill began to
compose, argumentative, essays, which were apparently crude
enough, but which were profitable exercises. Already, too, he was
beginning to take a position in the Utilitarian circle. John
Austin (1790-1859), his tutor, a man of lofty, if over-fastidious
character, encouraged the boy by his kind interest. Another
important friend was George Grote, who, as I have said, had
already become a writer in the cause. To both these men, his
seniors by sixteen and twelve years respectively, a boy of
sixteen or seventeen would naturally look up with respectful
admiration. With Grote, as with John Austin, he held much
'sympathetic communion,' but his first ally among men whom he
could feel to be contemporaries was Austin's younger brother
Charles. He was a man who gave the impression, according to Mill,
of 'boundless strength,' with talents and will which seemed
capable of 'dominating the world.' Instead of being, like his
brother John, incapacitated for life by over-refinement, he made
a fortune at the bar; and his energy was, after a time, entirely
diverted from the Utilitarian propaganda For the present,
however, he was defending the true faith in an uncongenial
atmosphere. He was, says Mill, the 'really influential mind among
these intellectual gladiators' -- the young Cambridge orators.
James Mill, as I have said, had been encouraged by hearing that
the cause of Utilitarianism was being upheld even in one of the
universities, which he took to be the natural centres of
obscurantism. John Mill visited Austin at Cambridge in 1822, and
the boy of sixteen greatly impressed the undergraduates by his
conversational power The elder Mill was urged to send his son to
Trinity College. He would no doubt have feared to expose the
youth to such contagion.(13*) John Mill himself long held the
universities to be mere institutions for supporting the
established creed. 'We regard the system of these institutions,'
he said in 1836, 'as administered for two centuries past, with
sentiments little short of utter abhorrence.'(14*) It is idle to
ask whether closer contact with the average English youth would
or would not have been beneficial, but the sentiment marks the
degree in which Mill was an alien among men of his own class in
English society. Meanwhile, he formed, in the winter of 1822-23,
a little society of his own. He called it the Utilitarian
Society, adopting the title which had been cursorily used by
Bentham(15*) from Galt's Annals of the Parish. He mentions among
its members, which never amounted to ten, William Eyton Tooke,
son of Thomas Tooke, the economist, who died young; William Ellis
(1800-1881), known, says Mill, for his 'apostolic exertions for
the improvement of education,' chiefly in the direction of
promoting the study of political economy in schools; George John
Graham, afterwards an official in the Bankruptcy Court; and
Graham's special friend, John Arthur Roebuck (1801-1879), who was
to become one of the most thoroughgoing Radicals of the following
period, though in later years the faithful Abdiel became an
Ishmael, and finally a Tory. With these youths, all apparently
Mill's seniors by a few years, he discussed the principles of the
sect, and became, as he says,, a sort of leader.' He tried hard
to enlist recruits, and soon became an effective combatant in the
actual warfare of the time. The society was broken up in 1826.
    Mill had already received the appointment which decided the
future course of his life. He was appointed to a clerkship in the
India House, 21st May 1823, having just finished his seventeenth
year. He received successive promotions, till in 1856 he became
chief of the office with a salary of £2000 a year. Mill gives his
own view of the advantages of the position, Which to a man of his
extraordinary power of work were unmistakable. He was placed
beyond all anxiety as to bread-winning. He was not bound to make
a living by his pen, and could devote himself to writing of
permanent value. He was at the same time brought into close
relation with the conduct of actual affairs; forced to recognise
the necessity of compromise, and to study the art of instilling
his thoughts into minds not specially prepared for their
reception. Mill's books show how well he acquired this art.
Whatever their other merits or defects, they reconcile conditions
too often conflicting; they are the product of mature reflection,
and yet presented so as to be intelligible without special
initiation. He is unsurpassable as an interpreter between the
abstract philosopher and the man of common-sense. The duties were
not such as to absorb his powers. Though his holidays were
limited to a month, he could enjoy Sunday rambles in the country
and pedestrian tours at home and abroad; and though
conscientiously discharging his official duties, he managed to
turn out as much other work as might have occupied the whole time
of average men. The Utilitarians were beginning to make
themselves felt in the press. Mill's first printed writings were
some letters in the Traveller in 1822, defending Ricardo and
James Mill against some criticism by Torrens. He then contributed
three letters to the Morning Chronicle, denouncing the
prosecution of Carlisle, which then excited the rightful wrath of
the Utilitarians. Two letters in continuation were too outspoken
to be published.(16*) Mill contributed to the Westminster Review
from its start in the spring of 1824, helping his father's
assault upon the Edinburgh. He was, he says, the most frequent
writer of all, and between the second and eighteenth number
contributed thirteen reviews. They show that he was reading
widely. An article upon Scott's Napoleon in 1828 shows that he
had fully made up his deficiencies as to the history of the
French revolution. He had not, however, as yet attained his full
powers of expression; and neither the style nor the arrangement
of the matter has the merits of his later work.(17*) The most
remarkable by far is the review of Whately's Logic in January
1828. It shows some touches of youthful arrogance, though
exceedingly complimentary to the author reviewed. But the
knowledge displayed and the vigour of the expression are
surprising in a youth of twenty-one; and it proves that Mill was
already reflecting to some purpose upon the questions treated in
his Logic.
    While thus serving an apprenticeship to journalism, Mill was
going through a remarkable mental training. About the beginning
of 1825 he undertook to edit Bentham's Rationale of Evidence. He
says that this work 'occupied nearly all his leisure for about a
year.' That such a task should have been accomplished by a youth
of twenty in a year would seem marvellous even if he had been
exclusively devoted to it. He had to condense large masses of
Bentham's crabbed manuscript into a continuous treatise; to
'unroll' his author's involved and parenthetic sentences; to read
the standard English textbooks upon evidence; to reply to
reviewers of previous works of Bentham, and to add comments
especially upon some logical points. Finally, he had to see, five
large volumes through the press.'(18*) That this was admirable
practice, and that Mill's style became afterwards, markedly
superior, to what it had been before, may be well believed. It is
impossible, however, not to connect the fact that Mill had gone
through this labour in 1825 with the singular mental convulsion
which followed in 1826.
    He was, he says, in a, dull state of nerves, in the autumn of
that year. It occurred to him to ask whether he would be happy
supposing that all his objects in life could be realised. 'An
irrepressible consciousness distinctly answered "No."' The cloud
would not pass away. He could think of no physician of the mind
who could 'raze out the rooted trouble of the brain.' His father
had no experience of such feeling, nor could he give the elder
man the pain of thinking that all the educational plans had
failed. The father's philosophy, indeed, both explained, and
showed the hopelessness of, the evil. Feelings depend upon
association. Analysis tends to destroy the associations, and
therefore to 'wear away the feelings.' Happiness has for its main
source the pleasure of sympathy with others. But the knowledge
that the feeling would give happiness could not suffice to
restore the feeling itself. It seemed to be impossible to set to
work again and create new associations. Mill dragged on
mechanically through the winter of 1826-27, and the gloom only
gathered. He made up his mind that he could not bear life for
more than a year. The first ray of hope came from a passage in
which Marmontel describes his father's death and his resolution
to make up the loss to his family. Gradually he recovered, though
he suffered several relapses. He learned, he says, two lessons:
first, that though happiness must be the end, it must not be the
immediate or conscious end, of life. Ask whether you are happy
and you will cease to be happy. Fix upon some end external to
happiness, and happiness will be 'inhaled with the air you
breathe.' And in the second place, he learned to make the
'cultivation of the feelings one of the cardinal points in his
ethical and philosophical creed.' He could not, however, for some
time apply his new doctrine to practice. He mentions as a quaint
illustration of this period one ingenious mode of self-torment.
He had from childhood taken pleasure in music. During the period
of depression even music had lost its charm. As he revived, the
charm gradually returned. Yet he teased himself by the reflection
that, as the number of musical notes is limited, there must come
a time when new Mozarts and Webers would no longer be possible.
This, he says, was like the fear of the Laputans that the sun
would in time be burnt out, a fear, it may be remarked, which
modern science has not diminished. He might have noticed that, as
the number of combinations of twenty-six letters is finite, new
Shakespeares and Dantes will become impossible. He observes,
however, that this was connected with the 'only good point in his
very unromantic and in no way honourable distress.' It showed an
interest in the fortunes of the race as well as in his own, and
therefore gave hopes that if he could see his way to better
prospects of human happiness his depression might be finally
removed. This state of mind made his reading of Wordsworth's
Excursion in the autumn of 1828 an important event in his life.
He could make nothing of Byron, whom he also studied for the
first time. But Wordsworth appealed to the love of scenery, which
was already one of his passions, and thus revealed to him the
pleasure of tranquil contemplation and of an interest in the
common feelings and destiny of human beings. From the famous Ode,
too, he inferred that Wordsworth had gone through an experience
like his own, had regretted the freshness of early life, and had
found compensation by the path along which he could guide his
reader.
    The effect upon Mill of Wordsworth's poetry is remarkable,
though I cannot here discuss the relation. Readers of the fourth
book of the Excursion (called 'despondency corrected') may note
how directly the poet applies his teaching to the philosopher. He
asks, for example, whether men of science and those who have,
analysed the thinking principle, are to become a 'degraded race',
and declares that it could never be intended by nature

    'That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,
    Viewing al objects unremittingly
    In disconnexion dead and spiritless;
    And still dividing, and dividing still,
    Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied
    With the perverse attempt, while littleness
    May yet become more little; waging thus
    An impious warfare with the very life
    Of our own souls!'

This is the precise equivalent of Mill's doctrine about the
danger of the habit of analysis, and James Mill, if Wordsworth
had ever read him, would have made an admirable example for the
excellent pedlar.
    It is characteristic of Mill that he does not explicitly
attribute this mental crisis to the obvious physical cause. As
Professor Bain tells us, he would never admit that hard work
could injure anybody. Disbelief in that danger is only too common
with hard workers. Mill intimates that his dejection was
occasioned by a 'low state of nerves,' but adds that this was one
of the accidents to which every one is occasionally liable.(19*)
A man would at least be more liable to it who, like Mill, had
been kept in a state of severe intellectual tension from his
earliest infancy, and who had gone through such labours as the
editing Bentham's Rationale of Evidence. That his health was
permanently affected seems to be clear. Ten years later (1836) he
was 'seized with an obstinate derangement of the brain.' One
symptom was a, ceaseless spasmodic twitching over one eye,' which
never left him. In 1839 another illness forced him to take a
month's holiday, which he spent in Italy. It left permanent
weakness in the lungs and the stomach. An accident in 1848 led to
a long illness and prostration of the nervous system; and in 1854
another serious illness, which he met by an eight months' tour in
Italy, Sicily, and Greece, led to the, partial destruction of one
lung, and great 'general debility.'(20*) In spite of these
illnesses, Mill continued to labour as strenuously as before, and
until the illness of 1848 at least showed no signs of any decline
of intellectual energy. They must be remembered if we would do
full justice to his later career.
    It is, meanwhile, remarkable that his energetic course of
self-education seems hardy to have been interrupted by the period
of dejection. In the year 1825, while, one might have supposed,
fairly drowned in Bentham's manuscript, he contributed an article
upon Catholic Emancipation to a Parliamentary History, started by
Mr Marshall of Leeds. He wrote others upon the commercial crisis
and upon the currency and upon reciprocity in commerce for the
two subsequent annual issues. He thinks that his work had now
ceased to be 'juvenile,' and might be called original, so far as
it applied old ideas in a new connection. At the same time he
learned German, forming a class for the purpose. He also set up a
society which met two days a week at Grote's house in
Threadneedle Street and discussed various topics from half-past 8
till 10 A.M. These meetings lasted till 1830. The young men
discussed in succession political economy, logic, and psychology.
Their plan was to take some text-book, and to discuss every point
raised thoroughly -- sometimes keeping to a single question for
weeks -- until every one was satisfied with at least his own
solution of the question. Ricardo, James Mill, and their like
supplied the chief literature; but in logic they went further,
and, being disgusted with Aldrich, reprinted the Manuductio ad
Logicam of the Jesuit du Trieu. The result of these arguments
appears in the review of Whately. Mill, helped by Graham and
Ellis (his old allies in the Utilitarian Society), started 'most
of the novelties'; while Grote and the others formed a critical
tribunal. The results formed the materials of several of Mill's
writings. These occupations might have been enough for a youth of
twenty, but another field for discussion offered itself. The
followers of Owen were starting weekly public discussions in
1825. The Utilitarians, headed by Charles Austin, went in a body,
and a series of friendly but very energetic debates went on for
three months. This led to the foundation of a debating society,
upon the model of the, Speculative Society, of Edinburgh. After a
failure at starting, the society became active, and until 1829
Mill took part in nearly every debate. Besides the Utilitarians,
it included Macaulay, Thirlwall, Praed, the Bulwers, Fonblanque,
and others. Charles Buller and Cockburn came in as Radicals, and
the Tories, of whom there had been a lack in those days of
reforming zeal, were reinforced by Shee (afterwards Judge) and A.
Hayward. Maurice and Sterling were representatives of a
liberalism widely differing from Utilitarianism, and acceding
Coleridge in place of Bentham as intellectual guide. Mill learned
to speak fluently, if not gracefully, and improved his style by
preparing written speeches. It is not strange that, with all
these occupations, he felt it a relief when, in 1828, he was
released from contributing to the Westminster. Bowring, the
editor, had made arrangements with Perronet Thompson, and it was
no longer an organ of the orthodox Utilitarians. In 1829 Mill
gave up the Speculative Society and resolved to devote himself to
private studies and prepare for more elaborate work. New thoughts
were being suggested from various quarters. Macaulay's attack
upon his father's political theory led him to recognise the
inadequacy of the Utilitarian system, and forced him to consider
the logical problems involved. He came under the influence of the
St. Simonians at the same period. An enthusiastic disciple of the
school, Gustave d'Eichthal, two years senior to Mill, was taken
by young Tooke to the debating society in May 1828, and was
surprised by Mill's skilful and comprehensive summing up of a
discussion. He endeavoured to make proselytes of the pair, then
full of the enthusiasm and expecting the triumph of their party.
Tooke, apparently Mill's warmest friend at the time, committed
suicide early in 1830, in an access of excitement produced by
fever ascribed to overwork and tension of mind. Mill became a
half-convert. He was greatly impressed by the St. Simonian
doctrine of the alternation of, critical, and, constructive,
periods. He admitted the necessity of something better than the
negative or 'critical philosophy' of the eighteenth century.(21*)
He desired the formation of a spiritual power. He protested,
however, against the excessive spirit of system and against
premature attempts to organise such a power. Yet by degrees he
modified his objections, and on 30th November 1831 declares his
belief that the St. Simonian ideal will be the final state of the
human race. Were England ripe for an 'organic view,' which it
certainly is not, he might renounce everything in the world to
become -- not one of them, but -- like them. Mill kept, as he
says, a bureau of St. Simonianism for a time, and suggested to
d'Eichthal the names of many persons to whom the publications of
the party might be sent. Bulwer, Sterling, Whately, Blanco White,
W. J. Fox, and Dr Arnold were among them.(22*) Meanwhile, his
speculations caused him to be much troubled by the doctrine of
Philosophical Necessity; and he worked out a solution which was
ultimately published in the Logic. While his mind was thus
fermenting with many new thoughts, often, as he says,(23*) new
only to him, he was profoundly moved by the French revolution of
July 1830. He went at once to Paris with Roebuck and Graham; was
introduced to Lafayette, made friends with other popular leaders,
and came back prepared to take an active part as a writer on
behalf of the Reform agitation. For some years he was an active
journalist, contributing to the Examiner under Fonblanque. A
series of articles called, The Spirit of the Age, in this paper
led to his acquaintance with Carlyle, who took him to be a 'new
Mystic.'(24*) In 1830 and 1831 he wrote his essays on Some
Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, the fruit of the
discussions with Graham (not published till 1844), and in 1832
wrote articles upon foundations and upon the 'currency juggle,'
which are the first of his collected dissertations.
    I have now followed Mill's mental history until the period at
which the follower was fully competent to become the guide. It
would be difficult to mention any thinker who has gone through a
more strenuous and continuous discipline. From his earliest
infancy till the full development of his powers he had been going
through a kind of logical mill. No student in the old schools
employing every waking hour in, syllogising, could have been more
assiduously trained to the use of his weapons. If his boyish
years had been passed in a kind of intellectual gymnasium, he had
as a youth proved and perfected his skill ill the open arena. His
official position was making him familiar with business and with
the ordinary state of mind of the commonplace politician. He had
been interested in fresh lines of thought through the writings of
French Liberals, and especially the St. Simonians, and through
his arguments with the Socialists who followed Owen, and with the
young men who looked up to Coleridge as their great teacher. His
own experience had brought home to him the sense of a certain
narrowness and rigidity in the Utilitarians; his friendly
controversies had led him to regard opponents with more
toleration than his party generally displayed, and he was
sincerely anxious to widen the foundations of his creed, and to
assimilate whatever was valuable in conflicting doctrines.
Meanwhile his practice as a writer had by this time enabled him
to express himself with great clearness and vigour; and young as
he still was, he was better qualified than any of his
contemporaries to expound the views of his party.
    One point, however, must be marked. Mill's training left
nothing to be desired as a system of intellectual gymnastics. It
was by no means so well calculated to widen the mental horizon.
His philosophical reading was not to be compared to that, for
example, of Sir William Hamilton, who was at this time
accumulating his great stores of knowledge. He learned German, as
people were beginning to learn it, but he did not make himself
familiar with German thought. On 13th March 1843, having just
sent a copy of his Logic to Comte, he observes that he owes much
to German philosophy as a corrective to his exclusive Benthamism.
He has not, he adds, read Kant, Hegel, or any chief of the
school, but knows of them from their French and English
interpreters -- presumably Cousin, Coleridge, and Sir W.
Hamilton. He tried some of the originals afterwards, but found
that he had got all that was useful in them, and the remainder
was so fastidieux that he could not go on reading.(25*)
Considering all his occupations, his official duties, his editing
of Bentham, his many contributions to journalism, and the time
taken up by the little societies of congenial minds, the
wonderful thing is that he read so much else. He kept himself
well informed on the intellectual movement of France; he had made
a special study of the French revolution; and was fairly familiar
with many other provinces of historical inquiry. It was
impossible, however, that he should become learned in the strict
sense. His studies, that is, were more remarkable for intensity
than for extent. The vigorous discussions with his friends upon
political economy, logic, and psychology, while implying an
admirable training, implied also a limitation of study; they did
not get beyond the school of Ricardo in political economy, nor
beyond the school of James Mill in psychology, nor beyond a few
textbooks in formal logic. They argued the questions raised
thoroughly, and until they had fully settled their own doubts.
But it would be an inevitable result that they would generally be
satisfied when they had discovered not so much a thorough
solution as the best solution which could be given from the
Utilitarian point of view. The more fundamental questions as to
the tenability of that view would hardly be raised. Therefore,
though Mill deserves all the credit which he has received for
candour, and was, in fact, most anxious to receive light from
outside, it is not surprising that he will sometimes appear to
have been blind to arguments familiar to thinkers of a different
school. The fault is certainly not peculiar to Mill; indeed, it
is his genuine desire to escape from it which makes it necessary
to ask why the escape was not more complete. Briefly, at any,
rate, Mill, like most other people, continued through life to be
penetrated by the convictions instilled in early youth.

 III. THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS

    The period which followed the Reform Bill showed a great
change in Mill's personal position. The Utilitarians had taken
their part in the agitation, and expected to share in the fruits
of victory. Several of them were members of the first reformed
parliament, especially Grote and Roebuck, who now entered the
House for the first time. Charles Buller (1806-1848) and Sir
William Molesworth (1810-1855) were also new members, and both
were among the youngest recruits of the Utilitarian party Buller
had been a pupil of Carlyle, and afterwards one of the Cambridge
orators. He was evidently a man of very attractive nature, though
he seems to have been too fond of a joke -- the only Utilitarian,
probably, liable to that imputation -- and was gaining a high
reputation by the time of his early death. Molesworth, after a
desultory education, which included a brief stay at Cambridge
about Buller's time, and some study on the continent, became a
friend of Grote upon entering parliament. He was a man of many
intellectual interests, and an ardent Utilitarian. These and a
few more formed the party known as 'the philosophical Radicals.'
Mill, whose position was incompatible with parliamentary
ambition, was to be the exponent of their principles in the
press. Whatever their failings, they certainly formed an
important section of the most intelligent politicians of the
time. Mill became their chief exponent in the press, and began
operations by articles in the Examiner and the Monthly Repository
(edited by W. J. Fox). He says(26*) that his writings between
1832 and 1834 would fill a large volume. Molesworth then proposed
to start a new quarterly, to be called the London Review, which
should represent the true creed more faithfully than the recreant
Westminster. He stipulated that Mill should be the virtual,
though he could not, on account of his official position, be the
ostensible, editor. The first number of the London accordingly
appeared in April 1835. A year later Molesworth bought the
Westminster, and the review was now called the London and
Westminster. Molesworth, having become tired of carrying on a
review which did not pay, handed it over to Mill in 1837, who
continued it till 1840, when he transferred it to Mr
Hickson.(27*) The vitality of unprofitable reviews is one of the
mysteries of literature. Mill lost money and spent much time in
this discouraging work; but he would doubtless have grudged
neither had he succeeded in doing a real service to his party.
    The 'philosophical' Radicals, however, were doomed to
failure. One among many obvious reasons is suggested by the name.
Philosophical in English is synonymous with visionary,
unpractical, or perhaps, simply foolish. The philosophers seemed
to be men of crotchets, fitter for the study than the platform.
They had, as Mill says, little enterprise or activity, and left
the lead to the 'old hands,' Hume and O'Connell. About 1838,
indeed, Mill appears to have become quite alienated from them. He
thought them 'craven,' and they thought him 'mad.'(28*) He
admits, indeed, that the men were less to blame than the times.
Mill, however, held then, and seems to have always believed, that
what was wanting was mainly a worthy leader. His father, he
thinks, might have forced the Whigs to accept the Radical policy
had he been in parliament. For want of such a leader, the
philosophical Radicals became a mere left wing of the Whigs. For
a time, Mill had some hopes of Lord Durham, who represented
Radical leanings in the upper sphere. Durham's death in 1840 put
an end to any such hopes; and the philosophical Radicals had
pretty well ceased by that time to represent any real political
force. In truth, however, it is difficult to believe that any
leader could have made much out of the materials at his disposal.
The Reform Bill had transferred power to the middle classes. They
had resented their own exclusion from influence, and it had been
impossible to prevent the great towns from acquiring a share in
the representation without risk of violent revolution. But it did
not at all follow that the majority of the new constituents
accepted the programme of the extreme reformers. They had forced
the doors for themselves, but had no desire to admit the crowd
still left outside. Only a small minority desired the measures
which the Radicals had contemplated, which involved organic
constitutional changes, and would possibly lead to confiscation.
When the Chartists proposed a sweeping reform the middle classes
were frightened by the prospect of revolution. They were quite
willing to leave the old aristocratic families in power, if only
the policy were modified so as to be more congenial to the
industrial interests. Statesmen brought up under the old system
were still the office holders, and were only anxious to steer a
middle course. All this is now obvious enough; and it meant at
the time that the philosophical Radicals found themselves, to
their surprise, without any great force behind them, and were
only able to complain of the half-hearted policy of the Whigs,
and to weaken the administration until the Conservatives under
Peel could take advantage of a situation which had become
intolerable. The favourite measure of the philosophical Radicals
was the ballot. They attributed the slackening of zeal for
Radicalism to the fact that the aristocracy were trying to
maintain their old power by bribery and intimidation. The ballot
would be the most obvious check to this policy.
    Under these conditions Mill's position is characteristic. He
wrote much and forcibly. Some of his articles of this period in
the Westminster are collected in the first volume of the
dissertations. He omitted others which refer to matters of more
ephemeral interest. They show great power, but they also indicate
the real difficulty. Mill writes as a philosopher and an
expounder of general ideas. But he also writes as a partisan --
insisting, for example, upon the ballot of which he afterwards
came to disapprove -- and it is always a very difficult matter to
reconcile the requirements imposed by these different points of
view. Mill was scarcely immersed enough in the current of
political agitation to plant telling personal blows; and, on the
other hand, his theories seem to be cramped by the necessity of
supporting a platform. He aimed, he says, at two points. He
tried, and, he thinks, with partial success, to supply a
philosophy of Radicalism, wider than Bentham's, and yet including
what was permanently valuable in Bentham. He tried also, and this
aim was, from the first chimerical,' to rouse the Radicals to the
formation of a powerful party. The articles upon Durham were
partly prompted by this purpose; and, though unsuccessful in that
respect, he spoke, he thinks, the 'word in season,' which at a
critical moment directed public opinion towards the concession of
self-government to the Colonies.(29*)
    The articles in the Westminster show, now that we can see
later developments, how clearly he saw the real difficulty, and
yet how far he was from estimating its full significance. They
are of essential importance to an understanding of his whole
career.(30*) In the article which was his farewell to politics
for the time, he elaborately states the problem. He considers
what are a man's, natural, politics. He claims more than the
usual faith in the influence of reason and virtue over men's
minds; but then it is in the influence 'of the reason and virtue
upon their own side of the question.' A man is made a Liberal or
a Conservative on the average by his position; he is made a
Liberal or a Conservative of a particular kind by his 'intellect
and heart.' In other words, parties, in the main, represent
classes; and the fundamental opposition is between the,
privileged, and the, disqualified, classes. The line, then, as
with the old Radicals, is drawn between the privileged, who are
chiefly the landowners and their adherents, clerical, legal, and
military, and the, disqualified,' who are chiefly the lower
middle classes and the working classes. Now, the Radical party
ought to combine the whole strength of the disqualified against
the privileged. Why do they not? Among the superficial reasons is
that want of a leader, which Mill hoped to supply by Durham.
Another personal reason is that, as he complains rather
bitterly,(31*) the Radicals never spoke so as to secure the
sympathy of the working classes. This points to the real
difficulty. There was a gulf between the middle and the working
classes, as well as between the, privileged, and the
'disqualified.' The real aim of Mill's articles is to show how
this gulf could be surmounted. All the, disqualified, might be
brought into line if only the philosophical Radicals could be got
to attract the working classes, and the working classes to follow
the Radicals. Mill therefore endeavours to prove that the Radical
measures were in fact intended for the benefit of the working
classes, and might consequently be made attractive. The position
was in fact precisely this. The Chartist agitation was becoming
conspicuous, and the Chartists had broken off from the Radicals.
Mill had to persuade them that they did not know their true
friends. His sincerity and the warmth of his sympathy are
unmistakable, but so is the difficulty of the task.
    In the first place, he repudiates universal suffrage (one of
the six points). He thinks it bad in point of policy, because to
propose it would alienate the whole middle class at once, who
would see in it a direct attack upon property. But universal
suffrage was also bad in itself, because the mass of the very
lowest class was ignorant, degraded, and utterly unfit for power.
The intelligent working man ought to recognise the fact, and
therefore not to grant the suffrage to the lowest class. What,
then, was to be done? The answer, given emphatically in his last
article, is that we should govern for the working classes by
means of the middle classes. That, he says, should be the motto
of every Radical. The ideal is a government which should adopt
such a policy as would be adopted under universal suffrage in a
country where the masses were educated so as to be fit for it. In
other words, the great aim of Radicals should be to redress
practical grievances.
    Did, then, the Radical platform aim at such redress? Mill's
proof that it did is significant. The Radicals were unanimous
against the Corn-laws; and the Corn-laws, as he argues,(32*)
injure the poor man because they lower the rate of profit, and
are ruining the small capitalist and destroying our trade. The
philosophical Radicals were supporters of the new Poor-law. It
had often been said that the sinecurists were in fact rich
paupers living on other men's labours. Mill inverts the argument
by saying that the paupers under the old system were poor
sinecurists, equally living upon other men's labours. To say
nothing of some smaller grievances, such as taxes on articles
consumed by the poor, logging in the army, and enclosure of
commons, which were attacked by the Radicals, the Radicals also
wished to discharge, one of the highest duties of government, by
setting up a system of national education. It is now easy to see
why these proposals failed to satisfy the class to whom the
Radicals were to appeal. A great part of them, he says, were,
Owenites, or, in other words, inclined to Socialism. They had, as
Mill regretfully admits, crude views upon political economy.
Thus, the Chartists were not hearty, even in the anti-Corn-law
agitation. They did not see that a rise of profits was at all for
their benefit. They held, as Mill observes, that whatever profit
was gained would go to their masters. On the other hand, they did
not admire the new Poor-law. They thought that, as Cobbett had
told them, it robbed them of their rights, and did not object to
having small sinecures. National education, however desirable,
did not seem worth a struggle till they had got higher wages.
Then, as Mill again admits, they would not see that the
competition which injured them was their own competition, and due
to their disregard of Malthus. They objected to competition in
general, which meant, as they thought, the grinding down of their
class by the wicked capitalist. Mill remarks that Owen was not
really opposed to rights of property; and one of his
recommendations is that the law of partnership should be reformed
so as to facilitate the growth of cooperative societies. Even if
this failed, it would tend to educate the poor in sound economic
principles. Meanwhile, however, the principles of their actual
leaders were anything but 'sound.' Mill incidentally speaks of
the, Oastlers and Stephenses, as representing only the worst
class of the 'operative Radicals.' Oastler was at this time
conspicuous for his support of the factory legislation. He was
allied with Lord Ashley, and represented the alliance of
Socialism with Toryism or 'New Englandism.' Now the factory
legislation, which naturally seemed to the working classes the
greatest step towards a recognition of their interest, is not
mentioned by Mill, and for the good reason that he and his school
were opposed to it on principle. He refers incidentally to
measures such as the Eight Hours Bill as belonging to the quack
schemes of reform.(33*) Briefly, the difficulty was that the
working classes were already looking in the direction of
Socialism, and that Mill remained a thorough individualist. With
his sanguine belief in the power of education, he thought, with a
certain simplicity, that the Owenites, with whose ultimate views
he fully sympathised, might be taught to give up their crude
political economy. Their education required more time and labour
than he imagined.
    This indicates a critical point. The classes which had been
disappointed by the Reform Bill, and had hoped for great social
changes, were discontented, but looked for remedies of a very
different kind from Mill's. They could not see a philanthropy
which was hidden behind Malthus and Ricardo, and which proposed
to improve their position by removing privileges, indeed, but not
by diminishing competition. If this applied to Mill, it applied
still more to his friends. They represented rather intellectual
scorn for old prejudices and clumsy administration than any keen
sympathy with the sufferings of the poor. The harsher side of the
old Utilitarianism was, therefore, emphasised by them, and Mill's
attempts to enlarge and soften its teaching were regarded by his
allies with a certain suspicion. They thought that his sympathy
with the Socialist ends implied a tendency to look too favourably
upon its means. The articles upon Bentham and Coleridge,(34*) in
which he tried to inculcate a wider sympathy with his opponents,
scandalised such friends as Grote, and he ceased to represent
even his own allies. Philosophical Radicalism died out. Its
adherents became Whigs, or joined the Cobden form of Radicalism,
which was the very antithesis of Socialism. Their philosophy
suited neither party. To the class which still retained the
leading position in politics, they appeared as destructives; and
to the classes which were turning towards Chartism, they appeared
as the most chilling critics of popular aspiration. The
Free-trade movement, which was gathering strength as the
manufacturing interest grew stronger, had no doubt an affinity
for one important part of their teaching. But such men as Cobden
and Bright, though they accepted the political economy of the
Utilitarians, could not be counted as products or adherents of
the Utilitarian philosophy. The agreement was superficial in
other respects, though complete in regard to one important group
of measures. This marks an essential point in Mill's political
and social doctrine. For the present, it is enough to note that
the philosophical Radicals who had expected to lead the van had
been left on one side in the political warfare, and by 1840 were
almost disbanded. Grote, the ablest of Mill's friends, retired
from parliament to devote himself to his History of Greece about
the same time as Mill set to work upon the completion of his
Logic.
    One characteristic of Mill as an editor may be noted before
proceeding. Under his management, a large number of distinguished
contributors were enlisted. Professor Bain mentions Bulwer,
Charles Buller, Roebuck, James and Harriet Martineau, W. J. Fox,
Mazzini, and others. The independent authorship of many articles
was indicated by appending letters, although Mill could not
introduce the more modern plan of full signatures. He
occasionally attaches notes to express his personal dissent from
some of the opinions advocated, and aims at representing various
shades of thought. He was especially anxious to help rising men
of genius. In the London Review in 1835 he wrote one of the first
appreciations of Tennyson, and answered some depreciatory
criticisms of the Quarterly Review and Blackwood.(35*) On the
publication of Carlyle's French Revolution he called attention to
its merits in an article (July 1837), which, though rather clumsy
in form, shows no want of generous appreciation of Carlyle's
historical powers; and in a later number (October 1839) admitted,
with a note to explain his personal reservations, an exposition
of Carlyle by Sterling. To his review of Carlyle's book, as to
the Durham article, he attributes considerable success.(36*) It
set people right, he thinks, in regard to a writer who had set
commonplace critics at defiance. From a letter quoted by
Professor Bain,(37*) he reckoned at the time as a third success
the result of his constant, dinning into people's ears, that
Guizot was, a great thinker and writer.' His opinion of Guizot
was to change; but the article republished in the dissertations
from the Edinburgh Review of 1845 shows that he retained a high
admiration for Guizot's work. Other articles upon Carrel, A. De
Vigny, and Michelet in the same collection show his constant
desire to rouse Englishmen to an appreciation of French
literature. Tocqueville's Democracy in America was twice reviewed
by him, and had an important influence upon his thought.(38*) The
rigid Utilitarianism of Grote was a little scandalised by the
width of Mill's sympathies even with his opponents. The orthodoxy
of a man who could see and even insist upon the good side of
Coleridge and Carlyle was precarious. In any case, we may admit
that Mill showed the generous desire to meet and encourage
whatever seemed good in others, which is one of his strong claims
upon our personal respect.
    For many years Mill's relation to Carlyle, who represented a
Radicalism of a very different type, was significant. The first
personal acquaintance began in 1831, when Carlyle came to London,
and desired to see the author of the articles upon the 'Spirit of
the Age.' For a time there was a warm liking on both sides. Mill
appeared as a candid and eager disciple, and Carlyle hoped that
he would become a 'mystic.' During Carlyle's subsequent
retirement at Craigenputtock, they carried on an intimate
correspondence.(39*) Mill's letters, of which Froude gives an
interesting summary, show Mill's characteristic candour and
desire to profit by a new light. Though he speaks with the
deference becoming to the younger man, and to one who admits his
senior's superiority as a poet, if not as a mere logician, he
confesses with a certain shyness to a radical dissent upon very
vital points. But the most remarkable characteristic is Mill's
conviction that he has emerged from the old dry Benthamism into
some higher creed. What precisely that may be is not so obvious.
When in 1834 Carlyle finally settled in London, the intercourse
became frequent. Mill supplied Carlyle with books on the French
revolution, and was responsible for the famous destruction of the
manuscript of the first volume. The review in the Westminster was
perhaps prompted partly by remorse for this catastrophe, though
mainly, no doubt, by a generous desire to help his friend. At one
time Carlyle hoped to be under-editor to the newly started London
Review; and, as the old tutor of Charles Buller, he was naturally
acquainted with the Utilitarian circle. The divergence of the
whole creed and ways of thought of the men was certain to cool
the alliance. Carlyle expresses respect for the honesty of the
Utilitarians, and considered them as allies in the war against
cant. But his 'mysticism' implied the conviction that their
negative attitude in regard to religion was altogether
detestable; while. in political theories, he was at the very
opposite pole. Mill sympathised with his Chartism (1839) and Past
and Present (1843), published at this period, as remonstrances
against the sins of the governing classes; but altogether rejects
what he took to be the reactionary tendency of the Carlylese
gospel. Ultimately. when Carlyle attacked the anti-slavery
agitators in 1849, Mill made an indignant reply,(40*) and all
intercourse ceased.(41*) Mill's judgment of Carlyle, as given in
his Autobiography, shows the vital difference. Carlyle was a
poet, he says, and a man of intuitions; and Mill was neither.
Carlyle saw at once many things which Mill could only, hobble
after and prove, when pointed out. 'I knew that I could not see
round him, and could never be certain that I saw over him, and I
never presumed to judge him with any definiteness until he was
interpreted to me by one greatly superior to us both, who was
more a poet than he and more a thinker than I 'whose own mind and
nature included his and infinitely more';(42*) in short, by Mrs
Taylor, of whom I shall speak directly. Carlyle's aversion to
scepticism (in some sense), to Utilitarianism, to logic, and to
political economy -- the 'dismal science, -- was indeed too
inveterate to allow of any real alliance; and though Mill did his
best to appreciate Carlyle, he learned from him only what one
learns from an antagonist, that is, to be more confident in one's
own opinions.

 IV. PHILOSOPHIC LEADERSHIP

    As philosophical Radicalism sank into impotence, Mill's
occupation as its advocate was gone. He now again became a
recluse. For many years he withdrew altogether from London
society. This was obviously due in part to the connection to
which he ascribed the greatest possible importance. The 'most
valuable friendship of his life,' as he calls it, had been formed
in 1830 with Mrs Taylor, who was two years his junior. Her
husband was a man in business,(43*) a 'most upright, brave, and
honourable man,' according to Mill, and regarded by her with the,
strongest affection, through life.(44*) Taylor was, however,
without the tastes which would have qualified him to be a worthy
intellectual companion for his wife. In this respect Mill was
greatly his superior; and his intimacy with Mrs Taylor rapidly
developed. He dined with her twice a week, her husband dining
elsewhere. She was an invalid for many years, and had to live in
country lodgings apart from her husband. He travelled with her on
the Continent during his illness of 1836. Although Taylor himself
behaved with singular generosity, and Mill himself states that
his own relation to Mrs Taylor was one of 'strong affection and
confidential intimacy only,' the connection naturally provoked
censure. His father bluntly condemned him for being in love with
another man's wife. His mother and sisters disapproved, and were
finally estranged by his marriage in later years.(45*) Mrs Grote
gave him up, apparently upon this ground, although he continued
his intercourse with Grote. Roebuck states that a remonstrance
which he imprudently made to Mill led to the cessation of their
friendship, which Mill attributes (with less probability) to
differences of opinion as to Byron and Wordsworth.(46*) Mill, who
worshipped Mrs Taylor as an embodiment of all that was excellent
in human nature, resented such disapproval bitterly; any
reference to Mrs Taylor produced excitement, and he avoided
collisions with possible censors by retiring from the world
altogether. On giving up the Westminster Review, he could, as he
put it,(47*) indulge the inclination, 'natural to thinking
persons when the age of boyish vanity is once past, for limiting
his own society to very few persons.' Englishmen, as he says in
his customary tone of disapproval, consider serious discussion as
'ill-bred,' and have not the French art of talking agreeably on
trifles. Men of mental superiority are, almost without exception
greatly deteriorated, if they condescend to join in such society.
The 'tone of the feelings is lowered,' and they adopt the low
modes of judgment which alone can meet with sympathy. When the
character, moreover, is once formed, agreement on cardinal points
is felt to be a necessary condition of 'anything worthy the name
of friendship.' Mill accordingly shut himself up in his office,
and except occasional intercourse with Grote, Professor Bain. and
a few others, lived as a solitary or sat at the feet of his
Egeria. His admirers, who were soon to be a rapidly increasing
class, heard generally that a sight of him was a rare privilege,
scarcely to be enjoyed except at meetings of the Political
Economy Club. There the conversation turned upon sufficiently
solid topics. Whether a life of seclusion be really wise is a
topic for an essay. Mill's unequivocal condemnation of the
society of which he had so little experience may appear to be
censorious. A philosopher may be as austere as a religious
Puritan; and Mill might have been a wiser man had he been able to
drop his dignity, indulge in a few amusements, and interpret a
little more generously the British contempt for high-flown
sentiment. His incapacity for play, as he admitted to Comte, was
a weak side of his character. Sydney Smith was for a short time
(1841-43) a member of the Political Economy Club, and there met
Mill on two or three occasions. One would like to know what
impression they made upon each other, and especially what Mill
thought of the jovial, life-enjoying, and sociable parson.
Probably, one fears, he would have taken the superabundant fun of
the canon as one more proof of the frivolity of British society,
and set his colleague down as a mere sycophant and buffoon. I
will not compare the merits of such opposite types. If Mill's
retirement is indicative of some weakness, it must also be
admitted that it was also dictated by a devotion to great tasks
requiring and displaying remarkable strength. He now set to work
vigorously, and in the course of the next few years produced his
most elaborate and important works.
    Both of them were the outcome of his early training. The
discussions at Grote's house had suggested to him the plan of a
book upon logic. The end, speaking roughly, was to set forth
articulately the theory of knowledge implicitly assumed in the
writings of his school. Fully accepting the main principles of
Bentham and James Mill, and regarding them as satisfactory, after
close investigation, he had yet become aware of certain
difficulties which might be solved by a more thorough inquiry. He
was afterwards stimulated by the controversy between his father
and Macaulay; and this led him, as he thought, to perceiving the
true logical method of political philosophy. About 1832 he took
up the subject again, and tried to solve the 'great paradox of
the discovery of new truths by general reasoning.' This led to
his theory of the syllogism, given in the second book of his
Logic. He now felt that he could produce a valuable work, and
wrote the first book. He was stopped by fresh difficulties, and
made a halt which lasted for five years. He, could make nothing
satisfactory of induction.' In 1837, while weighted by the
Review, he received a fresh impulse. Whewell's History of the
Inductive Sciences and Herschel's Discourse on the Study of
Natural Philosophy provided him with materials which had before
been lacking. In two months, during intervals snatched from other
works, he had written a third, 'the most difficult third,' of the
book. This included the remainder, of the doctrine of reasoning,
and the greater part of the book upon induction. He had now
'untied all the really hard knots,' and completion was only a
question of time. Comte's Philosophie Positive now became known
to him and greatly stimulated him, though he owed little of
definite result to it. In July and August 1838 he managed to
finish his third book; and his doctrine of, real kinds, enabled
him to turn the difficulty which had caused the five years' halt.
Other chapters on, language and classification, and upon
fallacies were added in the same autumn, and the remainder of the
work in the summer and autumn of 1840. Finally, the whole book
was rewritten between April 1841 and the end of the year, much
matter being introduced in the process which had been suggested
by Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and by Comte's
treatise.(48*) He offered the finished book to Murray, who
declined it; and it was finally accepted by Parker, who published
it in the spring of 1843.
    The significance of these dates will appear hereafter. It is
here enough to say that the book was the product of strenuous,
long-continued thought, and of influences from various quarters.
The success greatly exceeded his anticipations. No one since
Locke had approached him in the power of making the problems of
philosophy interesting to the laity. One remark which he makes is
important. He held that the philosophy which he assailed was the
great support of all deep-seated and antiquated prejudice. He was
therefore attacking false philosophy in its stronghold; and so
far as he succeeded, not merely exposing philosophic fallacies,
but essentially contributing to the triumph of reason. Though
retiring from active politics, he was elucidating the principles
which underlie all political theory.
    The Logic, in short, was intended not merely as a discussion
of abstruse problems, but as indirectly bearing upon the purposes
to which his life was devoted. He was led by the course of his
speculation to propose the formation of a new science to be
called 'ethology.' This ethology (of which I shall have to speak
in its place) is described by Mill as the Science which
corresponds to the Art of Education.(49*) Education is to be
taken in the widest sense of the word: as the training given by
the whole system of institutions which mould the character and
the thought of mankind. Mill had recognised the immense
difficulties in the way of all his schemes of reform which
resulted from the ignorance and stupidity of the classes to whom
power was inevitably passing. Whether that transition would be
beneficial or the reverse depended essentially upon the degree in
which men could be prepared for their new duties. Believing that
such a preparation was possible, he desired to determine the
general principles applicable; to give, as he says, the science
corresponding to the art.
    This scheme is noticed in the remarkable correspondence with
Comte, which began in 1841 during the final stage of the
composition of the Logic, and lasted until 1846. Some knowledge
of Comte's doctrines was spreading in England.(50*) Mill had read
an early work of Comte's (the Traité de Politique Positive,
1822), and criticised it sharply in his letters to d'Eichthal in
1828, though preferring it to other works of the St. Simonians.
On taking up in 1837 the two first volumes of Comte's Philosophie
Positive (all then published), he had been deeply impressed; he
read their successors, and in November 1841 he wrote to Comte as
an unknown admirer, and indeed in the tone of an ardent disciple.
He has, as he says, definitively left the 'Benthamist section of
the revolutionary school,' though he regards it as the best
preparation for true positivist doctrine. He accepts Comte's main
positions, though on some, secondary, questions he has doubts
which may disappear.(51*) He had even thought of postponing the
publication of his Logic until he had seen the completion of
Comte's treatise; and, had he been able to see the whole in time,
would perhaps have translated it instead of writing a new
book.(52*) Two-thirds, however, of the Logic was substantially
finished before he had read Comte, and it is adapted to the
backward state of English opinion. Mill holds, as he held when
writing to d'Eichthal, that a constructive should succeed to a
critical philosophy, and sees the realisation of his hopes in the
new doctrine. He holds with Comte that a 'spiritual power' should
be constituted, which cannot be reached through simple liberty of
discussion;(53*) and believes in a religion of humanity, destined
to replace theology.(54*) It is not surprising that Comte took
Mill for a thorough convert. A discord presently showed itself.
'You frighten me,' Mill said to Comte,'by the unity and
completeness of your convictions,' which seem to need no
confirmation from any other intelligence. Comte, in fact, had a
rounded and definitive scheme. He had ceased to read other
speculations as a mathematician might decline to read the
vagaries of circle-squarers. His whole system was demonstrated,
once for all. In 1843 Mill began an argument as to the equality
of the sexes, which lasted for some months, and ended
characteristically. Comte said(55*) that further argument would
be useless, as Mill was not yet prepared to accept 'fundamental
truths.' Mill agreed to drop the discussion, and added that his
own opinions had only been confirmed. The supposed convert
announced himself as an independent, though respectful, junior
colleague, with a right to differ. Mill, according to Bain,
became 'dissatisfied with the concessions which he had made.' In
truth, the divergence was hopeless, and implied a difference of
first principles. Meanwhile, the misunderstanding had further
consequences. When Comte was expecting to be dismissed from his
post, Mill generously declared (June 1843) that, so long as he
lived, he would share his last sou with his friend.(56*) Mill was
at this time in anxiety caused by the repudiation of American
bonds, in which he had invested some of his own money and some of
his father's, for which he was responsible. Comte declined to
take money from a fellow-thinker, but afterwards, when he
actually lost his post in July 1844, accepted help from Mill's
richer friends, Grote, Molesworth, and Raikes Currie. Comte took
their gift to be a tribute from disciples, and was offended when,
after the first year, they declined to continue the subsidy.
Instead of being disciples, they were simply persons interested
in a philosopher, many of whose tenets they utterly repudiated,
and thought that they had done quite enough to show their
respect. Mill, as the mediator in an awkward position, acted with
all possible frankness and delicacy, but the divergence was
growing. When, in 1845, Comte proposed to start a review to
propagate his doctrine, Mill had to point out that he and his
friends were partial allies, not subjects, and that positivism
was not yet sufficiently established to set up as a school.(57*)
Gradually the discord developed, and the correspondence dropped.
Comte's last letter is dated 3rd September 1846, and a letter
from Mill of 17th May 1847, speaking of the Irish famine,
produced no reply. Mill recognised the hopeless differences, and
came to think that Comte's doctrine of the spiritual power
implied a despotism of the worst kind. He expressed his
disapproval in his final criticism of Comte, and in the later
editions of the Logic considerably modified some of his early
compliments.(58*)
    On 3rd April 1844 Mill informs Comte that he has put aside
the Ethology, his ideas being not yet ripe, and has resolved to
write a treatise upon Political Economy. He is aware of Comte's
low opinion of this study, and ex plains that he only attaches a
provisional value to its sociological bearing. The book, he
explains, will only take a few months to write. The subject,
indeed, had been never far from his thoughts since his father had
in early days expounded to him the principles of Ricardo. He had
discussed economic questions with the meetings at Grote's house;
he had written his Essays upon Unsettled Questions; and had been
taking a part by his reviews and articles in controversies upon
such topics as the Corn-laws, the currency, and the Poor-law. He
thus had only to expound opinions already formed, and the book
was written far more rapidly than the Logic. Begun in the autumn
of 1845, it was finished by the end of 1847. Six months out of
this were spent in writing an elaborate series of articles in the
Morning Chronicle during the disastrous winter of 1846-47, urging
the formation of peasant properties on the waste lands of
Ireland.(59*) The articles, of which four or five often appeared
in a week, were remarkable in the journalism of the day; but his
proposals failed to attract attention from English stupidity and
prejudice. He tells Comte in his last letter that the English
wish to help Ireland; but, from their total ignorance of
Continental systems, can only think of enabling the population to
live as paupers, instead of introducing the one obvious remedy.
His friend and colleague in the India House, W. T. Thornton, was
writing about the same time his Plea for Peasant
Proprietors.(60*) Thornton was one of the few who from this
period saw much of Mill; and his influence at a later time was
remarkable. The Political Economy represents essentially a
development of the Ricardo doctrine. One point requires notice
here. Mill tells us that he had turned back from his 'reaction
against Benthamism.'(61*) At the height of that reaction he had
become more tolerant of compromise with current opinions. By
degrees, however, he had become more than ever opposed to the
established principles. He was less of a democrat, indeed,
because more convinced of the incapacity of the masses; but more
of a Socialist, in the sense that he looked forward to a
complete, though distant, revolution in the whole structure of
society. In the first edition of the Political Economy he had
spoken decidedly against the possibility of Socialism. The events
of 1848 seemed to open new possibilities for the propagation of
novel doctrines. He accordingly modified this part of his book,
and the second edition (1849) represented a 'more advanced
opinion.'(62*) How far Mill could be called a Socialist will have
to be considered hereafter. This tendency, at any rate, marks one
characteristic. Mill points out, as one condition of its very
remarkable success, that he regarded political economy, not as a
'thing by itself, but as part of a greater whole.' Its
conclusions, he held, were valid only as conditioned by
principles of, social philosophy, in general;(63*) and the book,
instead of being ostensibly a compendium of abstract scientific
principles, is therefore written with constant reference to wider
topics and to the application of the doctrines to concrete facts.
How far Mill succeeded in giving satisfactory theories is another
question, but one thing at least he achieved. The Political
Economy became popular in a sense in which no work upon the same
topic had been popular since the Wealth of Nations; and it owed
its success in a great degree to the constant endeavour to trace
the bearings of merely abstract formulae upon the general
questions of social progress. He stimulated the rising interest
in those important problems, and even if his solutions did not
carry general conviction, they brought to him in later years a
following of reverent disciples.
    These two books, the Logic and the Political Economy, contain
in fact a nearly complete statement of Mill's leading position.
Although in later years he was to treat of political, ethical,
and philosophical topics, his leading doctrines were now
sufficiently expounded; and the later writings were rather
deductions or applications than a breaking of new ground. None of
them involved so strenuous and long-continued a process of mental
elaboration. The success of these two books gave him a position
at the time unrivalled. He was accepted as the Liberal
philosopher; and could speak as one of unquestioned authority.
    Professor Bain thinks that Mill's energy was henceforth less
than it had been. The various attacks from which he had suffered
had probably weakened his constitution. It must be noticed,
however, as Professor Bain also remarks, that there were
sufficient causes for some decline of literary activity, and he
certainly did an amount of work in the remaining twenty-five
years of his life which would have been enough to absorb the
powers of most men even of high ability. The publication of new
editions of his great books, which involved revision and replies
to criticism, and the composition of occasional review articles,
occupied some of the leisure from his official duties. The severe
illness of 1854 made necessary a long foreign tour. In 1856 he
became head of his department, and more work was thrown upon him.
On the extinction of the East India Company in 1857, he drafted a
petition to parliament on their behalf. It is remarkable that,
like his father in 1833, he became the apologist of a system
generally condemned by the Liberals of the day. His belief --
whatever its value -- was that the government of India could not
be efficiently carried on by the English parliament; that Indian
appointments would become prizes to be won by jobbery; and that
the direct rule of English public opinion would imply a disregard
of native opinions and feelings. The company, however, came to an
end; and Mill, refusing to accept a place on the new councils,
retired at the beginning of 1858 on a pension of £1500 a year.

 V. MINOR WRITINGS

    A great change was now to take place in his life. Mr Taylor
had died in July 1849; and in April 1851 his widow became Mill's
wife. They co-operated in one remarkable work, which is to be
connected with the development of his opinions at the time. Mill
had welcomed the French revolution of 1848 with enthusiasm. He
saw in it the victory of the party to which he had been most
attached from his youth; and in 1849 he wrote a vigorous
vindication of its leaders against the criticisms of
Brougham.(64*) He spoke with much sympathy even of the Socialism
of Louis Blanc, though, of course, admitting that it contained
many grave errors. The, success of an unprincipled adventurer in
December 1851, put an end to his hopes for the immediate future.
He felt painfully that even the recognition of many opinions for
which he had contended in his youth had brought less benefit than
he had anticipated. He became convinced that a great change in
the 'fundamental conditions of (men's) modes of thought' was
essential to any great improvement in their lot.(65*) During 1854
he had planned an essay upon Liberty, which was essentially an
attempt to point out certain conditions of such improvements.
During the last two years of his official life, he went over this
elaborately with his wife. After being twice written, he tells
us, every sentence was carefully weighed and criticised by them
both. He intended to make a final revision during the winter of
1858-59. That was not to be given. The book, however, is not only
characteristic, but is, from a purely literary point of view, the
best of Mill's writings. Mrs Mill died at Avignon from a sudden
attack of congestion of the lungs. The blow was crushing. Mill
felt that 'the spring of his life was broken.' He withdrew for a
time into complete isolation, though he soon found some solace in
work. He bought a house at Avignon, and spent half his time there
to be near his wife's grave. The rest of his time was spent at
Blackheath. His stepdaughter, Miss Taylor, lived with him, and he
expresses his gratitude for having drawn two such prizes in 'the
lottery of life.' Other friends and disciples were to gather
round him in later years.
    It is necessary to say something of the woman to whom Mill
was thus devoted. Yet it is very difficult to speak without
conveying some false impression. It is impossible, on the one
hand, to speak too respectfully of so deep and enduring a
passion. Mill's love of his wife is a conclusive answer to any
one who can doubt the tenderness of his nature. A man who could
love so deeply must have been lovable himself. On the other hand,
it is necessary to point out plainly certain peculiarities which
it reveals. Mill speaks of his wife's excellences in language so
extravagant as almost to challenge antagonism.(66*) I have
already quoted the passage in which he says that her qualities
included Carlyle's and his own and 'infinitely more.' In other
passages, he seems to be endeavouring to outdo this statement:
her judgment, he declares, was 'next to infallible'; 'the highest
poetry, philosophy, oratory, and art seemed trivial by the side
of her, and equal only to expressing some part of her mind'; and
he prophesies that, if mankind continue to improve, their
spiritual history for ages to come will be the progressive
working out of her thoughts and realisation of her conceptions.'
'Only John Mill's reputation,' said Grote, 'could survive such
displays.'(67*) The truth seems to be that in Mill's grief one
exquisite pang came from the thought that his wife had left
nothing by which her excellence could be made manifest to others.
The only article which he could call hers was that upon the
'enfranchisement of women,' the prefatory note to which includes
the phrases cited. He feels that it would hardly justify his
words; and has to add that she would, had she pleased, have
excelled it in eloquence and profundity. Even that has to be
qualified by saying that she could have written nothing on a
single subject which would have adequately shown 'the depth and
compass of her mind.' His readers, therefore, have to take his
statements on faith, and he tries to make up for the want of
proof by vehemence of asseveration. The only way of accepting
such utterances fairly. is to regard them as a cry of poignant
anguish, not as a set of statements to be logically criticised.
The accumulation of superlatives, meanwhile, has the disadvantage
that it leaves us without any distinctive characteristic. The
figure invested with such a blaze of light has neither distinct
form nor colouring. Mill was, I think, always at his feeblest in
describing character, and that was a natural weakness of one who,
with all his perspicacity, was essentially a bad judge of men.
    Apart from the revelation of Mill's character, the only
question is whether any intellectual influence is to be
attributed to Mrs Mill. It is easy to suggest that he admired her
because she was skilful in echoing his own opinions. To this
Professor Bain replies that Mill generally liked intelligent
opposition, and holds that in fact Mrs Mill did set his mind to
work by stimulating conversation.(68*) This may be true within
limits. Mill, however, himself assigns coincidence on cardinal
points of opinion as a necessary condition of friendship.(69*) It
is plain that such an agreement existed between himself and his
wife. That he could detect no error in her proves simply that she
held what he thought to be true, that is, his own opinions. He
has indeed said enough to explain the general relation. She had
nothing to do with the Logic, except as to the minuter matters of
composition; he had already come to believe in woman's rights
before he knew her; she did not affect the logical framework of
the Political Economy, but she suggested the chapter to which he
attributes most influence upon the future of the labouring
classes; and gave to the book, the general tone by which it is
distinguished from previous treatises.' 'What was abstract and
purely scientific,' he says by way of summary, 'was generally
mine; the properly human element came from her.'(70*) In other
words, her influence was rather upon his emotions than upon his
intellect, and led him to apply his abstract principles to the
actual state of society and to estimate their bearing upon human
interests and sympathies more clearly and widely than he would
otherwise have done. Undoubtedly we may gladly admit the
importance of this element in Mill's life; we can fully believe
that this, the one great affection of his life, had enabled him
to breathe a more genial atmosphere and helped to save him from
the rigidity and dryness of some of his allies. It is, however,
impossible to attribute to Mrs Mill any real share in framing his
philosophical doctrines; and the impossibility will be the more
evident when we have noticed to what an extent they were simply
the development of the creed which he had been imbibing from his
earliest years. Mill was essentially formed by Bentham, James
Mill, and Ricardo; while the relation to Mrs Mill encouraged him
to a more human version of the old Utilitarian gospel. The
attribution of all conceivable excellences to his wife shows that
he loved, if I may say so, with his brain. The love was perfectly
genuine and of most unusual strength; but he interpreted it into
terms of reason, and speaks of an invaluable sympathy as if it
implied a kind of philosophical inspiration.
    Mill, now released from his official labours, settled down as
he expected, for the remainder of his existence into a purely
literary life.'(71*) For six or seven years (end of 1858 to
summer of 1865) he carried out this design, and wrote much both
on political and philosophical topics. He first published the
Liberty, in which, after the death of his wife, he resolved to
make no further alterations. He gave the weight of his approval
to the congenial work of his friend, Professor Bain, by a review
in the Edinburgh of October 1859. He put together, from
previously written papers, his short treatise upon
Utilitarianism.(72*) In October 1863 he reviewed in the Edinburgh
the recently published lectures of his old friend, John Austin,
the representative Utilitarian jurist. Two articles upon
Comte(73*) in 1864 gave his final judgment of one of the thinkers
to whom he owed most outside of the Utilitarian circle. His most
elaborate performance, however, was his examination of Sir
William Hamilton's philosophy. This was suggested by the recent
publication of Hamilton's Lectures, which he at first intended
only to review. The work swelled upon his hands; he read all
Hamilton's writings three times over, and much other literature;
he completed the book in the autumn of 1864, and published it in
the following spring. It involved him in some very sharp
controversies, and contained his final and most elaborate protest
against the Intuitionist school. This, too, with the three
posthumous essays,(74*) gives his position upon the general
philosophical questions which were not treated in the Logic. In
his earlier books he had been systematically reticent to a degree
of which he afterwards disapproved.(75*) The intelligent reader,
indeed, could perceive to what conclusions his principles led;
but the intelligent reader is a rarity. When, in 1865, his
political opponents tried to turn his unpopular opinions to
account, the only phrase upon which they could fix was the really
very orthodox sentiment (in the examination of Hamilton) that he
would go to hell rather than worship an unjust God. He had
intended, it may be noticed, to publish the essay Upon Nature
himself; but the others were to be still held back. These last
utterances, however, taken together, give a sufficient account of
Mill's final position in philosophy.

 VI. POLITICAL ACTIVITY

    Meanwhile. he had been again drawn to politics. After
indifference which followed the final the long period of decay of
the philosophical Radicals, the English democracy was showing
many symptoms of revived animation. The new Reform Bill was
becoming the object of practical political agitation; and it
seemed that the hopes entertained of the Reform Bill of 1832 had
now at last a prospect of realisation. Mill thought in 1861 that
there was 'a more encouraging prospect of the mental emancipation
of England,' and that things were looking better for the general
advance of Europe.(76*) The surviving Utilitarians had declined
from the true faith. John Austin before his death had become
distinctly Conservative; and the sacred fire of Benthamism was
nearly extinct. Mill himself had changed in some respects. While
more awake to certain dangers of democracy, he was the more
strongly convinced of the possibility of meeting them by
appropriate remedies. Meanwhile Radicalism in various forms was
raising its head, and willing to accept Mill, now a writer of the
first celebrity, as its authorised interpreter. He wrote much at
this period, which defines his position and shows his relation to
the new parties. His first publication was a pamphlet on
Parliamentary Reform, suggested by the futile Reform Bill of Lord
Derby and Disraeli in 1859. He now objected to the ballot, the
favourite nostrum of the philosophical Radicals to which Grote
still adhered, but his main suggestions were in harmony with the
scheme proposed by Mr Hare. After the publication of his own
pamphlet, he became acquainted with this scheme, of which he
immediately became an ardent proselyte. In 1860 and 1861 he wrote
two treatises. He expounded his whole political doctrine in his
Considerations on Parliamentary Government (1861), and he wrote
for future publication -- 'at the time when it should seem most
likely to be useful' -- his Subjection of Women.(77*) In this, as
he intimates, 'all that is most striking and profound belongs to
his wife'; while it appears that his stepdaughter had also some
share in the composition. The outbreak of the civil war in
America led him to pronounce himself strongly in support of
Bright and other sympathisers with the cause of union.(78*)
Although his opinions were opposed to those commonest among the
English upper classes, they fell in with those of the Radicals,
and made him at once a representative of a great current of
opinion. His occupation with Hamilton now withdrew him for a time
to another department of thought.
    In the beginning of 1865 Mill published popular editions of
his Political Economy, his Liberty, and his Representative
Government. At the general election of that year he was invited
to stand for Westminster. Mill accepted the invitation, though
upon terms which showed emphatically that he would make no
sacrifice of his principles. He declined to incur any expense. He
would not canvass, although he attended a few public meetings in
the week preceding the nomination. He declared that he would
answer no questions about his religious beliefs, but upon all
other topics would answer frankly and briefly. 'Did you,' he was
asked at one meeting, 'declare that the English working classes,
though differing from some other countries in being ashamed of
lying, were yet "generally liars"?' His answer, 'I did,'
produced, he says, 'vehement applause.' It certainly deserved the
applause. Upon some points, too, of the Radical creed, Mill's
views were not acceptable. His condemnation of the ballot, and
his adherence to women's suffrage and to minority representation
marked his opposition to some democratic tendencies. These
opinions, however, referred to questions not prominent enough at
the time to be important as disqualifications in a candidate. His
election by a considerable majority roused great interest. He
came in upon a wave of enthusiasm, which accompanied the
beginning of a new political era. The Radicalism which was to
succeed was, indeed, very unlike the old Radicalism of 1832; but,
for the time at least, it believed itself to be simply continuing
the old movement, and was willing to accept the most
distinguished representative of the creed for one of its leaders.
    In his Autobiography Mill shows a certain self-complacency in
describing his proceedings in the new parliament, which is not
unnatural in a man called from his study by the strong demand
from practical politicians. The voice which had been crying in
the wilderness was now to be heard in the senate, and philosophy
to be married to practice. Mill took up his duties with his usual
assiduity; he watched business as closely as the most diligent of
partisans, and was as regular in the House as he had been in his
office. The scenes in which he appeared as an orator were
remarkable. His figure was spare and slight, his voice weak; a
constant twitching of the eyebrow betrayed his nervous
irritability; he spoke with excessive rapidity, and at times lost
the thread of his remarks, and paused deliberately to regain
self-possession.(79*) But he poured out continuous and thoroughly
well-arranged essays -- lucid, full of thought, and frequently
touching the point epigrammatically. His old practice at debating
societies and the Political Economy Club had qualified him to
give full expression to his thoughts. A general curiosity to see
so strange a phenomenon as a philosopher in parliament was
manifest, and Mill undoubtedly introduced an order of
considerations far higher than those of the average politician.
The tone of the debates, as was said by competent witnesses, was
perceptibly raised by his speeches. The accepted leaders, such as
Bright and Gladstone, welcomed him cordially, and were doubtless
pleased to find that they had been talking so much philosophy
without knowing it. The young mell who were then entering public
life looked up to him with reverence; and, for a time, even the
squires, the embodiments of Tory prejudice, were favourably
impressed. That could not be for long. One of the hits to which
Mill refers with some glee in the Autobiography(80*) gave the
nickname of the 'stupid party' to the Conservatives. It expressed
his real view a little too clearly. Between him and the typical
'John Bull' a great gulf was fixed. He could never contrive,
though he honestly tried, to see anything in the class which most
fully represents that ideal, except the embodiment of selfish
stupidity generated by class prejudice, And the country-gentlemen
naturally looked upon him as their ancestors would have looked
upon Sieyes, could the Frenchman have been substituted for
Charles Fox. They could dimly understand Whiggism, embodied in a
genial, hearty member of their own class; but the flavour of the
French philosophy, or its English correlative, was thin, acid,
and calculated to set their teeth on edge. They showed the
feeling after a time, and Mill retorted by some irritability as
well as scorn, He did-not, I fancy, obtain that kind of personal
weight which is sometimes acquired by a man who, though he
preaches equally offensive doctrines, is more obviously made of
the same flesh and blood as his adversaries.(81*)
    Mill took a part in various parliamentary proceedings. He
helped to pass the Reform Bill of 1867; he acted as a mediator
between the ministers and the Radicals who were responsible for
the famous meeting in Hyde Park; and he made a weighty protest on
behalf of a generous and thoroughgoing Irish policy. He thought
that a separation would be mischievous to both parties; but he
advocated a scheme for giving a permanent tenure to existing
tenants, with a due regard to vested interests.(82*) He obtained
little support for a policy which, at least, went to the root of
the great difficulty; but the wisdom of his view, whatever its
shortcomings, is more likely to be recognised now. The main
peculiarity of Mill's position, however, is all that I am able to
notice. In spite of his philosophy, he appeared to be a thorough
party man. He fully adopted, that is to say, the platform of the
Radical wing, and voted systematically with them on all points.
His philosophy led him, as he says,(83*) to advocate some
measures not popular with the bulk of the Liberal party. Of these
the most important were the extension of the suffrage to women
and the provision of representation for minorities. Many people,
he observes, took these to be 'whims of his own.' Mill, in fact,
was contributing to the advance of democracy. In his eyes, these
measures were of vital importance as safeguards against
democratic tyranny. The democrat was, of course, content to
accept his alliance, and to allow him to amuse himself with
fanciful schemes, which for the time could make no difference.
Mill, on the other hand, thought that by helping the democrat's
immediate purposes, he was also gaining ground for the
popularisation of these subsidiary though essential changes. The
relation is significant; for, whatever may be the value of Mill's
proposals, there can be no doubt that in many ways the democratic
changes which he advocated have led to results which he would
have thoroughly disapproved. The alliance, that is, for the time,
covered very deep differences, and Mill was virtually helping
Demos to get into power, in the expectation that, when in power,
Demos would consent to submit to restrictions, not yet, if they
ever will be, realised. There is the further question, not here
debatable, whether, if realised, they would act as Mill supposed.
Anyhow, for the present, the philosopher was really the follower
of the partisan. Mill made himself unpopular with a class wider
than that which constituted the 'stupid party.' He took a very
active part in the agitation provoked by Governor Eyre's action
in the Jamaica insurrection. That he was right in demanding a
thorough investigation seems to be undeniable. It seems also that
a more judicial frame of mind would have restrained him from
apparently assuming that such an investigation could have but one
result. People of a high moral tone are too apt to show their
virtue by assuming that a concrete case comes under a simple
moral law when in fact most such cases are exceedingly complex.
Mill, at any rate, and his committee impressed many people
besides their strongest opponents as allowing their indignation
to swamp their sense of fair play. Governor Eyre appeared to be a
victim of persecution instead of a criminal, and there was,
though Mill could not see it, a generous element in the feeling
that allowance should be made for a man placed in a terribly
critical position.
    After the dissolution of parliament, Mill incurred further
odium by subscribing to the election expenses of Bradlaugh.
Nothing could be more in harmony with his principles than the
support of an honest and straightforward man, attacked by the
bitterest theological prejudice. His seat, however, for
Westminster was lost (1868), and, refusing some other offers, he
was glad to retire once more to private life, and to literary and
philosophical pursuits. His strength was apparently failing, and
he achieved little more. His parliamentary activity had enlarged
his circle of acquaintance, and during these years he became far
more sociable. Admiring friends gathered round him; his old
allies, such as Hare and W. T. Thornton, the economist Cairnes,
and such rising politicians as Henry Fawcett, Mr Courtney, and Mr
Worley, looked up to him, and had frequent meetings with him. One
characteristic point must be noticed, his withdrawal of the, wage
fund, theory when impugned by W. T. Thornton in 1869. The candour
which he showed on this occasion, and his generous appreciation
of his friend, was eminently characteristic. In the same year
appeared his edition of his father's Analysis, which, he
says,(84*) 'ought now to stand at the head of the systematic
works on Analytic Psychology.' He was preparing for other
writings, but his task was done. He died at Avignon, 8th May
1873, of a sudden attack, having three days before walked fifteen
miles on a botanical excursion.
    The impression made upon T. H. Green(85*) by some of Mill's
letters was that he must have been an 'extraordinarily good man.'
The remark came from a philosophical opponent, and might be
echoed by many admirers and generous adversaries. The reverence
of his personal friends is sufficiently indicated by the articles
of Mr John Morley,(86*) written at the time of their loss. Mill's
moral excellence, indeed, is in some directions beyond all
dispute. No human being ever devoted himself more unreservedly to
a worthy end from his earliest to his latest years; the end was
the propagation of truths of the highest importance to mankind,
and the devotion implied entire freedom from all meaner or
subsidiary ambitions. A man of whom that can be said without fear
of contradiction has certainly extraordinary goodness. When we
add that he was singularly candid, fair in argument, most willing
to recognise merits in others, and a staunch enemy of oppression
in every form, we may say that Mill possessed in an almost
unsurpassable degree the virtues peculiarly appropriate to a
philosopher. A complete judgment, however, must take other
characteristics into account. One remark is obvious. Mill
observes(87*) that the description of a Benthamite as 'a mere
reasoning machine,' though untrue of many of his friends, was
true of himself during 'two or three years' -- before, that is,
he had learned to appreciate the value of the emotions. Many
readers thought it true of him to the last. Though the phrase may
be understood so as to imply the very contradictory of the truth,
I take it to imply one aspect of his character which cannot be
neglected. The Autobiography, though a very interesting, is to
many readers far from an attractive, work; and its want of charm
is, I think, significant of the weakness which is caricatured by
the epithet 'reasoning machine.' Omitting the pages about his
wife, there is a singular absence of the qualities which make so
many autobiographies interesting: there is no tender dwelling
upon early days and associations; his father is incidentally
revealed as an object of profound respect, but without illusion
as to his harsher qualities; hardly any reference is made to his
mother or his brothers and sisters; his friends are briefly
noticed and their intellectual merits duly set forth, but there
is no warm expression of personal feeling towards any one of
them; his remarks upon his countrymen in general are
contemptuous; and, though he is desirous of the welfare of the
species, he is as fully convinced as Carlyle, that men are
'mostly fools.' Old institutions awake no thrill; they are simply
embodiments of prejudice; and the nation is divided between those
who have a 'sinister interest' in abuses, and the masses who are
still too brutalised to be trusted. At the bottom of his heart he
seems to prefer a prig, a man of rigid formula, to the vivid and
emotional character, whose merits he recognises in theory. He
complains frequently of the general decay of energy, and yet his
ideal would seem to be the thoroughly drilled thinker, who is the
slave of abstract theories. His 'zeal for the good of mankind'
was really to the last what he admits it to have been at the
early period, a 'zeal for speculative opinions.' The startling
phrases about his wife are in contrast to this coolness, but they
are so hysterical as to check full sympathy. From such remarks,
some people have inferred that Mill was really a frigid thinker,
a worthy prophet of the dismal science, which leaves out of
account all that is deepest and most truly valuable in human
nature.
    A reply even to an unjust estimate should admit what there is
of truth in it. In the first place, of course, Mill was not, and
never took himself to be, a poet. He had no vivid pictures of
concrete facts; he was not, as he puts it in contrasting himself
with Carlyle, a man of intuitions, and he formed his judgments of
affairs by analysing and reflecting and expressing the result in
abstract formula. That is only to say that his predominant
faculty was logical, and that the imagination was comparatively
feeble. He was sensitive to some poetry, to Shelley as well as to
Wordsworth; but he is more impressed by its philosophical than
its direct asthetical value. He was certainly less deficient than
James Mill in this direction; but in another quality the contrast
with his father is significant. James Mill, whatever his faults,
was a man, and born to be a leader of men. He was rigid,
imperative, and capable of controlling and dominating. John
Stuart Mill was far weaker in that sense, and weaker because he
had less virility. Mill never seems fully to appreciate the force
of human passions; he fancies that the emotions which stir men to
their depths can be controlled by instilling a few moral maxims
or pointing out considerations of utility. He has in that respect
less, human nature, in him than most human beings; and has not,
like Carlyle's favourite Ram Dass, fire enough in his inside to
burn up the sins of the world. One effect is obvious even in his
philosophy. A philosopher, I think, owes more than is generally
perceived to the moral quality which goes into masculine vigour.
To accept, as well as to announce, a doctrine which clashes with
the opinions accepted in his class requires an amount of vigour
and self-reliance which is only possessed by the few. Mill held
very unpopular opinions, but they had been instilled into him
from childhood; they were those of the whole world in which he
lived, and it would have required more vigour to abandon than to
maintain them. It is impossible to read the Autobiography without
wondering whether a different education might not have made him a
Coleridgean instead of a Benthamite. If he disbelieved in innate
principles and in the boundless power of 'association,' it was
partly because the influence of his own idiosyncrasy was so
slightly marked in his intellectual development. He was one of
the most remarkable instances of the power of education to mould
the intellect, because few intellects so powerful have been so
amenable.
    The want of the qualities which make a man self-assertive and
original implies, however, no coldness of the affections. Mill
was a man of great emotional sensibility, and of very unusual
tenderness. Besides his great attachment, he was deeply devoted
to a few friends, and, in certain cases, greatly overestimated
their qualities. His devotion to speculative pursuits made most
of his attachments the product of intellectual sympathy; and he
either did not form, or could not keep up, intimacies formed with
persons incapable of such sympathy. Unless he could talk upon
serious matters with man or woman, he would have no common bond
with them; and he was too sincere to express it. His feelings,
however, were, I take it, as tender as a woman's. They were
wanting, not in keenness, but in the massiveness which implies
more masculine fibre. And this, indeed, is what seems to indicate
the truth. Mill could never admit any fundamental difference
between the sexes. That is, I believe, a great but a natural
misconception for one who was in character as much feminine as
masculine. He had some of the amiable weaknesses which we at
present -- perhaps on account of the debased state of society --
regard as especially feminine. The most eminent women, hitherto
at least, are remarkable rather for docility than originality.
Mill was especially remarkable, as I have said, for his powers of
assimilation. No more receptive pupil could ever be desired by a
teacher. Like a woman, he took things -- even philosophers --
with excessive seriousness; and shows the complete want of humour
often -- unjustly perhaps -- attributed to women. Prejudices
provoke him, but he does not see the comic side of prejudice or
of life in general. When Carlyle, in his hasty wrath, denounces,
shams, with a huge guffaw, Mill patiently unravels the sophistry,
and tries to discover the secret of their plausibility. Mill's
method no doubt leads as a rule to safer and more sober results.
The real candour, too, and desire of light from all sides is most
genuine and admirable. It may lead him rather to develop and
widen the philosophy in which he was immersed than to strike out
new paths. One misses at times the flashes of intuition of keener
philosophers, and still more the downright protests of rough
common-sense, which can sweep away cobwebs without trying
elaborately to pick them to pieces.
    On the other hand, he has in the highest degree the power of
single-minded devotion, which is pre-eminently, though not
exclusively, a feminine quality. His intellect fitted him for
abstract speculation, rather than for immediate practical
applications. But he was from his youth upwards devoted to the
spread of principles which he held to be essential to human
happiness. No philanthropist or religious teacher could labour
more energetically and unremittingly for the good of mankind. He
never forgets the bearing of his speculations upon this ultimate
end. Whatever his limitations, he brought the whole energy of a
singularly clear, comprehensive, and candid intellect to bear
upon the greatest problems of his time; and worked at them with
unflagging industry for many years. He was eminently qualified to
bring out the really strong points of his creed; while his
perfect intellectual honesty forced him frankly to display its
weaker side. Through Mill English Utilitarianism gave the fullest
account of its method and its presuppositions. In summarising his
work, I must dwell less than I have hitherto done upon
surrounding conditions; and take his books, nearly in the order
of publication, as representing the final outcome of
Utilitarianism. He virtually answers in the Logic the question,
what are the ultimate principles by which the Utilitarians had
more or less unconsciously been guided. I shall first deal with
this. I shall then take his Political Economy, as showing how
these principles applied to sociology, which ought, upon his
showing, to be the crowning science. Then I shall take the
political speculations, which are a further application of the
same principles; and, finally, deal with his views in ethics and
in philosophy generally.

NOTES:

1. Mill's Autobiography (1873) is the main authority. Professor
Bain's John Stuart Mill: a Criticism with Personal Recollections
(1882), is a necessary supplement, and gives an excellent
summary. The most interesting later publications are the
correspondence with Gustave d'Eichthal (1898) and the
correspondence with Comte. Comte's letters were published by the
Positivist Society in 1877, and the whole edited by M. Lévy-Bruhl
in 1899. The Memories of Old Friends, by Caroline Fox (1882),
gives some interesting accounts of Mill's conversation in 1840,
etc.

2. Bentham's Works, x, 472.

3. Cf. letter of 30th July, 1819 in Bain's J.S. Mill, pp. 6 to 9.

4. Given in Dictionary of National Biography.

5. Autobiography, p. 52.

6. Autobiography, p. 30.

7. Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 84.

8. Mill's Autobiography, p. 43; Bain's James Mill, p. 90.

9. Autobiography, p. 58.

10. Mill does not here make especial reference to his father, of
whom, however, he had said before that he shared the ordinary
English weakness of starving the feelings from dislike of
expressing them. One would be inclined to guess that James Mill
exaggerated rather than shared that feeling.

11.  Autobiography, p. 108.

12. Autobiography, p. 66.

13. It was not necessary at this time for an undergraduate to
sign the Thirty-nine Articles as Bain supposes. From 1773 a
graduate had to make the declaration that he was a 'bona fide
member of the church of England,' whatever that may mean, but any
one might be a member of the University and pass the
examinations. Sylvester, for example, though a Jew, was second
wrangler in 1837.

14. Dissertations, i. 193.

15. The name soon became popular. Southey, writing to Henry
Taylor (12th April, 1827), call them 'Futilitarians' (Life and
Correspondence). Taylor was on friendly terms with the set,and
gives some account of them and the later debating society. See
Autobiography, i. 77-95; and Correspondence, pp. 30, 72.

16. About this period, Mill, then aged seventeen or eighteen,
took part with some friends in distributing a pamphlet called
'What is Love?' advocating what are now called Neo-Malthusian
principles. The police interferred, and some scandal was caused.
An allusion to this performance -- which shows Mill's enthusiasm
and honesty, if not his discretion -- appeared in an article by
Abraham Hayward upon Mill's death. Hayward was attacked by W.D.
Christie in an indignant pamphlet, which gives a sufficient
statement of the facts. See Cobden's Political Works, vi, 421
(August 1824), for a reference to this affair.

17. Bain thinks that J.S. Mill wrote the article in the Review
upon the Carlile prosecution in July 1824. I cannot admit this
opinion. If so, Mill was a more capable journalist than the other
articles would imply. But -- apart from questions of style -- I
cannot thing that Mill would have gone out of his way to avow a
belief in Christianity, as is done by the writer of the article.

18. In the collective edition of Bentham's Works the treatise
occupies about 900 double-column pages of some 500 words to a
column. If 500 days were given to the task, this would mean an
average output of 1500 words a day.

19. Autobiography, p. 133.

20. Bain's J.S. Mill, pp. 43, 45, 90, 95.

21. D'Eichthal, Correspondence, p. 30.

22. D'Eichthal, Correspondence, p. 147. The St Simonians excited
some interest in England at the time, See, e.g., Carlyle's Sartor
Resartus, book ii, ch. 12. Carlyle's Correspondence with Goethe,
214, 226, 258; Tennyson's Life, i. 99. Todhunter's Whewell, i.
240; Holder's Shaftesbury, i. 126. Shaftesbury's notice was
called to St Simonianism by Southey, who wrote an article upon it
in the Quarterly for July 1831 -- a mere shriek of alarm.

23. Autobiography, p. 168.

24. Seven articles appeared from January to May 1831. As Mill
says in his Autobiography, (p. 175) they are 'lumbering in style'
and of no great interest in substance, except as showing the St
Simonian influence.

25. Correspondence with Comte, p. 169-70.

26. Autobiography, p. 198.

27. Autobiography, pp. 199, 206, 220; Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 58.
Mill at first supervised rather than edited the Review. His
sub-editors were Thomas Falconer and afterwards John Robertson.

28. Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 160 (quotation from Fonblanque). See
also pp. 56, 82.

29. Autobiography, pp. 114-17.

30. See articles in Westminster Review, Oct. 1837, 'Parties and
the Ministry'; Jan. 1838, 'Radicalism in Canada'; April 1839,
'Reorganisation of the Radical party.'

31. 'Parties and the Ministry'.

32. 'Ministers and Parties'.

33. 'Claims of Labour' in Dissertations ii. 192.

34. August 1838, and March 1840.

35. Browning believed that he had written in 1833 a review of
Pauline for Tait's Magazine, where, however, it was supplanted by
a less favourable notice. -- Mrs Orr's Life of Browning, p. 59.

36. Autobiography, p. 217.

37. Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 59.

38. Autobiography, p. 191.

39. Froude's Carlyle, First Forty Years, ii. 360. The letters are
in existence but have not been published. Mr A. Carlyle has
kindly allowed me to read them.

40. 'Negro Question' in Fraser's Magazine, Feb. 1849.

41. A friendly message, as the Carlyle letters show, passed
between them in 1869.

42. Autobiography, pp. 175-76.

43. A 'drysalter' or 'wholesale druggist in Mark Lane', according
to Bain, 164 n.

44. Autobiography, p. 185.

45. Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 172.

46. Leader's Roebuck, p. 39; and Mill's Autobiography, p. 150.

47. Autobiography, p. 227.

48. Autobiography, pp. 122, 159, 181, 209, 221.

49. Logic, bk. vi. ch. v. sec. 4.

50. Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 70. There was a review of Comte by
Brewster in the Edinburgh Review for August 1838. G.H. Lewes
spoke favourably of Comte (to whom he had been personally
introduced by Mill) in an article upon 'Modern French Philosophy'
in the Foreign Quarterly in 1843. His later accounts of Comte in
the Biographical History of Philosophy (1st edition, 1845-46),
and in letters published in the Leader in 1852, and afterwards
collected as Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences are also
noticeable. Miss Martineau's abridged translation appeared in
1853.

51. Correspondence, pp. 2, 3.

52. Ibid., p. 29, cf. 414.

53. Ibid., p. 77.

54. Ibid. p. 135.

55. Correspondence, p. 273.

56. Ibid., p. 206.

57. Correspondence, p. 402.

58. See Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 72, for an account of the changes.

59. Autobiography, p. 235. Mil, as we have seen, spoke of the
Political Economy to Comte in April 1844. Possibly, therefore,
some preparation may have been made for it in the interval before
the autumn of 1845.

60. Published in 1848 before the appearance of Mill's Political
Economy. Mill read the proofs of his friend's book. Bain's J.S.
Mill, p. 86 n.

61. Autobiography, p. 231. The dates of these changes are rather
vaguely indicated.

62. Autobiography, p. 235.

63. Ibid. p. 236.

64. Article in Dissertations, ii, republished from Westminster
Review of April 1849.

65. Autobiography, p. 238.

66. See reference to Mrs Mill in the suppressed dedication of the
Political Economy given in Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 175; the
dedication of the Liberty; the note in Dissertation, ii, 412; and
Autobiography, pp. 184-90 and 240-45.

67. Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 167.

68. Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 173.

69. Autobiography, p. 229.

70. Autobiography, p. 244-47.

71. Autobiography, p. 262.

72. First in Fraser's Magazine in 1861; republished in 1863.

73. First in the Westminster for 1864, reprinted separately in
1865.

74. The essays upon Nature and The Utility of Religion are stated
to have been written between 1850 and 1858; that upon Theism
between 1868 and 1870.

75. Autobiography, p. 230. He defends this reticence in a letter
to Comte of 18th December 1841 -- Correspondence, p. 12.

76. Autobiography, p. 240.

77. Published in 1869.

78. Article in Fraser's Magazine, January 1861.

79. I heard some his first speeches from the press gallery of the
House of Commons.

80. Autobiography, p. 289.

81. Disraeli is said to have summed up the impression made upon
practical politicians by calling him a 'political finishing
governess'.

82. See his pamphlet, England and Ireland, 1869.

83. Autobiography, p. 286.

84. Autobiography, p. 308.

85. Green's Miscellaneous Works, iii, cxliv.

86. Miscellanies (second series).

87. Autobiography, p. 109.