MR. J. S. MILL'S RELIGIOUS CONFESSION.
WE have just received more posthumous confessions of John Stuart Mill's. We do not pretend to have studied or even completely read as yet the Essays on Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism, which Messrs. Longman have just published. But the fragments of these Essays which unaccount- ably leaked out in the Northern papers, with the fuller expositions. of the book itself, are, at all events, sufficient to give a very clear general impression of his point of view. And it is obvious that the moral and intellectual authority for which, in future, his name -will be quoted in theological controversy, will be one of a very complex, hesitating, and ambiguous character. No one could have anticipated, at the time when Mr. Mill pub- lished his "Logic" and his "Essays on some Unsettled Questions. of Political Economy," that when his career came to an end, he would have influenced his age chiefly as a kind of potent intel- lectual yeast or ferment, instead of as a great inculcator of definite truths. He began life chiefly as the antagonist of the a priori school of philosophy and as an advocate of the empirical school which found the germs of all our knowledge in particular sense-impressions. and the law of association ; partly also as one of the most severe disciples of the great teachers of 'the dismal science,'—Malthus and Ricardo. But we of the present generation shall now look upon these elements of his teaching as mere infinitesimal constituents in the powerful stimulus which he gave to the various conflicting ten- dencies of the seething and distracted thought of our times. The general effect of his writings will not be any definite teaching- at all, but a sort of impregnation of the waters of a cold and em i irical school of thought with foreign sources of agitation and ebullition rendering them apparently ardent and exciting. His- experience-philosophy was soon saturated with at least the deepest admiration for the methods, if not for the results. of Coleridge's speculations ; his political economy was modified by the warmest sympathy with the peasant and the labouring class, and the profoundest desire to mingle moral with economical motives in the distribution of wealth and industry. In politics his abstract democratic principles soon exhibited a strong deflection in the direction of Conservative scorn for the vaunted omnipo- tence of Radical machinery ; and then afterwards, during his short political career, displayed a strong reaction towards. "heroic measures " and popular sympathies. And in the region of ethics and religion his name is likely to be remembered chiefly for the heterogeneous character of the intellectual germs. which floated about his mind like the light seed-vessels of plants of the most mutually incompatible habits of growth and nutrition. It will be said of him that while he was a strict Utilitarian, finding the sanctions of all the ethical principles he admitted in their tendency to promote the happiness of the race, he yet thought it not only right, but obligatory on a high- minded man to defy even an omnipotent being who should. threaten men with eternal sufferings for refusing to surrender their finite notions of virtue to his own arbitrary will and law ; that he regarded the direct pursuit of happiness—i.e., of the only final end of life—as fatal to the happiness pursued ; and that he felt far more reverence for the enthusiastic emotions.. which arise incidentally during the pursuit of benevolent objects, than even for those benevolent objects themselves. And now that the posthumous essays on Nature, Religion, and Theism have appeared, it must be added, that while he doubted every- thing, from the existence of God and the divine mission of Christ to the immortality of the soul, he distinctly rejected nothing, except the divine omnipotence ; nay, that he preached the duty of saturating the imagination with possibilities of religious truth which he did not rate high, rather than stint the elastic force of hope by a rigid adherence to a rational standard of intellectual expec- tation. In short, Mr. Mill professed his wish that human nature should feed itself, consciously and deliberately, on very dubious, not to say slender hopes,—without, however, disguising from itself the slight character of those hopes,—by way of reinforcing its otherwise too small resources of aspiration ; that it should store up for itself new impulses through the habitual contempla- tion of spiritual contingencies the prospect of ever realising which would hardly exceed the chance of a prize in a very hazard- ous lottery, and this solely on the ground that all the anticipations in which men may indulge themselves with real confidence, are inadequate to the work of providing sufficiently inspiring and elevating themes. The following are his words :— " To me it seems that human life, small and confined as it is, and as, considered merely in the present, it is likely to remain, even when the progress of material and moral improvement may have freed it from the greater part of its present calamities, stands greatly in need of any wider range and greater height of aspiration for itself and its destina- tion which the exercise of imagination can yield to it, without running counter to the evidence of fact; and that 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 ; but that it is possible to form a perfectly sober estimate of the evidences on both sides of a question, and yet to let the imagination dwell by preference on those possibilities which are at once the most comforting and the most im- proving, without in the least degree overrating the solidity of the grounds for expecting that these rather than any other will be the possibilities actually realised." (pp. 245-6.)
Thus, Mr. Mill was an empiricist who attached more importance to the secondary than to the primary forms of pleasurable satis- faction; a Utilitarian who was more of a believer in the sacredness of disinterested emotion than trancendentalists themselves ; an economist who carried sentiment with a high hand into the very heart of questions affecting the accumulation and distribu- tion of wealth ; a necessarian who was the most passionate advocate of libexty ; a democrat who eagerly defended the rights of culture and the full representation of independent thought ; nay, he was a sceptic who held the character of Christ all but divine, and who wished meii to cling to the belief in even a slender hope of divine guidance and personal immortality for the sake of the new moral resources such a hope must give ;—and in practical matters, he was the enthusiastic advocate of a change which would tend to deprive women of the highest influence they have, while gaining for them a power for which they seem to most of us little suited. Of course, the mind which threw so much ardour into such paradoxical positions must appear to future ages as one of the most incalculable of the intellectual influences of his day, —one who fostered enthusiasms rooted in doubt, and revolutionary changes founded on visionary hopes,—one who acted like a fer- ment on almost all schools of intellectual tendency, developing rapidly all the floating germs in their authors' minds, and yet which robbed even that which it stimulated most, of anything like the firmness and stability of a steady conviction.
And no doubt the total influence which John Stuart Mill will exercise on the development of English thought will be rather this,—that he will have rendered it difficult for sceptics to shut themselves up in a shell of repellent theory,—that he will have taught them to sound all the doubtfulness of doubt, to enter into all the paradoxes of an empirical philo- sophy, to appreciate the religious enthusiasm consistent with a utilitarian belief, —than that he will have made any fundamental truth or any fundamental denial clearer than it was before. He will have given an ideal tone to political economy, and grafted a Conservative vein into democratic theory. He will have persuaded not a few of the disciples of Bentham that they ought to delight in emotions which it is impossible on Bentham's principles to justify, and to flush with joy at the prospect of changes the advantageous results of which are as yet visible only to the most sanguine eye. He will have convinced many Materialists that, though there can be no omnipotent God of perfect holiness, there may be a very powerful, invisible Being who is helping us to struggle against impossible conditions, not much more or not much less mighty than himself. And he will have induced certain Rationalists who smile at revelation, to believe that it becomes a sceptic to reserve the possibility at least that Christ actually was exactly what in the first three Gospels he declares himself to be,—i.e., not, in Mr. Mill's belief, God at all, but a divine messenger of God's, sent into the world to declare the will and unveil the nature of the Being who sent him. No doubt the effect of all this, not only on Mr. Mill's philosophical allies, but on their opponents of -all schools, must be to increase very much the sense of ultimate uncertainty ;—on his allies, because it shows them how much a negative thinker could sympathise with tendencies which his philosophy went to undermine; on his opponents, because bewilder- ing them with the vision of sympathies where they looked for prejudices, and yet sympathies which only permitted their subject to throw them the crumb of comfort involved in a perhaps.'
But even that is not the most curious feature of his total moral effect as a thinker. The most curious seems to us to be that, while mediating to some extent between opposite tendencies, and in-
creasing the sense of ultimate uncertainty about the foundations of things, Mr. Mill was the very apostle of noble emotions, pane- gyrising the disinterested feelings generated like phosphoric flames by the decay of the earthly objects of desire, and making a sort of religion of personal enthusiasm, without much relation either to the calculable advantages of the course he advocated, or to the hopefulness of the campaign. This gives something of a hectic effect to the character of his teaching. The enthusiasm looks more like the enthusiasm of fever than the enthusiasm of health, when one considers how it derives its origin from selfish sources which fall to justify its existence, and how it flames upwards to- wards objects, the very existence of which is expressly stated to be involved in a haze of doubt. One cannot but admire and even reverence the nobility of the mind which felt so keenly he sacred- ness of the glow of disinterested enthusiasm, alien as it was to his philosophy of things, as passionately to welcome it, and eagerly to dwell on the ambiguous and shadowy hopes on which it was most likely to gain strength. It is impossible to feel anytirt-7, but profound admiration for the delicate love of truth which makes Mr. Mill array so carefully all the half-tangible grounds of the hope to which he clings, and yet sadly confess how small in- dividually they seem. Still how strange it is to contrast what Mr. Mill has written concerning the genius and character of our Lord, with his own view of the slender probability of Christ's own beliefs !—
'And whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left,—a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his per- sonal teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been superadded by the tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers suffices to insert any number of marvels, and may have inserted all the miracles which he is reputed to have wrought. But who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee ; as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort ; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from
the higher source But about the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality, combined with profundity of insight, which, if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity ; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life. When to this we add that, to the con- ception of the rational sceptic' it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be —not God, for he never made the smallest pretension to that character, and would probably have thought such a pretension as blasphemous as it seemed to the men who condemned him, but a man charged with a special, express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue, we may well conclude that the influences of religion on the character which will remain after rational criticism has done its utmost against the evidences of religion are well worth preserving, and that what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a firmer belief, is more than compensated by the greater truth and rectitude of the morality they sanction."
No'w what is the very stamp of the genius or originality on which Mr. Mill so justly insists in this estimate of Jesus ? Is it not precisely that certainty of insight into divine things which Mr. Mill decides to be wholly unjustified and unjustifiable by his review not merely of Christ's own career, but of all that happened previous to and all that followed that career ? Not to refer to the Gospel of John, of which Mr. Mill's estimate is so strangely con- temptuous, was he not thinking as he spoke of the profundity and originality of Christ's genius of the calm confidence of "Blessed are the pare in heart, for they shall see God," "Every plant which my heavenly Father bath not planted shall be rooted up," "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect," "Who is my mother, and who are my brethren ? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." Now, where is the 'genius' in such ssayings, if they represented not insight into the truth, but the overmastering might of a potent delusion, —if the true state of mind on these subjects should be that which Mr. Mill delineates in these remarkable essays, the anxious hoard- ing-up of a number of doubtful indications of the supernatural influence of a Being of limited power,—" evidence insufficient for proof, but amounting only to one of the lower degrees of proba- bility" for the existence of any God at all? If this be so, surely the certainty and simplicity of Christ's insight would be a mark, not of genius, but of hallucination,—unless, indeed, the sceptic takes the view hinted at by Mr. Mill, that Christ may have really been what he assumed himself to be, i.e., may have had evidence hich we cannot recover of the divine life in which he lived. Only from any confident belief of this kind Mr. Mill is wholly shutout, for if he held it confidently, he must hold with precisely equal con- fidence the existence of the supernatural being whom Christ re- vealed. Yet if he thought it a mere possibility that Christ spoke of what he knew, when using the language of knowledge instead of the language of surmise,—surely he ought to think of the 'genius' of Jesus, as he calls it, only as of a very small possi- bility of the same order. On Mr. Mill's view, Christ was either a great genius, or had a wonderful aptitude for grand hallucinations, the last being to hiin much the more likely of the two,—otherwise
Mill's own slender 'hope' would take the form of a firm belief. Anyhow, nothing is stranger than the contrast between the language of the admirer, and the language of him whom he so profoundly admires, on divine subjects. The former is the language of hesitating feeble hope, hope of a low order, but which nevertheless warrants the attitude of enthusiasm and the glow of a poetic aspiration. The latter is the language of an absolute vision, of calm certainty, which warrants no such feverish emotion, but only undoubting trust and happy devotion. Will not the potent ferment which Mr. Mill has cast into the boiling cauldron of modern thought, end in making it seem far more reasonable to accept the quiet language of implicit faith, than the impassioned language of an idealising dream at once excited and despondent?
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