MR. J. S. MILL ON IMMORTALITY.
fTO THE EDITOR. OF THE " EFROTATOR.") SIE,—If Professor Stanley Jevons will examine my letter in the .Spectator of October 27, he will see, I think, that it in no way ,commits me to the position—which, indeed, I do not hold—that there is exact logical accurateness throughout Mr. Mill's three .essays on religion, when subjected to " minute logical criticism:, These essays were published posthumously, were written at dis- tant intervals of time, and were not intended, as the introduction tells us, to form a consecutive series, and 44 must not, therefore, be regarded as a connected body of thought." Moreover, with regard to the last essay, that on "Theism," we are 'told not only that it did not undergo the many revisions which it was the author's habit to make peculiarly searching and thorough, but that "even the matter itself, at least in the exact shape it here .assumes, has never undergone the repeated examination which it certainly would have passed through before he would himself have given it to the world." Is it, therefore, accurate or quite fair of Professor Jevons to speak of these three confessedly non-
.consecutive essays as forming a " trilor a whole?
The object of my letter was simply repel the extraordinary
charge of " G. S. B." that Mr. Mill w favour of retaining a doc-
trine which he thought probably f' s, for the sake of its moral value, and I desired to contrar clie moral inaccurateness of the accuser with the careful athfulness of Mr. Mill himself. Here I should in prudence pause, and decline any contest with so accomplished and formidable an antagonist as Professor Jevons ; yet I may confess that I am not greatly struck with the examples of logical faults which he adduces. Mr. Jevons extracts two :sentences about religion, and names them " definitions." Mr. Mill does not call them definitions, and in fact they are not so, for they require the context for their proper understanding, and I need lordly add that Mr. Mill has in his " Logic " warned us against the popular error of mistaking a partial description for a complete definition. On p. 108 Mr. Mill has been saying, " If, then, persons could be trained, as we see they were " (among the Greeks and Romans), "not only to believe in theory that the good of their ,country was an object to which all others ought to yield, but to feel this practically as the grand duty of life, so also may they be made to feel the same absolute obligation towards the universal good." On p. 100 he continues, " To call these sentiments by the name " morality," exclusively of any other title, is claiming too little for them. They are a real religion, of which, as of other religions, outward good works (the utmost meaning usually sug- gested by the word morality ') are only a part, and are, indeed, rather the fruits of the religion than the religion itself." Now comes what Professor Jevons calls a definition :—" The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognised as of the highest excellence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish .objects of desire." This, according to Mr. Jevons, is to say "that religion achieves its object in conceiving this ideal object," but the sentence itself says nothing about achieving an object ; 'it describes the essence of religion, while the context plainly says that religion will achieve its object not by conceiving an ideal, but by making men practically feel that the grand duty of life is to sacrifice selfish objects to the universal good ; in other words, religion strives to pass from the ideal to the real, and these are the very words in which Mr. Jevons sum- marises what he calls Mill's second definition of religion, and which he asserts to be in contradiction to the first. Secondly, Mr. Jevons makes a very vigorous assault upon the following passage:—" It is a part of wisdom to make the most of any, even small, probabilities on this subject, which furnish imagination with any footing to support itself upon.. And I am satisfied that the cultivation of such a tendency in the imagination, provided it goes on pari passu with the cultivation of severe reason, has no necessary tendency to pervert the judgment."
I am not, however, quite clear whether Mr. Jevons criticises the expression or the idea. If the former, it is possible that it would have been improved had it had the advantage of final revi- sion (I confess it seems to me capable of improvement) ; if the latter, we may put on one side minute verbal criticism. What I under- stand Mr. Mill to contend is,—that there is no assurance of a life after death, and he would bear this always clearly in mind ; but that there are grounds for hope, and that the beneficial effect of such a hope, in giving wider range and greater height to human aspiration, is far from trifling. lie considers that to indulge—to make the most of—such a hope, recognised as a hope only, may prove conducive to usefulness, and may be found improving as well as comforting. I am not adopting either part of Mr. Mill's view, but I do not see anything in it illogical. Does Mr. Jevons ? If so, how much more illogical to encourage the imagination to dwell upon con- fessedly impossible Utopias,—and yet how many philosophers have done so Comte, I believe, even recommends his disciples, as a valuable discipline, to let their thoughts and imaginations dwell upon an improved condition of society into which children should come without the at present necessary intervention of parents. It is open to any one to hold this recommendation odd, amusing, extravagant. Is it illogical ?—I am, Sir, &c., P.S.—My letter having been too late for your last Saturday's issue, give me leave to add a few words in reply to "J. S. B.'s " second letter. It is, as he says, a question of fair interpreta- tion; he repeats that Mr. Mill rejects the doctrine of immor- tality as a fact, and accepts it as a beneficial fiction. I sub- mit that this is not an interpretation, but a substitution ; it would be fair to say that Mr. Mill rejects the doctrine of immortality as an assurance, and accepts it as a beneficial hope for which he sees some ground, though slight, which is not in the region of the imagination (p. 210). "J. S. B.," in another instance, jumps too quickly to a conclusion ; he has " no doubt" that I accept Mr. Mill's enforcement of the "gospel according to Bentham." I am neither a Benthamite, nor a Utilitarian, nor a disbeliever in Immortality. I only wrote to rebut what appeared and appears to me an indefensible attack upon Mr. Mill, for " scientific shuffling and intellectual dis- honesty,"—words which " J. S. B." has not withdrawn.— W. T. M.
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