Mr. Mill was, in many respects, one of the most singular men ever
produced by English society. His father was a prominent member of
the small sect or coterie of Benthamites, whose attempts to
reform the world, during the whole of the earlier part of the
present century, furnished abundant matter for ridicule to the
common run of politicians and social philosophers; and this
ridicule was heightened, as the years rolled on, by the
extraordinary jargon which their master adopted for the
communication of his discoveries to the world. The author of the
"Defence of Usury," of the "Fragment on Government," and of the
"Book of Fallacies," had, however, secured a reputation very
early in his career which his subsequent eccentricities could not
shake, but the first attempts of his disciples to catch the
public ear were not fortunate. Macaulay's smart review of James
Mill's book on "Government" gives a very fair expression to the
common feeling about them in English literary and political
circles during John Stuart's boyhood. About the value of the
father's labors as a mental philosopher there are of course a
variety of opinions, but he gave two proofs of capacity for the
practical work of life which there was no gainsaying. He came to
London an obscure man of humble origin, but managed, without ever
having been in India, and at a period when authors were held in
much less esteem by politicians than they were at a later period,
to produce such an impression of his knowledge of Indian affairs,
by his elaborate history of that country, on the minds of the
Directors of the Company, that they gave him an important office
in the India House, and this, too, in spite of the fact that he
lived in a circle generally considered visionary--answering, in
fact, in some degree to what we call the "long-haired people."
Besides this, he himself personally gave his son an education
which made him, perhaps, all things considered, the most
accomplished man of his age, and without help from the universities
or any other institution of learning. The son grew up with a
profound reverence for his father as a scholar and thinker,
and rarely lost an opportunity of expressing it, though, curiously
enough, he began very early to look on Bentham, the head of the
school, with a critical eye. The young man's course was, however,
still more remarkable than the father's.
Although brought up in a narrow coterie holding peculiar and
somewhat unpopular opinions, and displaying, from his first entrance
in life, as intense hostility as it was in his nature to feel
against anything, against the English universities as then organized
and conducted, though they were the centre of English culture and
indeed one might say of intellectual activity, he saw himself,
before he reached middle life, the most potent influence known to
educated Englishmen, and perhaps that which has most contributed to
the late grave changes in English public opinion on several of the
leading social and political problems. Indeed, it is not too much to
say that his writings produced a veritable _débâcle_ in the English
mind. The younger generation were a good deal stirred by Carlyle;
but Carlyle, after all, only woke people up, and made them look out
of the window to see what was the matter, after which most of them
went to bed again and slept comfortably. His cries were rather too
inarticulate to furnish anything like a new gospel, and he never
took hold of the intellectual class. But Mill did. The "Logic" and
"Political Economy," as reinforced and expounded by his earlier
essays, were generally accepted by the younger men as the teachings
of a real master, and even those who fully accepted neither his
mental philosophy nor his social economy, acknowledged that the day
of old things was passing away under his preaching. His method,
however, as applied to politics, was not original--in fact, it was
Bentham's.
Bentham, who was perhaps, in the field of jurisprudence, the most
destructive critic that ever appeared, had the merit which in his
day was somewhat novel among reformers, and marked him out as
something very different from Continental radicals--of being also
highly constructive. Indeed, his labors in providing substitutes
for what he sought to overthrow are among the most curious, and,
we might add, valuable monuments of human industry and ingenuity.
His proposed reforms were based, too, on a theory of human nature
which differed from that in use among a large number of radicals
in our day in being perfectly sound, that is, in perfect
accordance with observed facts, as far as it went. But it did not
go nearly far enough. It did not embrace the whole of human
nature, or even the greater part of it, and for the simple
reason, which Mr. Mill himself has pointed out in his analysis of
Bentham's character, that its author was almost entirely wanting
in sympathy and imagination. A very large proportion of the
springs of human action were unknown or incomprehensible to him.
The result was that, although he exerted a powerful influence on
English law reform by his exposure of specific abuses, he made
little impression on English sociology, properly so called. This
was in part due to his narrowness of view, and in part to the
absence of an interpreter, none of his followers having attempted
to put his wisdom into readable shape, except Dumont, and he only
partially and in French. The application of his method to the
work of general reform was indeed left to Mr. Mill, who brought
to the task an amount of culture to which Bentham could make no
claim, and a large share of the sympathy of which there was also
so little in Bentham's composition, and a style which, for
expository and didactic purposes, has perhaps never been surpassed.
Moreover, Mr. Mill lost no time, as most men do, in maturing.
He was a full-blown philosopher at twenty-five, and discourses in
his earliest essays with almost the same measure, circumspection,
and gravity exhibited in the latest of his works, and with all the
Benthamite precision and attention to limitations.
He was, however, wanting, as his master was, in imagination, and
wanting, too, in what we may call, though not in any bad sense,
the animal side of man's nature. He suffered in his treatment of
all the questions of the day from excess of culture and
deficiency of blood. He understood and allowed for men's errors
of judgment and for their ignorance, and for their sloth and
indifference; but of appreciation of the force of their passions
his speculations contain little sign. For instance, he was the
first to point out the fact that the principle of competition,
the eager desire to sell, which furnishes the motive power of the
English and American social organization, is almost unknown and
unfelt among the greater part of mankind, but his remedy for
redundancy of population, and his lamentations over "the
subjection of women," are those of a recluse or a valetudinarian.
His influence as a political philosopher may be said to have
stood highest after the appearance of the "Political Economy." He
had, then, perhaps the most remarkable following of hard-headed
men which any English philosopher was ever able to show. But the
reverence of his disciples waned somewhat rapidly after he began
to take a more active part in the treatment of the questions of
the day. His "representative government," valuable as it was as a
philosophical discussion, offered no solution of the problem then
pressing on the public minds in England, which bitter Radicals or
Conservatives could consider comforting. The plan of having the
number of a man's votes regulated by his calling and intelligence
was thoroughly Benthamite. It was as complete and logical as a
proposition in Euclid, and in 1825 would have looked attractive;
but in 1855 the power of doing this nice work had completely
passed out of everybody's hands--indeed, the desire of political
perfection had greatly abated. His lofty and eloquent plaints on
the decline of social freedom helped to strengthen the charge of
want of practicalness, which in our day is so injurious to a
man's political influence, and when he entered Parliament,
although he disappointed none of those who best understood him,
the outside multitude, who had begun to look on him as a prophet,
were somewhat chagrined that he was not readier in parrying the
thrusts of the trained gladiators of the House of Commons. It was
the book on the "Subjection of Women," however, which most shook
the allegiance of his more educated followers, because it was
marked by the widest departures from his own rules of thinking.
It would be impossible to find any justification in his other
works for the doctrine that women are inferior to men for the
same reason that male serfs are inferior to their masters. His
refusal to consider difference of sex as even one probable cause
of women's inferiority to men in mental and moral characteristics,
was something for which few of his disciples were prepared, or
which they ever got over; and indeed his whole treatment of the
question of sex showed, in the opinion of many, a constitutional
incapacity to deal with the gravest problems of social economy.
The standing of Mr. Mill as a mental philosopher appears to be
very differently estimated by late critics and opponents and by
himself, whether we consider the extent of his influence, or the
relations of his doctrines to his nation and time; and there is a
most singular inversion in these estimates of what we should
naturally expect from friend and foe--an estimate of Mill's
position and influence by his opponents, which, compared to his
own, seems greatly exaggerated. For example, Dr. McCosh, a
thorough-going opponent, regards Mill's influence as the most
active and effective philosophical force now alive in Great
Britain, the strongest current of philosophic thought even at
Oxford; and M. Taine, who some years ago discovered at Oxford
that the British nation was not wanting in "general ideas" or
principles in its modes of thought above the requirements of the
accountant and assayer, found these principles in a really living
English philosophy, which has brought forth one of M. Taine's
most elaborate critical studies in his work on "Intelligence." In
contrast with these estimates, we have from Mr. Mill himself the
opinion, in a letter to M. Taine, that his views are not
especially English, and that they have not been so since the
philosophical reaction in Scotland, Germany, and later in England,
against Hume; that when his "System of Logic" was written he "stood
almost alone in his opinions; and though they have met with a degree
of sympathy which he by no means expected, we may still count in
England twenty _a priori_ and spiritualist philosophers for every
partisan of the doctrine of Experience."
This estimate of his own influence and of the importance to
metaphysical discussion at the present time of the philosophy he
"adopted" is entitled to much more consideration than ought in
general to be allowed for an opinion inspired by the ambition,
the enthusiasm, the disappointments, or even the modesty of a
philosophical thinker. Nevertheless, the far different opinion of
his standing as a metaphysician which his critics entertain is
undoubtedly more correct, though in a sense which was not so
clearly apparent to him. They see clearly that a philosophy of
which he was not the founder, and never pretended to be, has
gained through his writings a hold, not only on English
speculation, but on that of the civilized world, which it did not
acquire even in England when it was an especially English
philosophy, as it was "in the first half of the eighteenth
century, from the time of Locke to that of the reaction against
Hume."
What, then, is it in Mill's philosophical writings that has given
him this eminence as a thinker? Two qualities, we think, very
rarely combined: a philosophical style which for clearness and
cogency has, perhaps, never been surpassed, and a conscientious
painstaking, with a seriousness of conviction, and an earnestness
of purpose which did not in general characterize the thinkers
whose views he adopted. It was by bringing to the support of
doctrines previously regarded as irreligious a truly religious
spirit that Mill acquired in part the influence and respect which
have given him his eminence as a thinker. He thus redeemed the
word "utility" and the utilitarian doctrine of morals from the
ill repute they had, for "the greatest happiness principle" was
with him a religious principle. An equally important part of
his influence is doubtless due to the thoroughness of his
early training--the education received from his father's
instruction--which, as we have said, has made him truly regarded
as the most accomplished of modern dialecticians.
To these grounds of influence may be added, so far as his influence
on English thought is concerned, the fact that he was not a
metaphysician in a positive fashion, though he dealt largely with
metaphysical topics. He represented the almost instinctive aversion
to metaphysics, as such, which has characterized the English since
the time of Newton and Locke, we might also say since the time of
Bacon. Metaphysics, to pass current in England, has now to be
baptized and become part of the authoritative religious instruction,
else it is foreign and barbarous to the English matter-of-fact ways
of thinking. Mill's "System of Logic" was not intended as a system
of _philosophy_ in the German, French, or even Scotch sense of the
term. It is not through the _a priori_ establishment or refutation
of highest principles that experiential, inductive, fact-proven
principles of science are regarded or tested by the unmetaphysical
English mind. Metaphysical doctrines prevail, it is true, in
England, to the extent, probably, that Mr. Mill estimates--twenty to
one of its thinkers holding to some such views. Yet it would be a
misconception to suppose these to be products of modern English
_thought_. They are rather preserves, tabooed, interdicted to
discussion, not the representatives of its living thought.
Mr. Mill estimated the worth of contemporary thinkers in accordance
with this almost instinctive distrust of rational "illumination;"
setting Archbishop Whately, for example, as a thinker, above Sir W.
Hamilton, for his services to philosophy, on account of "the number
of true and valuable thoughts" which he originated and put into
circulation, not as parts of a system, but as independent truths of
sagacious or painstaking observation and reflection. It is by such a
standard that Mr. Mill would doubtless wish to be judged, and by it
he would be justly placed above all, or nearly all, of his
contemporaries. Nevertheless, as a conscientious student of
metaphysics he held in far higher esteem than is shown in general by
English thinkers the powers peculiar to the metaphysician--the
ability and disposition to follow out into their consequences, and
to concatenate in a system the assumption of _a priori_ principles.
Descartes, Leibnitz, Comte, and, as an exceptional English thinker,
even Mr. Spencer, receive commendation from him on this account. It
is clear, however, that his respect for this talent was of the sort
which does not aspire to imitate what is admired.