MR. JOHN STUART MILL.
PROBABLY very few authors who have exerted so powerful an influence over the course of English thought as Mr. John Stuart Mill have ever been so wanting in superficially marked personal characteristics of style. He has recast our politi- cal economy, converted almost a whole generation of teachers to his own opinions on Logic and Ethics, and materially modified the view taken even by democratic thinkers of the machinery of political life ; moreover, he has been for three event- ful years a distinguished Member of the House of Commons, where he delivered probably the most thoughtful speeches of that Parliament, and yet few of us would find it as easy to individualise our impression of him as we should our impression of many thinkers we have never seen or heard,—his own father, Mr. James Mill, for instance, or Jeremy Bentham, or Adam Smith, or Hume, or Locke, or Bishop Butler. There is a singularly polished uniformity, a want of light and shade in his style. It is always the style of flowing dis- quisition, without any relieving glimpses of • either humour, or fancy, or moral inequalities of any. kind. Locke's style is
uniform and dry in its own shrewd, investigating way ; but there is always the vigilant air of keen inquiry about it, and now and then, though very rarely, he breaks out into passages of a more personal character, like that on the fading of memory :—" Thus the ideas as well as children of our youth often die before us ; and our minds re- present to us those tombs to which we are approaching, where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away." In Mr. J. S. Mill's works we cannot at present recall one break of this peculiar kind, except, perhaps, the celebrated passage in his examination of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy, in which he declares, " I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures, and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go ;" and even that fine passage is not like the one we have cited from Locke, one of marked variety in style, a sort of shaft sunk into the inner character, but though deeper in conception, seems to be of one piece in rhythm and structure with the whole texture of Mr. Mill's writings, a part of the disquisition, not a light through it. No doubt there is a fine pale enthusiasm in the passage, but the same sort of pallid enthusiasm is visible on lower subjects, in the discussion of remedies for over- population, of safeguards against the dangers of democracy, of speculations as to the potentialities of education. What we miss in Mr. J. S. Mill are personal characteristics beneath and beyond the permanent characteristics of his rational disquisition. There is a monotony in the calm, evenly flowing, impartial, didactic pertinacity of disquisition, which is almost appalling, when we consider the number of volumes into which it has flowed with steady and uniform current, without a single important variety of doctrine or manner. Doubtless this is one of the causes of Mr. Mill's great doctrinal success. His books diffuse a fine all-interpene- trating intellectual atmosphere, more even than a body of in- dividual conviction, and the less closely they are associated with his name and personality, the more do they seem to partake of the impersonal intelligence of his age, and the more readily do they pass into the very essence of what is called the Time-Spirit, and win their way without the necessity for a battle and a con- quest. Still undoubtedly this great uniformity of style and want of individual touches,—read, for instance, through the three thick volumes of " Dissertations and Discussions," and hardly anywhere will you stop and say, 'There is the very man,'—make it more difficult to appreciate Mr. Mill's individual genius than it usually is in the case of men who have so powerfully influenced the thought of their day.
Yet after all, there is something characteristic of Mr. John Stuart Mill's genius in this uniform and colourless, but incessant stream of penetrating doctrine, in which an experience philosophy, a nominalist logic, a utilitarian ethics, a large-minded social economy, and a democratic political philosophy, are all taught in their most attractive and catholic sense, —no safeguard omitted which would help to make them more palatable to minds in doubt, and no difficulty ignored which is at all within the scope of Mr.
Mill's wide intellectual horizon. his is the kind of style which is great in method and not great in dealing with first principles ; for first principles require a close study of the roots of human character, while method occupies the middle- ground between those ultimate roots and the definite results of philosophical knowledge. Mr. Mill's strength lay in systematising, and especially in so systematising as to comprehend as much as possible within the limits of the same principle. This was what made his systematic books so much greater than his single papers. The "Dissertations and Discussions " are, except for their consider- able range of knowledge and interests, almost common-place. There are but one or two of the essays in which you are compelled to recog- nise the great author of the Political Economy and the New System of Logic. It is in stretching an elastic method so as to cover a great subject that Mr. Mill's peculiar power comes out. In criticising Grote, or Coleridge, or Alfred de Vigny he hardly gives one a conception of his own capacity at all. But when in his Logic he has to connect together his nominalist doctrine and experience philo- sophy so as to cover the whole of deductive and inductive reasoning, and, when in his Political Economy he has to apply the historical method so as to correct the narrow rules of a very provincial school, he shows at once the great grasp of his mind, which was unrivalled in its power of eking out a principle so as to make it cover as far as possible all the facts within his reach, but was by no means, at least in our view, of the first order in the discussion of ultimate speculative truths. We believe that for this reason his " Principles of Political Economy," as it is the less ambitious, is also by far the better of his two great works, and that his intellectual deficiencies come out
most in the criticism on Sir William Hamilton, and his book on Utilitarianism, where he grapples moat closely with the ultimate principles of psychology and ethics.
We may illustrate what seem to us Mr. Mill's radical deficiencies as a philosopher, by his virtual evasion of four ultimate difficulties in the theories of perception, of reasoning, of moral obligation, and of volition. In the theory of perception, nothing can be more unintelligible and inconsistent than his leap from consciousness,—the only thing of which he admits any direct knowledge,—to the belief in an external world as the cause of certain states of our own consciousness. He has various very ingenious devices for getting more hay out of the field than there is grass in it,—for showing how, though we know nothing but states of our own minds, we are certain to come to believe in external objects as " guaranteed possibilities of sensation" outside our own minds ; but the moment you look into his rationale of the process of inference, you discover at once that all be has any right to infer is a specific order of sensations, and that the notion of ex- ternality as the cause of that specific order could not possibly have entered into the inference, if it had not been put there by apprehensions quite different from any of which he will grant the reality. Again, in his theory of reasoning, Mr. Mill, true to the tenor of his system, maintains that all true inference is from particulars to particulars ; that you argue from the death of certain men, A, B, and C, to the mortality of another man, D, and not from the death of A, B, and C to the mortality of all men, and then to the mortality of D. But he ignores the truth, as it seems to us, that unless the death of A, B, and C be regarded as enough to suggest the mortality of all beings resembling them as D resembles them, it will not establish the mortality of D, and that in point of fact, the mind does infer first a general cause for the death of A, B, and C, which also applies to D, and that it is through that general cause,— which is represented by the major premiss of the syllogism,— that we get our inference, which we could not get without it. Again, in relation to his utilitarian ethics, Mr. Mill never was able to explain how, without the help of a principle of obligation lying outside the utilitarian system, it could be obligatory on us to re- gard the happiness of others as claiming as much consideration from us as our own. He leaps the chasm from the claims of our own pleasures to the claims of the pleasures of other sentient creatures, without admitting any aid from a moral faculty endowed with an authority wholly underived from the selfish system, and yet nothing is more obvious than that Mr. Mill is really an intuitive moralist, if he assumes, as he does, that I am bound to sacrifice a certain amount of my own happiness for a grain more than the same amount of another's happiness, though it is clearly to my own disadvantage to do so. Lastly, the way in which be endeavours to get rid of the controversy as to necessity or free-will by simply throw- ing doubt on the meaning we attach to the terms, has always seemed to us the very acme of philosophical evasion. His solu- tion is undoubtedly necessarian in spirit, but he tries to soften its real meaning by making much of verbal distinctions. On all these four fundamental points of psychology, Mr. Mill simply evades the stress of the argument against him,
We should be very sorry to seem to underrate the largeness and catholicity of Mr. Mill's intellect,—quite the largest and most catholic intellect that was ever well kept within the limits of a somewhat narrow system, of which, however, he knew well how to stretch the bounds, sometimes beyond, but more often only up to the full limits, that it would hear. He enlarged Utilitarianism in this sense till it was hardly recognisable as Utilitarianism ; and he made Political Economy from a " dismal " and hardly credible science into a wide and historical study. His genius for thus giving breadth and elasticity to an apparently inelastic and rigid set of notions was exceedingly marked, and was more or less connected, no doubt, with that fine susceptibility of his mind to all intellectual impressions which made it intolerable to him not to find room in his system for the recognition of so great a thinker, for example, as Coleridge. His essay upon Coleridge marked indeed a new era in the history of the philosophical Radicals, the era when their teaching may be said to have emancipated itself from the formula of a clique and to have become the doctrine of a great school of thought. Mr. Mill, who, like all great expositors of philosophical method, had a fine sense of what was local and provincial, and, on the other hand, of what was likely to be recognised by all ages as a factor in human speculation, was incapable of leading any school characterised by a harsh and jarring tone towards other wide schools of human thought. Keen as he was in con troversy,—as, for instance, in defending Utilitarianism against the hasty and not very scientific criticisms of the late Professor Sedgwick, —controversy had little charm for him. He greatly pre- ferred so to interpret a great philosophical tenet as to bring it within his own philosophy, to any attempt to confute it. His essays show no very great critical power in relation to poetical subjects, and no very great pleasure in such criticism. His mind was more intellectual and didactic than artistic, in spite of his pission for music ; and in the one essay in which he does criticise Wordsworth and Shelley, he seems to us to have missed their most striking poetic charac- teristics. But on philosophical subjects, he loved to appreciate fully and to expound with power the view of his opponent.
As a practical politician, Mr. Mill might have risen to the first rank, had be entered Parliament earlier, and had more physical power of voice. He showed considerable skill in repartee, and with greater strength would have made a great debater. As it was, he held his own against Mr. Lowe in the discussions on the cattle plague ; and we must remember that for the debates of Committee, the debates of short, sharp dialogue, Mr. Lowe is probably as formidable an antagonist as it would be possible to find. Perhaps the chief hindrance to Mr. Mill's political career was his high place in the hierarchy of philosophers. Having been so long looked up to as the head of a school, he could not quite divest himself of the didactic feelings of a philo- sophical bishop, and gave letters of recommendation to Mr. Chad- wick,—and we believe to another candidate,—for the election of 1868 which materially injured his own chances at West- minster. But these are errors which are of the minutest kind, and only worth mention at all as accounting for the arrest of a political career which was fairly successful, and might have been of the first order. His enthusiasm for all causes that he thought just was intense, though mild in its character, and more than once he administered a telling rebuke to the vulgar non-intervention doctrines of the commercial Radicals. We do not know that his Parliamentary life added greatly to his fame, but at least it showed that a thinker and a scholar is not disqualified by his studies for taking a very weighty part in the practical affairs of life. Whatever, indeed, were Mr. Mill's philosophical and political errors, we believe it may be truly said of him that no recluse was ever before so honestly devoted as he to the cause of the people, and that no popular reformer was ever before so honestly devoted as he to the cause of abstract truth.
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