what all careful students of Mr. Mill's books supposed, that with him
the social aim, the repayment of the services of the past by devotion to
the services of present and future, was predominant over any merely
speculative curiosity or abstract interest. His preference for deeply
reserved ways of expressing even his strongest feelings prevented him
from making any expansive show of this governing sentiment. Though no
man was ever more free from any taint of that bad habit of us English,
of denying or palliating an abuse or a wrong, unless we are prepared
with an instant remedy for it, yet he had a strong aversion to mere
socialistic declamation. Perhaps, if one may say so without presumption,
he was not indulgent enough in this respect. I remember once pressing
him with some enthusiasm for Victor Hugo,--an enthusiasm, one is glad to
think, which time does nothing to weaken. Mr. Mill, admitting, though
not too lavishly, the superb imaginative power of this poetic master of
our time, still counted it a fatal drawback to Hugo's worth and claim to
recognition that 'he has not brought forward one single practical
proposal for the improvement of the society against which he is
incessantly thundering.' I ventured to urge that it is unreasonable to
ask a poet to draft acts of parliament; and that by bringing all the
strength of his imagination and all the majestic fulness of his sympathy
to bear on the social horrors and injustices which still lie so thick
about us, he kindled an inextinguishable fire in the hearts of men of
weaker initiative and less imperial gifts alike of imagination and
sympathy, and so prepared the forces out of which practical proposals
and specific improvements may be expected to issue. That so obvious a
kind of reflection should not have previously interested Mr. Mill's
judgment in favour of the writer of the _Outcasts_, the _Legend of the
Ages_, the _Contemplations_, only shows how strong was his dislike to
all that savoured of the grandiose, and how afraid he always was of
everything that seemed to dissociate emotion from rationally directed
effort. That he was himself inspired by this emotion of pity for the
common people, of divine rage against the injustice of the strong to the
weak, in a degree not inferior to Victor Hugo himself, his whole career
most effectually demonstrates.
It is this devotion to the substantial good of the many, though
practised without the noisy or ostentatious professions of more egoistic
thinkers, which binds together all the parts of his work, from the
_System of Logic_ down to his last speech on the Land Question. One of
the most striking pages in the Autobiography is that in which he gives
his reasons for composing the refutation of Hamilton, and as some of
these especially valuable passages in the book seem to be running the
risk of neglect in favour of those which happen to furnish material for
the idle, pitiful gossip of London society, it may be well to reproduce
it.
'The difference,' he says, 'between these two schools of philosophy,
that of Intuition and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere
matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences,
and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical
opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to
demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful
and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and
indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable
part of his argument to show how those powerful feelings had their
origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible.
There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy
which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by
circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up
favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the
voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that
of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing
tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as
innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs
that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between
individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally
would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief
hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one
of the greatest stumbling-blocks to human improvement. This tendency has
its source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterised the
reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is a
tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative
interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure
to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by the
more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy.... Considering then
the writings and fame of Sir W. Hamilton as the great fortress of the
intuitional philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formidable
from the imposing character, and the, in many respects, great personal
merits and mental endowments of the man, I thought it might be a real
service to philosophy to attempt a thorough examination of all his most
important doctrines, and an estimate of his general claims to eminence
as a philosopher; and I was confirmed in this resolution by observing
that in the writings of at least one, and him one of the ablest, of Sir
W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the
justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly
immoral--that it is our duty to bow down and worship before a Being
whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be
perhaps extremely different from those which, when speaking of our
fellow-creatures, we call by the same name' (pp. 273-275).
Thus we see that even where the distance between the object of his
inquiry and the practical wellbeing of mankind seemed farthest, still
the latter was his starting point, and the doing 'a real service to
philosophy' only occurred to him in connection with a still greater and
more real service to those social causes for which, and which only,
philosophy is worth cultivating. In the _System of Logic_ the
inspiration had been the same.
'The notion that truths external to the mind,' he writes, 'may be known
by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and
experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual
support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this
theory every inveterate belief and every intense feeling of which the
origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of
justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient
voucher and justification. There never was an instrument better devised
for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength of
this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the
appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics
and of the cognate branches of physical science. To expel it from these
is to drive it from its stronghold.... In attempting to clear up the
real nature of the evidence of mathematical and physical truth, the
_System of Logic_ met the intuitive philosophers on ground on which they
had previously been deemed unassailable; and gave its own explanation
from experience and association of that peculiar character of what are
called necessary truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidence
must come from a deeper source than experience. Whether this has been
done effectually is still _sub judice_; and even then, to deprive a mode
of thought so strongly rooted in human prejudices and partialities of
its mere speculative support, goes but a very little way towards
overcoming it; but though only a step, it is a quite indispensable one;
for since, after all, prejudice can only be successfully combated by
philosophy, no way can really be made against it permanently, until it
has been shown not to have philosophy on its side' (pp. 225-227).
This was to lay the basis of a true positivism by the only means through
which it can be laid firmly. It was to establish at the bottom of men's
minds the habit of seeking explanations of all phenomena in experience,
and building up from the beginning the great positive principle that we
can only know phenomena, and can only know them experientially. We see,
from such passages as the two that have been quoted, that with Mr. Mill,
no less than with Comte, the ultimate object was to bring people to
extend positive modes of thinking to the master subjects of morals,
politics, and religion. Mr. Mill, however, with a wisdom which Comte
unfortunately did not share, refrained from any rash and premature
attempt to decide what would be the results of this much-needed
extension. He knew that we were as yet only just coming in sight of the
stage where these most complex of all phenomena can be fruitfully
studied on positive methods, and he was content with doing as much as he
could to expel other methods from men's minds, and to engender the
positive spirit and temper. Comte, on the other hand, presumed at once
to draw up a minute plan of social reconstruction, which contains some
ideas of great beauty and power, some of extreme absurdity, and some
which would be very mischievous if there were the smallest chance of
their ever being realised. 'His book stands,' Mr. Mill truly says of the
_System of Positive Polity_, 'a monumental warning to thinkers on
society and politics of what happens when once men lose sight in their
speculations of the value of Liberty and Individuality' (p. 213).
* * * * *
It was his own sense of the value of Liberty which led to the production
of the little tractate which Mr. Mill himself thought likely to survive
longer than anything else that he had written, 'with the possible
exception of the _Logic_,' as being 'a kind of philosophic text-book of
a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern
society tend to bring out into ever stronger relief; the importance to
man and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving
full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and
conflicting directions' (p. 253). It seems to us, however, that Mr.
Mill's plea for Liberty in the abstract, invaluable as it is, still is
less important than the memorable application of this plea, and of all
the arguments supporting it, to that half of the human race whose
individuality has hitherto been blindly and most wastefully repressed.
The little book on the _Subjection of Women_, though not a capital
performance like the _Logic_, was the capital illustration of the modes
of reasoning about human character set forth in his _Logic_ applied to
the case in which the old metaphysical notion of innate and indelible
differences is still nearly as strong as ever it was, and in which its
moral and social consequences are so inexpressibly disastrous, so
superlatively powerful in keeping the ordinary level of the aims and
achievements of life low and meagre. The accurate and unanswerable
reasoning no less than the noble elevation of this great argument; the
sagacity of a hundred of its maxims on individual conduct and character,
no less than the combined rationality and beauty of its aspirations for
the improvement of collective social life, make this piece probably the
best illustration of all the best and richest qualities of its author's
mind, and it is fortunate that a subject of such incomparable importance
should have been first effectively presented for discussion in so
worthy and pregnant a form.
It is interesting to know definitely from the Autobiography, what is
implied in the opening of the book itself, that a zealous belief in the
advantages of abolishing the legal and social inequalities of women was
not due to the accident of personal intimacy with one or two more women
of exceptional distinction of character. What has been ignorantly
supposed in our own day to be a crotchet of Mr. Mill's was the common
doctrine of the younger proselytes of the Benthamite school, and Bentham
himself was wholly with them (_Autobiography_, p. 105, and also 244);
as, of course, were other thinkers of an earlier date, Condorcet for
instance.[4] In this as in other subjects Mr. Mill did not go beyond his
modest definition of his own originality--the application of old ideas
in new forms and connections (p. 119), or the originality 'which every
thoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressing
truths which are common property' (p. 254). Or shall we say that he had
an originality of a more genuine kind, which made him first diligently
acquire what in an excellent phrase he calls _plenary possession_ of
truths, and then transfuse them with a sympathetic and contagious
enthusiasm?
[Footnote 4: Condorcet's arguments the reader will find in vol. i. of
the present series of these _Critical Miscellanies_, p. 249.]
It is often complained that the book on Women has the radical
imperfection of not speaking plainly on the question of the limitations
proper to divorce. The present writer once ventured to ask Mr. Mill why
he had left this important point undiscussed. Mr. Mill replied that it
seemed to him impossible to settle the expediency of more liberal
conditions of divorce, 'first, without hearing much more fully than we
could possibly do at present the ideas held by women in the matter;
second, until the experiment of marriage with entire equality between
man and wife had been properly tried.' People who are in a hurry to get
rid of their partners may find this very halting kind of work, and a man
who wants to take a new wife before sunset, may well be irritated by a
philosopher who tells him that the question may possibly be capable of
useful discussion towards the middle of the next century. But Mr. Mill's
argument is full of force and praiseworthy patience.
* * * * *
The union of boundless patience with unshaken hope was one of Mr. Mill's
most conspicuous distinctions. There are two crises in the history of
grave and sensitive natures. One on the threshold of manhood, when the
youth defines his purpose, his creed, his aspirations; the other towards
the later part of middle life, when circumstance has strained his
purpose, and tested his creed, and given to his aspirations a cold and
practical measure. The second crisis, though less stirring, less vivid,
less coloured to the imagination, is the weightier probation of the two,
for it is final and decisive; it marks not the mere unresisted force of
youthful impulse and implanted predispositions, as the earlier crisis
does, but rather the resisting quality, the strength, the purity, the
depth, of the native character, after the many princes of the power of
the air have had time and chance of fighting their hardest against it.
It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or
five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or
the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral
climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial
cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous
resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the
burning fiery furnace of circumstance.
Mr. Mill did not escape the second crisis, any more than he had escaped
the first, though he dismisses it in a far more summary manner. The
education, he tells us, which his father had given him with such fine
solicitude, had taught him to look for the greatest and surest source of
happiness in sympathy with the good of mankind on a large scale, and had
fitted him to work for this good of mankind in various ways. By the time
he was twenty, his sympathies and passive susceptibilities had been so
little cultivated, his analytic quality had been developed with so
little balance in the shape of developed feelings, that he suddenly
found himself unable to take pleasure in those thoughts of virtue and
benevolence which had hitherto only been associated with logical
demonstration and not with sympathetic sentiment. This dejection was
dispelled mainly by the influence of Wordsworth--a poet austere yet
gracious, energetic yet sober, penetrated with feeling for nature, yet
penetrated with feeling for the homely lot of man. Here was the
emotional synthesis, binding together the energies of the speculative
and active mind by sympathetic interest in the common feelings and
common destiny of human beings.
For some ten years more (1826-1836) Mr. Mill hoped the greatest things
for the good of society from reformed institutions. That was the period
of parliamentary changes, and such hope was natural and universal. Then
a shadow came over this confidence, and Mr. Mill advanced to the
position that the choice of political institutions is subordinate to the
question, 'what great improvement in life and culture stands next in
order for the people concerned, as the condition of their further
progress?' (p. 170). In this period he composed the _Logic_ (published
1843) and the _Political Economy_ (1848). Then he saw what all ardent
lovers of improvement are condemned to see, that their hopes have
outstripped the rate of progress; that fulfilment of social aspiration
is tardy and very slow of foot; and that the leaders of human thought
are never permitted to enter into that Promised Land whither they are
conducting others. Changes for which he had worked and from which he
expected most, came to pass, but, after they had come to pass, they were
'attended with much less benefit to human wellbeing than I should
formerly have anticipated, because they had produced very little
improvement in that which all real amelioration in the lot of mankind
depends on, their intellectual and moral state.... I had learnt from
experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones,
without in the least altering the habit of mind of which false opinions
are the result' (p. 239). This discovery appears to have brought on no
recurrence of the dejection which had clouded a portion of his youth. It
only set him to consider the root of so disappointing a conclusion, and
led to the conviction that a great change in the fundamental
constitution of men's modes of thought must precede any marked
improvement in their lot. He perceived that society is now passing
through a transitional period 'of weak convictions, paralysed
intellects, and growing laxity of principle,' the consequence of the
discredit in the more reflective minds of the old opinions on the
cardinal subjects of religion, morals, and politics, which have now lost
most of their efficacy for good, though still possessed of life enough
to present formidable obstacles to the growth of better opinion on those
subjects (p. 239).
Thus the crisis of disappointment which breaks up the hope and effort of
so many men who start well, or else throws them into poor and sterile
courses, proved in this grave, fervent, and most reasonable spirit only
the beginning of more serious endeavours in a new and more arduous vein.
Hitherto he had been, as he says, 'more willing to be content with
seconding the superficial improvements which had begun to take place in
the common opinions of society and the world.' Henceforth he kept less
and less in abeyance the more heretical part of his opinions, which he
began more and more clearly to discern as 'almost the only ones, the
assertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society' (p. 230). The
crisis of middle age developed a new fortitude, a more earnest
intrepidity, a greater boldness of expression about the deeper things,
an interest profounder than ever in the improvement of the human lot.
The book on the _Subjection of Women_, the _Liberty_, and probably some
pieces that have not yet been given to the world, are the notable result
of this ripest, loftiest, and most inspiring part of his life.
This judgment does not appear to be shared by the majority of those who
have hitherto published their opinions upon Mr. Mill's life and works.
Perhaps it would have been odd if such a judgment had been common.
People who think seriously of life and its conditions either are content
with those conditions as they exist, or else they find them empty and
deeply unsatisfying. Well, the former class, who naturally figure
prominently in the public press, because the press is the more or less
flattering mirror of the prevailing doctrines of the day, think that Mr.
Mill's views of a better social future are chimerical, utopian, and
sentimental. The latter class compensate themselves for the pinchedness
of the real world about them by certain rapturous ideals, centring in
God, a future life, and the long companionship of the blessed. The
consequence of this absorption either in the immediate interests and
aims of the hour, or in the interests and aims of an imaginary world
which is supposed to await us after death, has been a hasty inclination
to look on such a life and such purposes as are set forth in the
Autobiography as essentially jejune and dreary. It is not in the least
surprising that such a feeling should prevail. If it were otherwise, if
the majority of thoughtful men and women were already in a condition to
be penetrated by sympathy for the life of 'search with many sighs,' then
we should have already gone far on our way towards the goal which a
Turgot or a Mill set for human progress. If society had at once
recognised the full attractiveness of a life arduously passed in
consideration of the means by which the race may take its next step
forward in the improvement of character and the amelioration of the
common lot,--and this not from love of God nor hope of recompense in a
world to come, and still less from hope of recompense or even any very
firm assurance of fulfilled aspiration in this world,--then that
fundamental renovation of conviction for which Mr. Mill sighed, and that
evolution of a new faith to which he had looked forward in the far
distance, would already have come to pass.
Mr. Mill has been ungenerously ridiculed for the eagerness and
enthusiasm of his contemplation of a new and better state of human
society. Yet we have always been taught to consider it the mark of the
loftiest and most spiritual character, for one to be capable of
rapturous contemplation of a new and better state in a future life. Why,
then, do you not recognise the loftiness and spirituality of those who
make their heaven in the thought of the wider light and purer happiness
that, in the immensity of the ages, may be brought to new generations of
men, by long force of vision and endeavour? What great element is
wanting in a life guided by such a hope? Is it not disinterested, and
magnanimous, and purifying, and elevating? The countless beauties of
association which cluster round the older faith may make the new seem
bleak and chilly. But when what is now the old faith was itself new,
that too may well have struck, as we know that it did strike, the
adherent of the mellowed pagan philosophy as crude, meagre, jejune,
dreary.