CRITICAL MISCELLANIES

 BY JOHN MORLEY

 VOL. III. 

 ESSAY 2: THE DEATH OF MR MILL ESSAY 3: MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 London MACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904

 CONTENTS

 THE DEATH OF MR. MILL. 

 Peculiar office of the Teacher 37

 Mill's influence in the universities and the press 39

 His union of science with aspiration 40

 And of courage with patience 42

 His abstinence from society 45

 Sense of the tendency of society to relapse 46

 Peculiar trait of his authority 47

 The writer's last day with him 48

 MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 The spirit of search 53

 Key to Mill's type of character and its value 54

 Sensibility of his intellect 56

 Yet no reaction against his peculiar education 57

 Quality of the Autobiography 58

 One of its lessons--[Greek: memnęso apistein] 60

 Mill's aversion to the spirit of sect 60

 Not a hindrance to systematisation 61

 Criticism united with belief 63

 Practical difficulties in the union of loyalty with tolerance 64

 Impressiveness of Mill's self-effacement 65

 His contempt for socialistic declamation 68

 Yet the social aim paramount in him 69

 Illustrated in his attack on Hamilton 71

 And in the Logic 72

 The book on the Subjection of Women 75

 The two crises of life 77

 Mill did not escape the second of them 78

 Influence of Wordsworth 79

 Hope from reformed institutions 79

 This hope replaced by efforts in a deeper vein 80

 Popular opinion of such efforts 81

 Irrational disparagement of Mill's hope 82

 Mill's conception of happiness contrasted with his father's 84

 Remarks on his withdrawal from society 88

 It arose from no moral valetudinarianism 91

THE DEATH OF MR. MILL. 

(_May 1873. _)

The tragic commonplaces of the grave sound a fuller note as we mourn forone of the greater among the servants of humanity. A strong and purelight is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficentpurpose. One of those high and most worthy spirits who arise from timeto time to stir their generation with new mental impulses in the deeperthings, has perished from among us. The death of one who did so much toimpress on his contemporaries that physical law works independently ofmoral law, marks with profounder emphasis the ever ancient and everfresh decree that there is one end to the just and the unjust, and thatthe same strait tomb awaits alike the poor dead whom nature orcircumstance imprisoned in mean horizons, and those who saw far and feltpassionately and put their reason to noble uses. Yet the fulness of ourgrief is softened by a certain greatness and solemnity in the event. Theteachers of men are so few, the gift of intellectual fatherhood is sorare, it is surrounded by such singular gloriousness. The loss of apowerful and generous statesman, or of a great master in letters or art, touches us with many a vivid regret. The Teacher, the man who hastalents and has virtues, and yet has a further something which isneither talent nor virtue, and which gives him the mysterious secret ofdrawing men after him, leaves a deeper sense of emptiness than this; butlamentation is at once soothed and elevated by a sense of sacredness inthe occasion. Even those whom Mr. Mill honoured with his friendship, andwho must always bear to his memory the affectionate veneration of sons, may yet feel their pain at the thought that they will see him no more, raised into a higher mood as they meditate on the loftiness of his taskand the steadfastness and success with which he achieved it. If it isgrievous to think that such richness of culture, such full maturity ofwisdom, such passion for truth and justice, are now by a single strokeextinguished, at least we may find some not unworthy solace in thethought of the splendid purpose that they have served in keeping alive, and surrounding with new attractions, the difficult tradition of patientand accurate thinking in union with unselfish and magnanimous living. 

 * * * * *

Much will one day have to be said as to the precise value of Mr. Mill'sphilosophical principles, the more or less of his triumphs as adialectician, his skill as a critic and an expositor. However this trialmay go, we shall at any rate be sure that with his reputation willstand or fall the intellectual repute of a whole generation of hiscountrymen. The most eminent of those who are now so fast becoming thefront line, as death mows down the veterans, all bear traces of hisinfluence, whether they are avowed disciples or avowed opponents. Ifthey did not accept his method of thinking, at least he determined thequestions which they should think about. For twenty years no one at allopen to serious intellectual impressions has left Oxford without havingundergone the influence of Mr. Mill's teaching, though it would be toomuch to say that in that gray temple where they are ever burnishing newidols, his throne is still unshaken. The professorial chairs there andelsewhere are more and more being filled with men whose minds have beentrained in his principles. The universities only typify his influence onthe less learned part of the world. The better sort of journalistseducated themselves on his books, and even the baser sort acquired ahabit of quoting from them. He is the only writer in the world whosetreatises on highly abstract subjects have been printed during hislifetime in editions for the people, and sold at the price of railwaynovels. Foreigners from all countries read his books as attentively ashis most eager English disciples, and sought his opinion as to their ownquestions with as much reverence as if he had been a native oracle. Aneminent American who came over on an official mission which brought himinto contact with most of the leading statesmen throughout Europe, saidto the present writer:--'The man who impressed me most of them all wasStuart Mill; you placed before him the facts on which you sought hisopinion. He took them, gave you the different ways in which they mightfairly be looked at, balanced the opposing considerations, and thenhanded you a final judgment in which nothing was left out. His mindworked like a splendid piece of machinery; you supply it with rawmaterial, and it turns you out a perfectly finished product. ' Of such aman England has good reason to be very proud. 

He was stamped in many respects with specially English quality. He isthe latest chief of a distinctively English school of philosophy, inwhich, as has been said, the names of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, andBentham (and Mr. Mill would have added James Mill) mark the line ofsuccession--the school whose method subordinates imagination toobservation, and whose doctrine lays the foundations of knowledge inexperience, and the tests of conduct in utility. Yet, for all this, oneof his most remarkable characteristics was less English than French; hisconstant admission of an ideal and imaginative element in socialspeculation, and a glowing persuasion that the effort and wisdom andingenuity of men are capable, if free opportunity be given by socialarrangements, of raising human destiny to a pitch that is at presentbeyond our powers of conception. Perhaps the sum of all his distinctionlies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, ofrigorous sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminoushope. He told one who was speaking of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, thatin his younger days whenever he was inclined to be discouraged, he wasin the habit of turning to this book, and that he never did so withoutrecovering possession of himself. To the same friend, who had printedsomething comparing Mr. Mill's repulse at Westminster with the dismissalof the great minister of Lewis the Sixteenth, he wrote:--'I neverreceived so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to Turgot;it is indeed an honour to me that such an assimilation should haveoccurred to you. ' Those who have studied the character of one whom eventhe rigid Austin thought worthy to be called 'the godlike Turgot, ' knowboth the nobleness and the rarity of this type. 

Its force lies not in single elements, but in that combination of anardent interest in human improvement with a reasoned attention to thelaw of its conditions, which alone deserves to be honoured with the highname of wisdom. This completeness was one of the secrets of Mr. Mill'speculiar attraction for young men, and for the comparatively few womenwhose intellectual interest was strong enough to draw them to his books. He satisfied the ingenuous moral ardour which is instinctive in the bestnatures, until the dust of daily life dulls or extinguishes it, and atthe same time he satisfied the rationalistic qualities, which are notless marked in the youthful temperament of those who by and by do thework of the world. This mixture of intellectual gravity with apassionate love of improvement in all the aims and instruments of life, made many intelligences alive who would otherwise have slumbered, orsunk either into a dry pedantry on the one hand, or a windy, mischievousphilanthropy on the other. He showed himself so wholly free from thevulgarity of the sage. He could hope for the future without taking hiseye from the realities of the present. He recognised the socialdestination of knowledge, and kept the elevation of the great art ofsocial existence ever before him, as the ultimate end of all speculativeactivity. 

Another side of this rare combination was his union of courage withpatience, of firm nonconformity with silent conformity. Compliance isalways a question of degree, depending on time, circumstance, andsubject. Mr. Mill hit the exact mean, equally distant from timorouscaution and self-indulgent violence. He was unrivalled in the difficultart of conciliating as much support as was possible and alienating aslittle sympathy as possible, for novel and extremely unpopular opinions. He was not one of those who strive to spread new faiths by brilliantswordplay with buttoned foils, and he was not one of those who run amuckamong the idols of the tribe and the market-place and the theatre. Heknew how to kindle the energy of all who were likely to be persuaded byhis reasoning, without stimulating in a corresponding degree the energyof persons whose convictions he attacked. Thus he husbanded thestrength of truth, and avoided wasteful friction. Probably no Englishwriter that ever lived has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the veryroot of the theological spirit, yet there is only one passage in thewritings published during his lifetime--I mean a well-known passage inthe Liberty--which could give any offence to the most devout person. Hisconformity, one need hardly say, never went beyond the negative degree, nor ever passed beyond the conformity of silence. That guilty andgrievously common pusillanimity which leads men to make or acthypocritical professions, always moved his deepest abhorrence. And hedid not fear publicly to testify his interest in the return of anatheist to parliament. 

His courage was not of the spurious kinds arising from anger, orignorance of the peril, or levity, or a reckless confidence. These areall very easy. His distinction was that he knew all the danger tohimself, was anxious to save pain to others, was buoyed up by no rashhope that the world was to be permanently bettered at a stroke, and yetfor all this he knew how to present an undaunted front to a majority. The only fear he ever knew was fear lest a premature or excessiveutterance should harm a good cause. He had measured the prejudices ofmen, and his desire to arouse this obstructive force in the least degreecompatible with effective advocacy of any improvement, set the singlelimit to his intrepidity. Prejudices were to him like physicalpredispositions, with which you have to make your account. He knew, too, that they are often bound up with the most valuable elements incharacter and life, and hence he feared that violent surgery which ineradicating a false opinion fatally bruises at the same time a true andwholesome feeling that may cling to it. The patience which with some menis an instinct, and with others a fair name for indifference, was withhim an acquisition of reason and conscience. 

The value of this wise and virtuous mixture of boldness with tolerance, of courageous speech with courageous reserve, has been enormous. Alongwith his direct pleas for freedom of thought and freedom of speech, ithas been the chief source of that liberty of expressing unpopularopinions in this country without social persecution, which is now sonearly complete, that he himself was at last astonished by it. Themanner of his dialectic, firm and vigorous as the dialectic was inmatter, has gradually introduced mitigating elements into the atmosphereof opinion. Partly, no doubt, the singular tolerance of free discussionwhich now prevails in England--I do not mean that it is at allperfect--arises from the prevalent scepticism, from indifference, andfrom the influence of some of the more high-minded of the clergy. ButMr. Mill's steadfast abstinence from drawing wholesale indictmentsagainst persons or classes whose opinions he controverted, his generouscandour, his scrupulous respect for any germ of good in whatever companyit was found, and his large allowances, contributed positive elements towhat might otherwise have been the negative tolerance that comes ofmoral stagnation. Tolerance of distasteful notions in others becameassociated in his person at once with the widest enlightenment, and thestrongest conviction of the truth of our own notions. 

 * * * * *

His career, beside all else, was a protest of the simplest and loftiestkind against some of the most degrading features of our society. No oneis more alive than he was to the worth of all that adds grace anddignity to human life; but the sincerity of this feeling filled him withaversion for the make-believe dignity of a luxurious and artificialcommunity. Without either arrogance or bitterness, he stood aloof fromthat conventional intercourse which is misnamed social duty. Withouteither discourtesy or cynicism, he refused to play a part in that danceof mimes which passes for life among the upper classes. In him, toextraordinary intellectual attainments was added the gift of a firm andsteadfast self-respect, which unfortunately does not always go withthem. He felt the reality of things, and it was easier for a workmanthan for a princess to obtain access to him. It is not always the menwho talk most affectingly about our being all of one flesh and blood, who are proof against those mysterious charms of superior rank, which doso much to foster unworthy conceptions of life in English society; andthere are many people capable of accepting Mr. Mill's socialprinciples, and the theoretical corollaries they contain, who yet wouldcondemn his manly plainness and austere consistency in acting on them. The too common tendency in us all to moral slovenliness, and a lazycontentment with a little flaccid protest against evil, finds a constantrebuke in his career. The indomitable passion for justice which made himstrive so long and so tenaciously to bring to judgment a publicofficial, whom he conceived to be a great criminal, was worthy of one ofthe stoutest patriots in our seventeenth-century history. The same moralthoroughness stirred the same indignation in him on a more recentoccasion, when he declared it 'a permanent disgrace to the Governmentthat the iniquitous sentence on the gas-stokers was not remitted as soonas passed. '

 * * * * *

Much of his most striking quality was owing to the exceptional degree inwhich he was alive to the constant tendency of society to lose someexcellence of aim, to relapse at some point from the standard of truthand right which had been reached by long previous effort, to fall backin height of moral ideal. He was keenly sensible that it is only bypersistent striving after improvement in our conceptions of duty, andimprovement in the external means for realising them, that even theacquisitions of past generations are retained. He knew the intensedifficulty of making life better by ever so little. Hence at once theexaltation of his own ideas of truth and right, and his eagerness toconciliate anything like virtuous social feeling, in whateverintellectual or political association he found it. Hence also thevehemence of his passion for the unfettered and unchecked development ofnew ideas on all subjects, of originality in moral and social points ofview; because repression, whether by public opinion or in any other way, may be the means of untold waste of gifts that might have conferred onmankind unspeakable benefits. The discipline and vigour of hisunderstanding made him the least indulgent of judges to anything likecharlatanry, and effectually prevented his unwillingness to let thesmallest good element be lost, from degenerating into that weak kind ofuniversalism which nullifies some otherwise good men. 

 * * * * *

Some great men seize upon us by the force of an imposing and majesticauthority; their thoughts impress the imagination, their words arewinged, they are as prophets bearing high testimony that cannot begainsaid. Bossuet, for instance, or Pascal. Others, and of these Mr. Mill was one, acquire disciples not by a commanding authority, but by amoderate and impersonal kind of persuasion. He appeals not to our senseof greatness and power in a teacher, which is noble, but to our love offinding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. Peoplewho like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with heraldand trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitualeffacement of his own personality marked a delicate and very rare shadein his reverence for the sacred purity of truth. 

 * * * * *

Meditation on the influence of one who has been the foremost instructorof his time in wisdom and goodness quickly breaks off, in this hour whenhis loss is fresh upon us; it changes into affectionate reminiscencesfor which silence is more fitting. In such an hour thought turns ratherto the person than the work of the master whom we mourn. We recall hissimplicity, gentleness, heroic self-abnegation; his generosity inencouraging, his eager readiness in helping; the warm kindliness of hisaccost, the friendly brightening of the eye. The last time I saw him wasa few days before he left England. [1] He came to spend a day with me inthe country, of which the following brief notes happened to be writtenat the time in a letter to a friend:--

 'He came down by the morning train to Guildford station, where I was waiting for him. He was in his most even and mellow humour. We walked in a leisurely way and through roundabout tracks for some four hours along the ancient green road which you know, over the high grassy downs, into old chalk pits picturesque with juniper and yew, across heaths and commons, and so up to our windy promontory, where the majestic prospect stirred him with lively delight. You know he is a fervent botanist, and every ten minutes he stooped to look at this or that on the path. Unluckily I am ignorant of the very rudiments of the matter, so his parenthetic enthusiasms were lost upon me. 

[Footnote 1: April 5, 1873. ]

'Of course he talked, and talked well. He admitted that Goethe had addednew points of view to life, but has a deep dislike of his moralcharacter; wondered how a man who could draw the sorrows of a desertedwoman like Aurelia, in _Wilhelm Meister_, should yet have behaved sosystematically ill to women. Goethe tried as hard as he could to be aGreek, yet his failure to produce anything perfect in form, except a fewlyrics, proves the irresistible expansion of the modern spirit, and theinadequateness of the Greek type to modern needs of activity andexpression. Greatly prefers Schiller in all respects; turning to himfrom Goethe is like going into the fresh air from a hothouse. 

'Spoke of style: thinks Goldsmith unsurpassed; then Addison comes. Greatly dislikes the style of Junius and of Gibbon; indeed, thinksmeanly of the latter in all respects, except for his research, whichalone of the work of that century stands the test of nineteenth-centurycriticism. Did not agree with me that George Sand's is the high-watermark of prose, but yet could not name anybody higher, and admitted thather prose stirs you like music. 

'Seemed disposed to think that the most feasible solution of the IrishUniversity question is a Catholic University, the restrictive andobscurantist tendencies of which you may expect to have cheeked by theactive competition of life with men trained in more enlightened systems. Spoke of Home Rule. 

'Made remarks on the difference in the feeling of modern refusers ofChristianity as compared with that of men like his father, impassioneddeniers, who believed that if only you broke up the power of the priestsand checked superstition, all would go well--a dream from which theywere partially awakened by seeing that the French revolution, whichoverthrew the Church, still did not bring the millennium. His radicalfriends used to be very angry with him for loving Wordsworth. "Wordsworth, " I used to say, "is against you, no doubt, in the battlewhich you are now waging, but after you have won, the world will needmore than ever those qualities which Wordsworth is keeping alive andnourishing. " In his youth mere negation of religion was a firm bond ofunion, social and otherwise, between men who agreed in nothing else. 

'Spoke of the modern tendency to pure theism, and met the objection thatit retards improvement by turning the minds of some of the best men fromsocial affairs, by the counter-proposition that it is useful to society, apart from the question of its truth, --useful as a provisional belief, because people will identify serviceable ministry to men with service ofGod. Thinks we cannot with any sort of precision define the comingmodification of religion, but anticipates that it will undoubtedly restupon the solidarity of mankind, as Comte said, and as you and I believe. Perceives two things, at any rate, which are likely to lead men toinvest this with the moral authority of a religion; first, they willbecome more and more impressed by the awful fact that a piece of conductto-day may prove a curse to men and women scores and even hundreds ofyears after the author of it is dead; and second, they will more andmore feel that they can only satisfy their sentiment of gratitude toseen or unseen benefactors, can only repay the untold benefits they haveinherited, by diligently maintaining the traditions of service. 

'And so forth, full of interest and suggestiveness all through. When hegot here, he chatted to R---- over our lunch, with something of thesimple amiableness of a child, about the wild flowers, the ways ofinsects, and notes of birds. He was impatient for the song of thenightingale. Then I drove him to our little roadside station, and one ofthe most delightful days of my life came to its end, like all otherdays, delightful and sorrowful. '

Alas, the sorrowful day which ever dogs our delight followed veryquickly. The nightingale that he longed for fills the darkness withmusic, but not for the ear of the dead master: he rests in the deeperdarkness where the silence is unbroken for ever. We may consoleourselves with the reflection offered by the dying Socrates to hissorrowful companions: he who has arrayed the soul in her own properjewels of moderation and justice and courage and nobleness and truth, isever ready for the journey when his time comes. We have lost a greatteacher and example of knowledge and virtue, but men will long feel thepresence of his character about them, making them ashamed of what isindolent or selfish, and encouraging them to all disinterested labour, both in trying to do good and in trying to find out what the goodis, --which is harder. 

MR. MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

_Chercher en gémissant_--search with many sighs--that was Pascal'snotion of praiseworthy living and choosing the better part. Search, andsearch with much travail, strikes us as the chief intellectual ensignand device of that eminent man whose record of his own mental nurtureand growth we have all been reading. Everybody endowed with energeticintelligence has a measure of the spirit of search poured out upon him. All such persons act on the Socratic maxim that the life without inquiryis a life to be lived by no man. But it is the rare distinction of avery few to accept the maxim in its full significance, to insist on anopen mind as the true secret of wisdom, to press the examination andtesting of our convictions as the true way at once to stability andgrowth of character, and thus to make of life what it is so good for usthat it should be, a continual building up, a ceaseless fortifying andenlargement and multiplication of the treasures of the spirit. To make apoint of 'examining what was said in defence of all opinions, howevernew or however old, in the conviction that even if they were errorsthere might be a substratum of truth underneath them, and that in anycase the discovery of what it was that made them plausible would be abenefit to truth, '[2]--to thrust out the spirit of party, of sect, ofcreed, of the poorer sort of self-esteem, of futile contentiousness, andso to seek and again seek with undeviating singleness of mind the rightinterpretation of our experiences--here is the genuine seal ofintellectual mastery and the true stamp of a perfect rationality. 

[Footnote 2: Mill's _Autobiography_, 242. ]

The men to whom this is the ideal of the life of the reason, and whohave done anything considerable towards spreading a desire after it, deserve to have their memories gratefully cherished even by those who donot agree with all their positive opinions. We need only to reflect alittle on the conditions of human existence; on the urgent demand whichmaterial necessities inevitably make on so immense a proportion of ourtime and thought; on the space which is naturally filled up by theactivity of absorbing affections; on the fatal power of mere traditionand report over the indifferent, and the fatal power of inveterateprejudice over so many even of the best of those who are notindifferent. Then we shall know better how to value such a type ofcharacter and life as Mr. Mill has now told us the story of, in whichintellectual impressionableness on the most important subjects of humanthought was so cultivated as almost to acquire the strength and quickresponsiveness of emotional sensibility. And this, without the toocommon drawback to great openness of mind. This drawback consists inloose beliefs, taken up to-day and silently dropped to-morrow;vacillating opinions, constantly being exchanged for their contraries;feeble convictions, appearing, shifting, vanishing, in the quicksands ofan unstable mind. 

Nobody will impute any of these disastrous weaknesses to Mr. Mill. Hisimpressionableness was of the valuable positive kind, which adds andassimilates new elements from many quarters, without disturbing theorganic structure of the whole. What he says of one stage in his growthremained generally true of him until the very end:--'I found the fabricof my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places, and Inever allowed it to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied inweaving it anew. I never in the course of my transition was content toremain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I hadtaken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted itsrelations to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effectought to extend in modifying or superseding them' (p. 156). This carefuland conscientious recognition of the duty of having ordered opinions, and of responsibility for these opinions being both as true and asconsistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could makethem, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly fromdoctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point topoint in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from thosesensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights ofrationalism suddenly into the pit of an infallible church; and fromthose who, like La Mennais, move violently between faith and reason, between tradition and inquiry, between the fulness of deference toauthority and the fulness of individual self-assertion. 

All minds of the first quality move and grow; they have a susceptibilityto many sorts of new impressions, a mobility, a feeling outwards, whichmakes it impossible for them to remain in the stern fixity of an earlyimplanted set of dogmas, whether philosophic or religious. In stoicaltenacity of character, as well as in intellectual originality andconcentrated force of understanding, some of those who knew both tell usthat Mr. Mill was inferior to his father. But who does not feel in theson the serious charm of a power of adaptation and pliableness which wecan never associate with the hardy and more rigorous nature of theother? And it was just because he had this sensibility of the intellect, that the history of what it did for him is so edifying a performance fora people like ourselves, among whom that quality is so extremelyuncommon. For it was the sensibility of strength and not of weakness, nor of mere over-refinement and subtlety. We may estimate thesignificance of such a difference, when we think how little, after all, the singular gifts of a Newman or a Maurice have done for theircontemporaries, simply because these two eminent men allowedconsciousness of their own weakness to 'sickly over' the spontaneousimpulses of their strength. 

The wonder is that the reaction against such an education as thatthrough which James Mill brought his son, --an education so intense, sopurely analytical, doing so much for the reason and so little for thesatisfaction of the affections, --was not of the most violent kind. Thewonder is that the crisis through which nearly every youth of goodquality has to pass, and from which Mr. Mill, as he has told us, by nomeans escaped, did not land him in some of the extreme forms oftranscendentalism. If it had done so the record of the journey would nodoubt have been more abundant in melodramatic incidents. It would havedone more to tickle the fancy of 'the present age of loud disputes butweak convictions. ' And it might have been found more touching by thelarge numbers of talkers and writers who seem to think that a history ofa careful man's opinions on grave and difficult subjects ought to haveall the rapid movements and unexpected turns of a romance, and that abook without rapture and effusion and a great many capital letters mustbe joyless and disappointing. Those of us who dislike literary hysteriaas much as we dislike the coarseness that mistakes itself for force, maywell be glad to follow the mental history of a man who knew how to moveand grow without any of these reactions and leaps on the one hand, orany of that overdone realism on the other, which may all make a morestriking picture, but which do assuredly more often than not mark theruin of a mind and the nullification of a career. 

If we are now and then conscious in the book of a certain want ofspacing, of changing perspectives and long vistas; if we have perhaps asense of being too narrowly enclosed; if we miss the relish of humour orthe occasional relief of irony; we ought to remember that we are busynot with a work of imagination or art, but with the practical record ofthe formation of an eminent thinker's mental habits and the successionof his mental attitudes. The formation of such mental habits is not aromance, but the most arduous of real concerns. If we are led up to noneof the enkindled summits of the soul, and plunged into none of itsabysses, that is no reason why we should fail to be struck by the paleflame of strenuous self-possession, or touched by the ingenuousness andsimplicity of the speaker's accents. A generation continually excited bynarratives, as sterile as vehement, of storm and stress and spiritualshipwreck, might do well, if it knew the things that pertained to itspeace, to ponder this unvarnished history--the history of a man who, though he was not one of the picturesque victims of the wastefultorments of an uneasy spiritual self-consciousness, yet laboured sopatiently after the gifts of intellectual strength, and did so muchpermanently to widen the judgments of the world. 

If Mr. Mill's Autobiography has no literary grandeur, nor artisticvariety, it has the rarer merit of presenting for our contemplation acharacter that was infested by none of the smaller passions, and warpedby none of the more unintelligent attitudes of the human mind. We haveto remember that it is exactly these, the smaller passions on the onehand, and slovenliness of intelligence on the other, which are evenworse agencies in spoiling the worth of life and the advance of societythan the more imposing vices either of thought or sentiment. Many havetold the tale of a life of much external eventfulness. There is a rarerinstructiveness in the quiet career of one whose life was an incessanteducation, a persistent strengthening of the mental habit of 'neveraccepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning apuzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up;never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored, because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectlyunderstood any part of a subject until I understood the whole' (p. 123). It is true that this mental habit is not so singular in itself, for itis the common and indispensable merit of every truly scientific thinker. Mr. Mill's distinction lay in the deliberate intention and thesystematic patience with which he brought it to the consideration ofmoral and religious and social subjects. In this region hitherto, forreasons that are not difficult to seek, the empire of prejudice andpassion has been so much stronger, so much harder to resist, than in thefield of physical science. 

Sect is so ready to succeed sect, and school comes after school, withconstant replacement of one sort of orthodoxy by another sort, untileven the principle of relativity becomes the base of a set of absoluteand final dogmas, and the very doctrine of uncertainty itself becomesfixed in a kind of authoritative nihilism. It is, therefore, a signalgain that we now have a new type, with the old wise device, [Greek:memnęso apistein]--_be sure that you distrust_. Distrust your own bias;distrust your supposed knowledge; constantly try, prove, fortify yourfirmest convictions. And all this, throughout the whole domain where theintelligence rules. It was characteristic of a man of this type that heshould have been seized by that memorable passage in Condorcet's Life ofTurgot to which Mr. Mill refers (p. 114), and which every man with anactive interest in serious affairs should bind about his neck and writeon the tablets of his heart. 

'Turgot, ' says his wise biographer, 'always looked upon anything like asect as mischievous. . . . From the moment that a sect comes intoexistence, all the individuals composing it become answerable for thefaults and errors of each one of them. The obligation to remain unitedleads them to suppress or dissemble all truths that might wound anybodywhose adhesion is useful to the sect. They are forced to establish insome form a body of doctrine, and the opinions which make a part of it, being adopted without inquiry, become in due time pure prejudices. Friendship stops with the individuals; but the hatred and envy that anyof them may arouse extends to the whole sect. If this sect be formed bythe most enlightened men of the nation, if the defence of truths of thegreatest importance to the common happiness be the object of its zeal, the mischief is still worse. Everything true or useful which theypropose is rejected without examination. Abuses and errors of every kindalways have for their defenders that herd of presumptuous and mediocremortals, who are the bitterest enemies of all celebrity and renown. Scarcely is a truth made clear, before those to whom it would beprejudicial crush it under the name of a sect that is sure to havealready become odious, and are certain to keep it from obtaining so muchas a hearing. Turgot, then, was persuaded that perhaps the greatest illyou can do to truth is to drive those who love it to form themselvesinto a sect, and that these in turn can commit no more fatal mistakethan to have the vanity or the weakness to fall into the trap. '

Yet we know that with Mr. Mill as with Turgot this deep distrust of sectwas no hindrance to the most careful systematisation of opinion andconduct. He did not interpret many-sidedness in the flaccid watery sensewhich flatters the indolence of so many of our contemporaries, who liketo have their ears amused with a new doctrine each morning, to be heldfor a day, and dropped in the evening, and who have little moreseriousness in their intellectual life than the busy insects of a summernoon. He says that he looked forward 'to a future which shall unite thebest qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organicperiods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individualaction in all modes not hurtful to others; but also convictions as towhat is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on thefeelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and sofirmly grounded in reason and the true exigencies of life, that theyshall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, andpolitical, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others'(p. 166). This was in some sort the type at which he aimed in theformation of his own character--a type that should combine organic withcritical quality, the strength of an ordered set of convictions, withthat pliability and that receptiveness in face of new truth, which areindispensable to these very convictions being held intelligently and intheir best attainable form. We can understand the force of the eulogy onJohn Austin (p. 154), that he manifested 'an equal devotion to the twocardinal points of Liberty and Duty. ' These are the correlatives in thesphere of action to the two cardinal points of Criticism and Belief inthe sphere of thought. 

We can in the light of this double way of viewing the right balance ofthe mind, the better understand the combination of earnestness withtolerance which inconsiderate persons are apt to find so awkward astumbling-block in the scheme of philosophic liberalism. Many people inour time have so ill understood the doctrine of liberty, that in some ofthe most active circles in society they now count you a bigot if youhold any proposition to be decidedly and unmistakably more true than anyother. They pronounce you intemperate if you show anger and sterndisappointment because men follow the wrong course instead of the rightone. Mr. Mill's explanation of the vehemence and decision of hisfather's disapproval, when he did disapprove, and his refusal to allowhonesty of purpose in the doer to soften his disapprobation of the deed, gives the reader a worthy and masculine notion of true tolerance. JamesMill's 'aversion to many intellectual errors, or what he regarded assuch, partook in a certain sense of the character of a moral feeling. . . . None but those who do not care about opinions will confound this withintolerance. Those, who having opinions which they hold to be immenselyimportant, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have anydeep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a classand in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right, andright what they think wrong: though they need not be, nor was my father, insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in theirestimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of by thewhole of their character. I grant that an earnest person, being no moreinfallible than other men, is liable to dislike people on account ofopinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither himself doesthem any ill office, nor connives at its being done by others, he is notintolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a conscientious senseof the importance to mankind of the equal freedom of all opinions is theonly tolerance which is commendable, or to the highest moral order ofminds, possible' (p. 51). This is another side of the co-ordination ofCriticism and Belief, of Liberty and Duty, which attained in Mr. Millhimself a completeness that other men, less favoured in education andwith less active power of self-control, are not likely to reach, but toreach it ought to be one of the prime objects of their mentaldiscipline. The inculcation of this peculiar morality of theintelligence is one of the most urgently needed processes of our time. For the circumstance of our being in the very depths of a period oftransition from one spiritual basis of thought to another, leads men notonly to be content with holding a quantity of vague, confused, andcontradictory opinions, but also to invest with the honourable name ofcandour a weak reluctance to hold any one of them earnestly. 

Mr. Mill experienced in the four or five last years of his life thedisadvantage of trying to unite fairness towards the opinions from whichhe differed, with loyalty to the positive opinions which he accepted. 'As I had showed in my political writings, ' he says, 'that I was awareof the weak points in democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems, had not been without hopes of finding me an opponent of democracy: as Iwas able to see the Conservative side of the question, they presumedthat like them I could not see any other side. Yet if they had reallyread my writings, they would have known that after giving full weight toall that appeared to me well grounded in the arguments againstdemocracy, I unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while recommendingthat it should be accompanied by such institutions as were consistentwith its principle and calculated to ward off its inconveniences' (p. 309). This was only one illustration of what constantly happened, untilat length, it is hardly too much to say, a man who had hitherto enjoyeda singular measure of general reverence because he was supposed to seetruth in every doctrine, became downright unpopular among many classesin the community, because he saw more truth in one doctrine thananother, and brought the propositions for whose acceptance he was mostin earnest eagerly before the public. 

In a similar way the Autobiography shows us the picture of a man unitingprofound self-respect with a singular neutrality where his own claimsare concerned, a singular self-mastery and justice of mind, in matterswhere with most men the sense of their own personality is wont to be soexacting and so easily irritated. The history of intellectual eminenceis too often a history of immoderate egoism. It has perhaps hardly everbeen given to any one who exerted such influence as Mr. Mill did overhis contemporaries, to view his own share in it with such discriminationand equity as marks every page of his book, and as used to mark everyword of his conversation. Knowing as we all do the last infirmity ofeven noble minds, and how deep the desire to erect himself Pope and SirOracle lies in the spirit of a man with strong convictions, we may valuethe more highly, as well for its rarity as for its intrinsic worth, Mr. Mill's quality of self-effacement, and his steadfast care to lookanywhere rather than in his own personal merits, for the source of anyof those excellences which he was never led by false modesty todissemble. 

Many people seem to find the most interesting figure in the book thatstoical father, whose austere, energetic, imperious, and relentlesscharacter showed the temperament of the Scotch Covenanter of theseventeenth century, inspired by the principles and philosophy of Francein the eighteenth. No doubt, for those in search of strong dramaticeffects, the lines of this strenuous indomitable nature are full ofimpressiveness. [3] But one ought to be able to appreciate thedistinction and strength of the father, and yet also be able to see thatthe distinction of the son's strength was in truth more reallyimpressive still. We encounter a modesty that almost speaks the languageof fatalism. Pieces of good fortune that most people would assuredlyhave either explained as due to their own penetration, or to therecognition of their worth by others, or else would have refrained fromdwelling upon, as being no more than events of secondary importance, areby Mr. Mill invariably recognised at their full worth or even above it, and invariably spoken of as fortunate accidents, happy turns in thelottery of life, or in some other quiet fatalistic phrase, expressive ofhis deep feeling how much we owe to influences over which we have nocontrol and for which we have no right to take any credit. His sayingthat 'it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could bebelieved by all _quoad_ the characters of others, and disbelieved inregard to their own' (p. 169), went even further than that, for heteaches us to accept the doctrine of necessity _quoad_ the most markedfelicities of life and character, and to lean lightly or not at allupon it in regard to our demerits. Humility is a rationalistic, no lessthan a Christian grace--not humility in face of error or arrogantpretensions or selfishness, nor a humility that paralyses energeticeffort, but a steadfast consciousness of all the good gifts which ourforerunners have made ready for us, and of the weight of ourresponsibility for transmitting these helpful forces to a newgeneration, not diminished but augmented. 

[Footnote 3: In an interesting volume (_The Minor Works of GeorgeGrote_, edited by Alexander Bain. London: Murray), we find Groteconfirming Mr. Mill's estimate of his father's psychagogic quality. 'Hisunpremeditated oral exposition, ' says Grote of James Mill, 'was hardlyless effective than his prepared work with the pen; his colloquialfertility in philosophical subjects, his power of discussing himself, and stimulating others to discuss, his ready responsive inspirationsthrough all the shifts and windings of a sort of Platonic dialogue, --allthese accomplishments were to those who knew him, even more impressivethan what he composed for the press. Conversation with him was notmerely instructive, but provocative to the observant intelligence. Ofall persons whom we have known, Mr. James Mill was the one who stoodleast remote from the lofty Platonic ideal of Dialectic--[Greek: toudidonai kai dechesthai logon] (the giving and receiving ofreasons)--competent alike to examine others or to be examined by them inphilosophy. When to this we add a strenuous character, earnestconvictions, and single-minded devotion to truth, with an utter disdainof mere paradox, it may be conceived that such a man exercised powerfulintellectual ascendancy over youthful minds, ' etc. --_Minor Works ofGeorge Grote_, p. 284. ]

 * * * * *

In more than one remarkable place the Autobiography shows us distinctlywhat all careful students of Mr. Mill's books supposed, that with himthe social aim, the repayment of the services of the past by devotion tothe services of present and future, was predominant over any merelyspeculative curiosity or abstract interest. His preference for deeplyreserved ways of expressing even his strongest feelings prevented himfrom making any expansive show of this governing sentiment. Though noman was ever more free from any taint of that bad habit of us English, of denying or palliating an abuse or a wrong, unless we are preparedwith an instant remedy for it, yet he had a strong aversion to meresocialistic declamation. Perhaps, if one may say so without presumption, he was not indulgent enough in this respect. I remember once pressinghim with some enthusiasm for Victor Hugo, --an enthusiasm, one is glad tothink, which time does nothing to weaken. Mr. Mill, admitting, thoughnot too lavishly, the superb imaginative power of this poetic master ofour time, still counted it a fatal drawback to Hugo's worth and claim torecognition that 'he has not brought forward one single practicalproposal for the improvement of the society against which he isincessantly thundering. ' I ventured to urge that it is unreasonable toask a poet to draft acts of parliament; and that by bringing all thestrength of his imagination and all the majestic fulness of his sympathyto bear on the social horrors and injustices which still lie so thickabout us, he kindled an inextinguishable fire in the hearts of men ofweaker initiative and less imperial gifts alike of imagination andsympathy, and so prepared the forces out of which practical proposalsand specific improvements may be expected to issue. That so obvious akind of reflection should not have previously interested Mr. Mill'sjudgment in favour of the writer of the _Outcasts_, the _Legend of theAges_, the _Contemplations_, only shows how strong was his dislike toall that savoured of the grandiose, and how afraid he always was ofeverything that seemed to dissociate emotion from rationally directedeffort. That he was himself inspired by this emotion of pity for thecommon people, of divine rage against the injustice of the strong to theweak, in a degree not inferior to Victor Hugo himself, his whole careermost effectually demonstrates. 

It is this devotion to the substantial good of the many, thoughpractised without the noisy or ostentatious professions of more egoisticthinkers, which binds together all the parts of his work, from the_System of Logic_ down to his last speech on the Land Question. One ofthe most striking pages in the Autobiography is that in which he giveshis reasons for composing the refutation of Hamilton, and as some ofthese especially valuable passages in the book seem to be running therisk of neglect in favour of those which happen to furnish material forthe idle, pitiful gossip of London society, it may be well to reproduceit. 

'The difference, ' he says, 'between these two schools of philosophy, that of Intuition and that of Experience and Association, is not a merematter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences, and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practicalopinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually todemand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerfuland widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity andindefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensablepart of his argument to show how those powerful feelings had theirorigin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible. There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophywhich discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts bycircumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimateelements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding upfavourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be thevoice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than thatof our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailingtendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character asinnate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofsthat by far the greater part of those differences, whether betweenindividuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturallywould be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chiefhindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and oneof the greatest stumbling-blocks to human improvement. This tendency hasits source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterised thereaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is atendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservativeinterests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sureto be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by themore moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy. . . . Considering thenthe writings and fame of Sir W. Hamilton as the great fortress of theintuitional philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formidablefrom the imposing character, and the, in many respects, great personalmerits and mental endowments of the man, I thought it might be a realservice to philosophy to attempt a thorough examination of all his mostimportant doctrines, and an estimate of his general claims to eminenceas a philosopher; and I was confirmed in this resolution by observingthat in the writings of at least one, and him one of the ablest, of SirW. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made thejustification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundlyimmoral--that it is our duty to bow down and worship before a Beingwhose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to beperhaps extremely different from those which, when speaking of ourfellow-creatures, we call by the same name' (pp. 273-275). 

Thus we see that even where the distance between the object of hisinquiry and the practical wellbeing of mankind seemed farthest, stillthe latter was his starting point, and the doing 'a real service tophilosophy' only occurred to him in connection with a still greater andmore real service to those social causes for which, and which only, philosophy is worth cultivating. In the _System of Logic_ theinspiration had been the same. 

'The notion that truths external to the mind, ' he writes, 'may be knownby intuition or consciousness, independently of observation andexperience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectualsupport of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of thistheory every inveterate belief and every intense feeling of which theorigin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation ofjustifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficientvoucher and justification. There never was an instrument better devisedfor consecrating all deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength ofthis false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in theappeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematicsand of the cognate branches of physical science. To expel it from theseis to drive it from its stronghold. . . . In attempting to clear up thereal nature of the evidence of mathematical and physical truth, the_System of Logic_ met the intuitive philosophers on ground on which theyhad previously been deemed unassailable; and gave its own explanationfrom experience and association of that peculiar character of what arecalled necessary truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidencemust come from a deeper source than experience. Whether this has beendone effectually is still _sub judice_; and even then, to deprive a modeof thought so strongly rooted in human prejudices and partialities ofits mere speculative support, goes but a very little way towardsovercoming it; but though only a step, it is a quite indispensable one;for since, after all, prejudice can only be successfully combated byphilosophy, no way can really be made against it permanently, until ithas been shown not to have philosophy on its side' (pp. 225-227). 

This was to lay the basis of a true positivism by the only means throughwhich it can be laid firmly. It was to establish at the bottom of men'sminds the habit of seeking explanations of all phenomena in experience, and building up from the beginning the great positive principle that wecan only know phenomena, and can only know them experientially. We see, from such passages as the two that have been quoted, that with Mr. Mill, no less than with Comte, the ultimate object was to bring people toextend positive modes of thinking to the master subjects of morals, politics, and religion. Mr. Mill, however, with a wisdom which Comteunfortunately did not share, refrained from any rash and prematureattempt to decide what would be the results of this much-neededextension. He knew that we were as yet only just coming in sight of thestage where these most complex of all phenomena can be fruitfullystudied on positive methods, and he was content with doing as much as hecould to expel other methods from men's minds, and to engender thepositive spirit and temper. Comte, on the other hand, presumed at onceto draw up a minute plan of social reconstruction, which contains someideas of great beauty and power, some of extreme absurdity, and somewhich would be very mischievous if there were the smallest chance oftheir ever being realised. 'His book stands, ' Mr. Mill truly says of the_System of Positive Polity_, 'a monumental warning to thinkers onsociety and politics of what happens when once men lose sight in theirspeculations of the value of Liberty and Individuality' (p. 213). 

 * * * * *

It was his own sense of the value of Liberty which led to the productionof the little tractate which Mr. Mill himself thought likely to survivelonger than anything else that he had written, 'with the possibleexception of the _Logic_, ' as being 'a kind of philosophic text-book ofa single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modernsociety tend to bring out into ever stronger relief; the importance toman and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of givingfull freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable andconflicting directions' (p. 253). It seems to us, however, that Mr. Mill's plea for Liberty in the abstract, invaluable as it is, still isless important than the memorable application of this plea, and of allthe arguments supporting it, to that half of the human race whoseindividuality has hitherto been blindly and most wastefully repressed. The little book on the _Subjection of Women_, though not a capitalperformance like the _Logic_, was the capital illustration of the modesof reasoning about human character set forth in his _Logic_ applied tothe case in which the old metaphysical notion of innate and indelibledifferences is still nearly as strong as ever it was, and in which itsmoral and social consequences are so inexpressibly disastrous, sosuperlatively powerful in keeping the ordinary level of the aims andachievements of life low and meagre. The accurate and unanswerablereasoning no less than the noble elevation of this great argument; thesagacity of a hundred of its maxims on individual conduct and character, no less than the combined rationality and beauty of its aspirations forthe improvement of collective social life, make this piece probably thebest illustration of all the best and richest qualities of its author'smind, and it is fortunate that a subject of such incomparable importanceshould have been first effectively presented for discussion in soworthy and pregnant a form. 

It is interesting to know definitely from the Autobiography, what isimplied in the opening of the book itself, that a zealous belief in theadvantages of abolishing the legal and social inequalities of women wasnot due to the accident of personal intimacy with one or two more womenof exceptional distinction of character. What has been ignorantlysupposed in our own day to be a crotchet of Mr. Mill's was the commondoctrine of the younger proselytes of the Benthamite school, and Benthamhimself was wholly with them (_Autobiography_, p. 105, and also 244);as, of course, were other thinkers of an earlier date, Condorcet forinstance. [4] In this as in other subjects Mr. Mill did not go beyond hismodest definition of his own originality--the application of old ideasin new forms and connections (p. 119), or the originality 'which everythoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressingtruths which are common property' (p. 254). Or shall we say that he hadan originality of a more genuine kind, which made him first diligentlyacquire what in an excellent phrase he calls _plenary possession_ oftruths, and then transfuse them with a sympathetic and contagiousenthusiasm?

[Footnote 4: Condorcet's arguments the reader will find in vol. I. Ofthe present series of these _Critical Miscellanies_, p. 249. ]

It is often complained that the book on Women has the radicalimperfection of not speaking plainly on the question of the limitationsproper to divorce. The present writer once ventured to ask Mr. Mill whyhe had left this important point undiscussed. Mr. Mill replied that itseemed to him impossible to settle the expediency of more liberalconditions of divorce, 'first, without hearing much more fully than wecould possibly do at present the ideas held by women in the matter;second, until the experiment of marriage with entire equality betweenman and wife had been properly tried. ' People who are in a hurry to getrid of their partners may find this very halting kind of work, and a manwho wants to take a new wife before sunset, may well be irritated by aphilosopher who tells him that the question may possibly be capable ofuseful discussion towards the middle of the next century. But Mr. Mill'sargument is full of force and praiseworthy patience. 

 * * * * *

The union of boundless patience with unshaken hope was one of Mr. Mill'smost conspicuous distinctions. There are two crises in the history ofgrave and sensitive natures. One on the threshold of manhood, when theyouth defines his purpose, his creed, his aspirations; the other towardsthe later part of middle life, when circumstance has strained hispurpose, and tested his creed, and given to his aspirations a cold andpractical measure. The second crisis, though less stirring, less vivid, less coloured to the imagination, is the weightier probation of the two, for it is final and decisive; it marks not the mere unresisted force ofyouthful impulse and implanted predispositions, as the earlier crisisdoes, but rather the resisting quality, the strength, the purity, thedepth, of the native character, after the many princes of the power ofthe air have had time and chance of fighting their hardest against it. It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty orfive-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand orthe poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moralclimacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenialcynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generousresolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in theburning fiery furnace of circumstance. 

Mr. Mill did not escape the second crisis, any more than he had escapedthe first, though he dismisses it in a far more summary manner. Theeducation, he tells us, which his father had given him with such finesolicitude, had taught him to look for the greatest and surest source ofhappiness in sympathy with the good of mankind on a large scale, and hadfitted him to work for this good of mankind in various ways. By the timehe was twenty, his sympathies and passive susceptibilities had been solittle cultivated, his analytic quality had been developed with solittle balance in the shape of developed feelings, that he suddenlyfound himself unable to take pleasure in those thoughts of virtue andbenevolence which had hitherto only been associated with logicaldemonstration and not with sympathetic sentiment. This dejection wasdispelled mainly by the influence of Wordsworth--a poet austere yetgracious, energetic yet sober, penetrated with feeling for nature, yetpenetrated with feeling for the homely lot of man. Here was theemotional synthesis, binding together the energies of the speculativeand active mind by sympathetic interest in the common feelings andcommon destiny of human beings. 

For some ten years more (1826-1836) Mr. Mill hoped the greatest thingsfor the good of society from reformed institutions. That was the periodof parliamentary changes, and such hope was natural and universal. Thena shadow came over this confidence, and Mr. Mill advanced to theposition that the choice of political institutions is subordinate to thequestion, 'what great improvement in life and culture stands next inorder for the people concerned, as the condition of their furtherprogress?' (p. 170). In this period he composed the _Logic_ (published1843) and the _Political Economy_ (1848). Then he saw what all ardentlovers of improvement are condemned to see, that their hopes haveoutstripped the rate of progress; that fulfilment of social aspirationis tardy and very slow of foot; and that the leaders of human thoughtare never permitted to enter into that Promised Land whither they areconducting others. Changes for which he had worked and from which heexpected most, came to pass, but, after they had come to pass, they were'attended with much less benefit to human wellbeing than I shouldformerly have anticipated, because they had produced very littleimprovement in that which all real amelioration in the lot of mankinddepends on, their intellectual and moral state. . . . I had learnt fromexperience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habit of mind of which false opinionsare the result' (p. 239). This discovery appears to have brought on norecurrence of the dejection which had clouded a portion of his youth. Itonly set him to consider the root of so disappointing a conclusion, andled to the conviction that a great change in the fundamentalconstitution of men's modes of thought must precede any markedimprovement in their lot. He perceived that society is now passingthrough a transitional period 'of weak convictions, paralysedintellects, and growing laxity of principle, ' the consequence of thediscredit in the more reflective minds of the old opinions on thecardinal subjects of religion, morals, and politics, which have now lostmost of their efficacy for good, though still possessed of life enoughto present formidable obstacles to the growth of better opinion on thosesubjects (p. 239). 

Thus the crisis of disappointment which breaks up the hope and effort ofso many men who start well, or else throws them into poor and sterilecourses, proved in this grave, fervent, and most reasonable spirit onlythe beginning of more serious endeavours in a new and more arduous vein. Hitherto he had been, as he says, 'more willing to be content withseconding the superficial improvements which had begun to take place inthe common opinions of society and the world. ' Henceforth he kept lessand less in abeyance the more heretical part of his opinions, which hebegan more and more clearly to discern as 'almost the only ones, theassertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society' (p. 230). Thecrisis of middle age developed a new fortitude, a more earnestintrepidity, a greater boldness of expression about the deeper things, an interest profounder than ever in the improvement of the human lot. The book on the _Subjection of Women_, the _Liberty_, and probably somepieces that have not yet been given to the world, are the notable resultof this ripest, loftiest, and most inspiring part of his life. 

This judgment does not appear to be shared by the majority of those whohave hitherto published their opinions upon Mr. Mill's life and works. Perhaps it would have been odd if such a judgment had been common. People who think seriously of life and its conditions either are contentwith those conditions as they exist, or else they find them empty anddeeply unsatisfying. Well, the former class, who naturally figureprominently in the public press, because the press is the more or lessflattering mirror of the prevailing doctrines of the day, think that Mr. Mill's views of a better social future are chimerical, utopian, andsentimental. The latter class compensate themselves for the pinchednessof the real world about them by certain rapturous ideals, centring inGod, a future life, and the long companionship of the blessed. Theconsequence of this absorption either in the immediate interests andaims of the hour, or in the interests and aims of an imaginary worldwhich is supposed to await us after death, has been a hasty inclinationto look on such a life and such purposes as are set forth in theAutobiography as essentially jejune and dreary. It is not in the leastsurprising that such a feeling should prevail. If it were otherwise, ifthe majority of thoughtful men and women were already in a condition tobe penetrated by sympathy for the life of 'search with many sighs, ' thenwe should have already gone far on our way towards the goal which aTurgot or a Mill set for human progress. If society had at oncerecognised the full attractiveness of a life arduously passed inconsideration of the means by which the race may take its next stepforward in the improvement of character and the amelioration of thecommon lot, --and this not from love of God nor hope of recompense in aworld to come, and still less from hope of recompense or even any veryfirm assurance of fulfilled aspiration in this world, --then thatfundamental renovation of conviction for which Mr. Mill sighed, and thatevolution of a new faith to which he had looked forward in the fardistance, would already have come to pass. 

Mr. Mill has been ungenerously ridiculed for the eagerness andenthusiasm of his contemplation of a new and better state of humansociety. Yet we have always been taught to consider it the mark of theloftiest and most spiritual character, for one to be capable ofrapturous contemplation of a new and better state in a future life. Why, then, do you not recognise the loftiness and spirituality of those whomake their heaven in the thought of the wider light and purer happinessthat, in the immensity of the ages, may be brought to new generations ofmen, by long force of vision and endeavour? What great element iswanting in a life guided by such a hope? Is it not disinterested, andmagnanimous, and purifying, and elevating? The countless beauties ofassociation which cluster round the older faith may make the new seembleak and chilly. But when what is now the old faith was itself new, that too may well have struck, as we know that it did strike, theadherent of the mellowed pagan philosophy as crude, meagre, jejune, dreary. 

Then Mr. Mill's life as disclosed to us in these pages has been calledjoyless, by that sect of religious partisans whose peculiarity is tomistake boisterousness for unction. Was the life of Christ himself, then, so particularly joyful? Can the life of any man be joyful who seesand feels the tragic miseries and hardly less tragic follies of theearth? The old Preacher, when he considered all the oppressions that aredone under the sun, and beheld the tears of such as were oppressed andhad no comforter, therefore praised the dead which are already dead morethan the living which are yet alive, and declared him better than both, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is doneunder the sun. Those who are willing to trick their understandings andplay fast and loose with words may, if they please, console themselveswith the fatuous commonplaces of a philosophic optimism. They may, witheyes tight shut, cling to the notion that they live in the best of allpossible worlds, or discerning all the anguish that may be compressedinto threescore years and ten, still try to accept the Stoic's paradoxthat pain is not an evil. Or, most wonderful and most common of all, they may find this joy of which they talk, in meditating on the moralperfections of the omnipotent Being for whose diversion the dismalpanorama of all the evil work done under the sun was bidden to unfolditself, and who sees that it is very good. Those who are capable of acontinuity of joyous emotion on these terms may well complain of Mr. Mill's story as dreary; and so may the school of Solomon, who commendedmirth because a man hath no better thing than to eat and to drink and tobe merry. People, however, who are prohibited by their intellectualconditions from finding full satisfaction either in spiritual rapturesor in pleasures of sense, may think the standard of happiness which Mr. Mill sought and reached, not unacceptable and not unworthy of beingdiligently striven after. 

Mr. Mill's conception of happiness in life is more intelligible if wecontrast it with his father's. The Cynic element in James Mill, as hisson now tells us (pg. 48), was that he had scarcely any belief inpleasures; he thought few of them worth the price which has to be paidfor them; and he set down the greater number of the miscarriages in lifeas due to an excessive estimate of them. 'He thought human life a poorthing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosityhad gone by. . . . He would sometimes say that if life were made what itmight be, by good government and good education, it would be worthhaving; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of thatpossibility. ' We should shrink from calling even this theory dreary, associated as it is with the rigorous enforcement of the heroic virtuesof temperance and moderation, and the strenuous and careful bracing upof every faculty to face the inevitable and make the best of it. Atbottom it is the theory of many of the bravest souls, who fare grimlythrough life in the mood of leaders of forlorn hopes, denying pleasures, yet very sensible of the stern delight of fortitude. We can have nodifficulty in understanding that, when the elder Mill lay dying, 'hisinterest in all things and persons that had interested him through lifewas undiminished, nor did the approach of death cause the smallestwavering (as in so strong and firm a mind it was impossible that itshould), in his convictions on the subject of religion. His principalsatisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, seemed to be thethought of what he had done to make the world better than he found it;and his chief regret in not living longer, that he had not had time todo more' (p. 203). [5]

[Footnote 5: For the mood in which death was faced by another person whohad renounced theology and the doctrine of a future state ofconsciousness, see Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, ii. 435, etc. ]

Mr. Mill, however, went beyond this conception. He had a belief inpleasures, and thought human life by no means a poor thing to those whoknow how to make the best of it. It was essential both to the stabilityof his utilitarian philosophy, and to the contentment of his owntemperament, that the reality of happiness should be vindicated, and hedid both vindicate and attain it. A highly pleasurable excitement thatshould have no end, of course he did not think possible; but he regardedthe two constituents of a satisfied life, much tranquillity and someexcitement, as perfectly attainable by many men, and as ultimatelyattainable by very many more. The ingredients of this satisfaction heset forth as follows:--a willingness not to expect more from life thanlife is capable of bestowing; an intelligent interest in the objects ofmental culture; genuine private affections; and a sincere interest inthe public good. What, on the other hand, are the hindrances whichprevent these elements from being in the possession of every one born ina civilised country? Ignorance; bad laws or customs, debarring a man orwoman from the sources of happiness within reach; and 'the positiveevils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering--suchas indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or prematureloss of objects of affection. '[6] But every one of these calamitousimpediments is susceptible of the weightiest modification, and some ofthem of final removal. Mr. Mill had learnt from Turgot andCondorcet--two of the wisest and noblest of men, as he justly calls them(113)--among many other lessons, this of the boundless improvableness ofthe human lot, and we may believe that he read over many a time thepages in which Condorcet delineated the Tenth Epoch in the history ofhuman perfectibility, and traced out in words of finely reservedenthusiasm the operation of the forces which should consummate theprogress of the race. 'All the grand sources of human suffering, ' Mr. Mill thought, 'are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal isgrievously slow--though a long succession of generations will perish inthe breach before the conquest is completed, and this world becomes allthat, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily bemade--yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear apart, however small and unconspicuous, in the endeavour, will draw anoble enjoyment from the contest itself, which he would not for anybribe in the form of selfish indulgence consent to be without'(_Utilitarianism_, 22). 

[Footnote 6: For this exposition see _Utilitarianism_, pp. 18-24. ]

We thus see how far from dreary this wise and benign man actually foundhis own life; how full it was of cheerfulness, of animation, ofpersevering search, of a tranquillity lighted up at wholesome intervalsby flashes of intellectual and moral excitement. That it was not seldomcrossed by moods of despondency is likely enough, but we may at least besure that these moods had nothing in common with the vulgar despondencyof those whose hopes are centred in material prosperity in this worldand spiritual prosperity in some other. They were, at least, thedejection of a magnanimous spirit, that could only be cast down by somenew hindrance to the spread of reason and enlightenment among men, orsome new weakening of their incentives to right doing. 

 * * * * *

Much has been said against Mr. Mill's strictures on society, and hiswithdrawal from it. If we realise the full force of all that he says ofhis own purpose in life, it is hard to see how either his opinion or hispractice could have been different. He ceased to be content with'seconding the superficial improvements' in common ways of thinking, andsaw the necessity of working at a fundamental reconstitution of acceptedmodes of thought. This in itself implies a condemnation of a socialintercourse that rests on the base of conventional ways of looking atthings. The better kind of society, it is true, appears to contain twoclasses; not only the class that will hear nothing said hostile to thegreater social conventions, including among these the popular theology, but also another class who will tolerate or even encourage attack onthe greater social conventions, and a certain mild discussion ofimprovements in them--provided only neither attack nor discussion beconducted in too serious a vein. A new idea about God, or property, orthe family, is handed round among the company, as ladies of quality inQueen Anne's time handed round a black page or a China monster. InBishop Butler's phrase, these people only want to know what is said, notwhat is true. To be in earnest, to show that you mean what you say, tothink of drawing blood in the encounter, is thought, and perhaps verynaturally thought, to be a piece of bad manners. Social intercourse canonly exist either pleasantly or profitably among people who share agreat deal of common ground in opinion and feeling. Mr. Mill, no doubt, was always anxious to find as much common ground as he honestly could, for this was one of the most characteristic maxims of his propagandism. But a man who had never been brought up in the popular religion, and whohad been brought up in habits of the most scrupulous fair dealing withhis own understanding; who had never closed his mind to new truths fromlikely sources, but whose character was formed, and whose mind was madeup, on the central points of opinion, was not in a position to derivemuch benefit from those who in all respects represent a less advancedstage of mental development. On the other hand, all the benefit whichthey were in a position to derive from him could be adequately securedby reading what he wrote. Perhaps there is nothing wiser among the wisethings written in the Autobiography than the remarks on the fact thatpersons of any mental superiority, who greatly frequent society, aregreatly deteriorated by it. 'Not to mention loss of time, the tone oftheir feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those oftheir opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the societythey frequent: they come to look on their most elevated objects asunpractical, or at least too remote from realisation to be more than avision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain theirhigher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons andaffairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling andjudgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep'(p. 228). That a man loses something, nay, that he loses much, by beingdeprived of animating intercourse with other men, Mr. Mill wouldprobably have been the first to admit. Where that intercourse can behad, nothing is more fit to make the judgment robust, nothing more fitto freshen and revive our interests, and to clothe them with reality. Even second-rate companionship has some clear advantages. The questionis, whether these advantages outweigh the equally clear disadvantages. Mr. Mill was persuaded that they do not. 

Those whom disgust at the aimlessness and insignificance of most of oursocial intercourse may dispose to withdrawal from it--and their numberwill probably increase as the reaction against intellectual flippancygoes on--will do well to remember that Mr. Mill's retirement and hisvindication of it sprang from no moral valetudinarianism. He did notretire to gratify any self-indulgent whim, but only in order to work themore uninterruptedly _and definitely_. The Autobiography tells us whatpains he took to keep himself informed of all that was going on in everypart of the world. 'In truth, the modern facilities of communicationhave not only removed all the disadvantages, to a political writer intolerably easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of politicalaction, but have converted them into advantages. The immediate andregular receipt of newspapers and periodicals keeps him _au courant_ ofeven the most temporary politics, and gives him a much more correct viewof the state and progress of opinion than he could acquire by personalcontact with individuals; for every one's social intercourse is more orless limited to particular sets or classes, whose impressions and noothers reach him through that channel; and experience has taught me thatthose who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is calledsociety, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with theorgans of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state eitherof the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than arecluse who reads the newspapers need be. There are, no doubt, disadvantages in too long a separation from one's country--in notoccasionally renewing one's impressions of the light in which men andthings appear when seen from a position in the midst of them; but thedeliberate judgment formed at a distance, and undisturbed byinequalities of perspective, is the most to be depended on, even forapplication in practice. Alternating between the two positions, Icombined the advantages of both. ' Those who knew him will perhaps agreethat he was more widely and precisely informed of the transactions ofthe day, in every department of activity all over the world, than anyother person of their acquaintance. People should remember, further, that though Mr. Mill saw comparatively little of men after a certaintime, yet he was for many years of his life in constant and activerelations with men. It was to his experience in the Indian Office thathe attributed some of his most serviceable qualities, especially this:'I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtaineverything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could nothave entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could havethe smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear withcomplete equanimity the being overruled altogether' (pp. 85, 86). Inthese words we seem almost to hear the modest and simple tones of thewriter's own voice.