LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MR. J. S. MILL ON IMMORTALITY. [To THE EDITOR OF THE ssrsorsres."] Sts,—As regards Mill's " Essays on Religion," I venture to differ from your correspondents, " W. T. Malleson," and " G. S. B."
I do not like the expression "scientific shuffling and intellectual dishonesty," which " G. S. B." has used, for fear it should imply that Mill knowingly misled his readers. It is impossible to doubt that Mill's mind was " sensitively honourable," and whatever may be his errors of judgment, we cannot call in question the perfect good-faith and loftiness of his intentions. On the other hand, it is equally difficult to accept what Mr. Malleson says as to the
" scrupulous accurateness" of Mill's " Essays on Religion." He was scrupulous, but the term " accurateness," if it means " logical accurateness," cannot be applied to his works by any one who has subjected them to minute logical criticism. This fact I will amply demonstrate to Mr. Malleson before long, but on this occa- sion, space allows me to do little more than to ask him whether ho has read the " Essays on Religion" with sufficient care to know that Mill therein gives two definitions of religion, at pp. 109 and 103 of the second edition, which may thus be placed side by side :—
"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 right- fully paramount over all selfish objects of desire." In the one case, religion achieves its object in conceiving this ideal object ; in the other case, it strives to pass from the ideal to the real.
There is, however, nothing worse in this conflict of definitions than in part of a passage already quoted by Mr. Malleson, as follows :—" 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 passe with the cultivation of severe reason, has no necessary tendency to pervert the judgment."
How are we to perform this operation of making the most of
" Religion, as distinguished from poetry, is the product of the craving to know whether these imaginative conceptions have realities answer- ing to thorn in some other world than ours." small probabilities ? If the imagination makes the probabilities seem in the least greater than they really are, it perverts the judgment ; if it does;not make them seem greater, what does it do ? Having carefully thought over this passage since it was first pub- lished, I can oome to no other conclusion than that Mill, within the scope of two adjoining sentences, tells us to imagine the pro- bability more than it is, and at the same time not to do so. Such is the plain English of this interesting passage.
The above cases, however, are only two samples of the kind of logic which pervades the whole of the work. The three essays form a curious trilogy. The first essay reduces almost to zero (in the author's opinion) the probability that there is a God or a future life ; the second shows that we have no need of such things, because the religion of humanity is better than any super- natural religion ; the third essay leads to the conclusion that the ideal imagination of supernatural things in which others believe is infinitely precious even to those who do not believe, and that after all, we may " cultivate " the small probabilities by imagina- tion into something different from what they were before. The question is,—" To bo or not to be ?" We must entertain answers to this important question, whether negative or affirmative, pro- vided that they are logical, but it is surely unsatisfactory to find that the leading logician of the day answers the question by confusing together ideal and real existence.-1 am, Sir, &c., W. STANLEY JEVONS.
Previous page
