John Stuart Mill. [From The Nation 16.412 (22 May 1873): 351.] ⁴⁰

MR. MILL was, in many respects, one of the most singular men ever produced by English society. His father was a prominent, member of the small sect or coterie of Benthamites, whose attempts to reform the world, during the whole of the earlier part of the present century, furnished abundant matter for ridicule to the common run of politicians and social philosophers; and this ridicule was heightened, as the years rolled on, by the. extraordinary jargon which their master adopted for the communication of his discoveries to the world. The author of the ‘Defence of Usury,’ of the ‘Fragment on Government’ and of the ‘Book of Fallacies’ had, however, secured a reputation very early in his career which his subsequent eccentricities could not shake, but the first attempts of his disciples to catch the public ear were not fortunate. Macaulay’s smart review of James Mill’s hook on ‘ Government’ gives a very fair expression to the common feeling about them in English literary and political circles during John Stuart’s boyhood. About the value of the father’s labors as a mental philosopher there are of course a variety of opinions, but he gave two proofs of capacity for the practical work of life which there was no gainsaying. Became to London an obscure man of humble origin, but managed, without ever having been in India, and at a period when authors were held in much less esteem by politicians than they were at a later period, to produce such an impression of his knowledge of Indian affairs, by his elaborate history of that country, on the minds of the Directors of the Company, that they gave him an important office in the India House, and this, too, in spite of the fact that he lived in a circle generally considered visionary—answering, in fact, in some degree to what we call the “long-haired people.” Besides this, he himself personally gave his son an education which made him, perhaps, all things considered, the most accomplished man of his age, and without help from the universities or any other institution of learning. The son grew up with a profound reverence for his father as a scholar and thinker, and rarely lost an opportunity of expressing it, though, curiously enough, he began very early to look on Bentham, the head of the school, with a critical eye. The young man’s course was, however, still more remarkable than the father’s. Although brought up in a narrow coterie holding peculiar and somewhat unpopular opinions, and displaying, from his first entrance in life, as intense hostility as it was in his nature to feel against anything, against the English universities as then organized and conducted, though they were the centre of English culture and indeed one might say of intellectual activity, he saw himself, before he reached middle life, the most potent influence known to educated Englishmen, and perhaps that which has most contributed to the late grave changes in English public opinion on several of the leading social and political problems. Indeed, it is not too much to say that his writings produced a veritable debacle in the English mind. The younger generation were a good deal stirred by Carlyle; but Carlyle, after all, only woke people up, and made them look out of the window to see what was the matter, after which most of them went to bed again and slept comfortably. His cries were rather too inarticulate to furnish anything like a new gospel, and he never took hold of the intellectual class. But Mill did. The ‘ Logic ’ and ‘ Political Economy/ as reinforced and expounded by his earlier essays, were generally accepted by the younger men as the teachings of a real master, and even those who fully accepted neither his mental philosophy nor his social economy, acknowledged that the day of old things was passing away under his preaching. His method, however, as applied to politics, was not original—in fact, it was Bentham’s.

Bentham, who was perhaps, in the field of jurisprudence, the most destructive critic that ever appeared, had the merit which in his day was somewhat novel among reformers, and marked him out as something very different from Continental radicals, of being also highly constructive. Indeed, his labors in providing substitutes for what he sought to overthrow are amongst the most curious and, we might add, valuable monuments of human industry and ingenuity. His proposed reforms were based, too, on a theory of human nature which differed from that in use among a large number of radicals in our day in being perfectly sound, that is, in perfect accordance with observed facts, as far as it went. But it did not go nearly far enough. It did not embrace the whole of human nature, or even the greater part of it, and for the simple reason, which Mr. Mill himself has pointed out in his analysis of Bentham’s character, that its author was almost entirely wanting in sympathy and imagination. A very large proportion of the springs of human action were unknown or incomprehensible to him. The result was that, although he exerted a powerful influence on English law reform by his exposure of specific abuses, he made little impression on English sociology, properly so called. This was in part duo to his narrowness of view, and in part to the absence of an interpreter, none of his followers having attempted to put his wisdom into readable shape, except

Dumont, and he only partially and in French. The application of his method to the work of general reform was indeed left to Mr. Mill, who brought to the task an amount of culture to which Bentham could make no claim, and a large share of the sympathy of which there was also so little in Bentham’s composition, and a style which, for expository and didactic purposes, has perhaps never been surpassed. Moreover, Mr. Mill lost no time, as most men do, in maturing. He was a full-blown philosopher at twenty-five, and discourses in his earliest essays with almost the same measure, circumspection, and gravity exhibited in the latest of his works, and with all the Benthamite precision and attention to limitations. He was however wanting, as his master was, in imagination, and wanting too in what we may call, though not in any bad sense, the animal side of man's nature. He suffered in his treatment of all the questions of the day from excess of culture and deficiency of blood. He understood and allowed for men's errors of judgment and for their ignorance, and for their sloth and indifference; but of appreciation of the force of their passions, his speculations contain little sign. For instance, he was the first to point out the fact that the principle of competition, the eager desire to sell, which furnishes the motive power of the English and American social organization, is almost unknown and unfelt among the greater part of mankind, but his remedy for redundancy of population, and his lamentations over “the subjection of women,” are those of a recluse or valetudinarian.

His influence as a political philosopher may be said to have stood highest after the appearance of the ‘Political Economy.’ Ho had then perhaps the most remarkable following of hard-headed men which any English philosopher was ever able to show. But the reverence of his disciples waned somewhat rapidly after ho began to take a more active part in the treatment of the questions of the day. His ‘ Representative Government,’ valuable as it was as a philosophical discussion, offered no solution of the problem then pressing on the public mind in England which bitter Radicals or Conservatives could consider comforting. The plan of having the number of a man’s votes regulated by his calling and intelligence was thoroughly Benthamite. It was as complete and logical as a proposition in Euclid, and in 1825 would have looked attractive; but in 1855 the power of doing this nice work had completely passed out of everybody’s hands—indeed, the desire of political perfection had greatly abated. His lofty and eloquent plaints on the decline of social freedom helped to strengthen the charge of want of practicalness which in our day is so injurious to a man’s political influence, and when he entered Parliament, although he disappointed none of those who best understood him, the outside multitude, who had begun to look on him as a prophet, were somewhat chagrined that he was not readier in parrying the thrusts of the trained gladiators of the House of Commons. It was the book on the ‘Subjection of Women,’ however, which most shook the allegiance of his more educated followers, because it was marked by the widest departures from his own rules of thinking. It would be impossible to find any justification in his other works for the doctrine that women are inferior to men for the same reason that male serfs are inferior to their masters. His refusal to consider difference of sex as even one probable cause of women’s inferiority to men in mental and moral characteristics, was something for which few of his disciples were prepared, or which they ever got over; and indeed his whole treatment of the question of sex showed, in the opinion of many, a constitutional incapacity to deal with the gravest problems of social economy.

The standing of Mr. Mill as a mental philosopher appears to be very differently estimated by late critics and opponents and by himself, whether we consider the extent of his influence, or the relations of his doctrines to his nation and times; and there is a most singular inversion in these estimates of what we should naturally expect from friend and foe—an estimate of Mill’s position and influence by his opponents which, compared to his own, seems greatly exaggerated. For example, Dr. McCosh, a thoroughgoing opponent, regards Mill’s influence as the most active and effective philosophical force now alive in Great Britain, the strongest current of philosophic thought even at Oxford; and M. Taine, who some years ago discovered at Oxford that the British nation was not wanting in “general ideas” or principles in its modes of thought above the requirements of the accountant and assayer, found these principles in a really living English philosophy of which the head and founder was Stuart Mill—a philosophy which has brought forth one of M. Taine’s most elaborate critical studies in his work on ‘ Intelligence.’ In contrast with these estimates we have from Mr. Mill himself the opinion, in a letter to M. Taine, that his views are not especially English, and that they have not been so since the philosophical reaction in Scotland, Germany, and later in England, against Hume; that when his ‘System of Logic’ was written he “stood almost alone in his opinions; and though they have met with a degree of sympathy which he by no means expected, we may still count in England twenty à priori and spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the doctrine of Experience.”

This estimate of his own influence and of the importance to metaphysical discussion at the present time of the philosophy he “adopted,” is entitled to much more consideration than ought in general to be allowed for an opinion inspired by the ambition, the enthusiasm, the disappointments, or even the modesty of a philosophical thinker. Nevertheless, the far different opinion of his standing as a metaphysician which his critics entertain is undoubtedly more correct, though in a sense which was not so clearly apparent to him. They see clearly that a philosophy of which he was not the founder, and never pretended to be, has gained through his writings a hold not only on English speculation, but on that of the civilized world, which it did not acquire even in England when it was an especially English philosophy, as it was “in the first half of the eighteenth century, from the time of Locke to that of the reaction against Hume.”

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

To these grounds of influence may be added, so far as his influence on English thought is concerned, the fact that he was not a metaphysician in a positive fashion, though he dealt largely with metaphysical topics. He represented the almost instinctive aversion to metaphysics, as such, which has characterized the English since the time of Newton and Locke, we might almost say since the time of Bacon. Metaphysics, to pass current in England, has now to be baptized and become part of authoritative religious instruction, else it is foreign and barbarous to the English matter-of-fact ways of thinking. Mill’s ‘ System of Logic ’ was not intended as a system of philosophy in the German, French, or even Scotch sense of the term. It is not through the à priori establishment or refutation of highest principles that experiential, inductive, fact-proven principles of science are regarded or tested by the unmetaphysical English mind. Metaphysical doctrines prevail, it is true, in England to the extent probably that Mr. Mill estimates —twenty to one of its thinkers holding to some such views. Yet it would be a misconception to suppose those to be products of modern English thought. They are rather preserves, tabooed, interdicted to discussion, not the representatives of its living thought.

Mr. Mill estimated the worth of contemporary thinkers in accordance with this almost instinctive distrust of rational “illumination”; setting Archbishop Whately, for example, as a thinker above Sir W. Hamilton, for his services to philosophy, on account of “the number of true and valuable thoughts” which he originated and put into circulation, not as parts of a system, but as independent truths of sagacious or painstaking observation and reflection. It is by such a standard that Mr. Mill would doubtless wish to be judged, and by it he would be justly placed above all or nearly all of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, as a conscientious student of metaphysics, he held in far higher esteem than is shown in general by English thinkers the powers peculiar to the metaphysician—the ability and disposition to follow out into their consequences, and to concatenate in a system, the assumptions of à priori principles. Descartes, Leibnitz, Comte, and, as an exceptional English thinker, even Mr. Spencer, receive commendation from him on this account. It is clear, however, that his respect for this talent was of the sort which docs not aspire to imitate what is admired.