Charles Buller, Macaulay, Buckle, Dickens, Thackeray, George Cornewall Lewis, Sydney Herbert, Lytton – John Stuart Mill has died when many years of thought and action might still have been confidently anticipated for him by his friends. He was born in 1806, and may be cited as one of the strongest confirmations of their theory by those who maintain the hereditary nature of genius or capacity; for he was the son of a man eminently endowed with the same qualities of mind by which he himself rose to be one of the most remarkable writers and thinkers of his generation. James Mill, the father, popularly known as the historian of British India, was the author of a great variety of essays on morals, government, and philosophy; among others of an essay on Education, in which he takes for granted, as an indisputable fact, ‘that the early sequences to which we are accustomed form those primary habits, and that the primary habits are the fundamental character of the man. The consequence is most important, for it follows that as soon as the infant, or rather the embryo begins to feel, the character begins to be formed, and that the habits which are then contracted are the most pervading and operative of all.’
The ‘primary habits’ of the infant or embryo disciple of Bentham were formed with especial reference to this principle. His education was in every sense private and paternal. He was hardly allowed to breathe out of the utilitarian atmosphere, he was swathed in metaphysics, he was dieted on political economy; and, instead of lisping, like Pope, in numbers, he lisped in syllogisms. His father, before going to the India House, had him up at 6 in the morning to dictate the tasks of the day, which included classics and modern languages, besides other branches of knowledge. He was, by all accounts an extraordinary child; and it is within our personal knowledge that he was an extraordinary youth when, in 1824, he took the lead at the London Debating Club in one of the most remarkable collections of ‘spirits of the age’ that ever congregated for intellectual gladiatorship, he being by two or three years the junior of the clique. The rivalry was rather in knowledge and reasoning than in eloquence: mere declamation was discouraged; and subjects of paramount importance were conscientiously thought out. He was already a frequent contributor to the Westminster Review, and a prominent member of the long defunct party, the Philosophic Radicals, whose sayings and doings in its heyday have recently been revived by Mrs. Grote. He must have been a boy in years when a foolish scheme for carrying out the Malthusian principle brought him under the lash of the satirist. In Moore’s Ode to the Goddess Ceres we find:-
‘There are two Mr. Mills, too, whom those who like reading
‘What’s vastly unreadable, call very clever;
‘And whereas Mill senior makes war on good breeding
‘Mill junior makes war on all breeding whatever.’
Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, plausibly suggests that literature will be most efficiently pursued by those who are tied down to some regular employment, official or professional, apart from and independent of it. Such employment, he thinks, exercises a steadying and bracing influence upon the mind. ‘Three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial than weeks of compulsion.’ During the entire period of his greatest intellectual efforts John Stuart Mill held an important office under the East India Company, and discharged its duties in a manner to make his retirement a real loss to the public when, in 1868, he declined a seat in the Indian Council offered him by the present Lord Derby. The despatches and other documents drawn up by him would entitle him to a high rank among those it is the fashion to call ‘closet statesmen.’
The first edition of his System of Logic, the work on which his reputation would be most confidently rested by his admirers, appeared in 1843. ‘This book,’ he says in his preface, ‘makes no pretence of giving to the world a new theory of the intellectual operations. Its claim to attention, if it possess any, is grounded on the fact that it is an attempt, not to supersede, but to embody and systematize the best ideas which have been either promulgated on its subject by speculative writers or confirmed by accurate thinkers in their scientific inquiries.’ It is a book which no one would read for amusement, hardly; indeed, except as a task; his style, always dry, is here at its driest, and the circumstance of the work having reached an eighth edition in 1872 is, therefore, a conclusive proof of its completeness as a system and a text-book. The same praise may be granted to his Principles of Political Economy, from which the existing state of the so-called science may be learnt; but in this work, instead of confining himself to the collection of known and recognized theories or facts, he has propounded sundry doctrines of dangerous tendency and doubtful soundness, which have laid him open to suspicion and attack – for instance, his doctrine of property in land, which, he maintains, is the inalienable inheritance of the human species, and may at any moment be wholly or in part resumed from considerations of expediency.
We need hardly add that many of his opinions on society and government have been generally and justly condemned; and that, in his more appropriate domain of mental and moral philosophy, he was engaged in unceasing feuds. He was, however, the most candid of controversialists, and too amiable to indulge in scorching sarcasm or inflict unnecessary pain. He was often a wrong-headed, but always a kind-hearted man. After conversing with some Oxford tutors in 1863, Mrs. Grote sets down:-
‘Grote and Mill may be said to have revived the study of the two master sciences – History and Mental Philosophy among the Oxford undergraduates. A new current of ideas, new and original modes of interpreting the past, the light of fresh learning cast upon the peoples of antiquity; such are their impulses given, by these two great teachers, that our youth are completely kindled to enthusiasm towards both at the present time.’
Mill’s election for Westminster in 1865 was an honourable tribute to his character and reputation, as his rejection in 1868 was the natural consequence and well-deserved penalty of his imprudence in exhibiting an uncalled-for sympathy with Mr. Odger and otherwise recklessly offending the most respectable portion of the constituency. He was well received in the House of Commons, and, although wanting in most of the physical requisites of an orator, he seldom failed to command attention when he rose. Indeed, he made a better figure even as a debater than was expected from his former appearances in that capacity, and the proof is that a well known writer produced a carefully finished parallel between him and Mr. Lowe apropos of some passages of arms between them during the Cattle Plague debates:-
‘Mr. Lowe takes by preference the keen, practical common-sense view of his subject; Mr. Mill the philosophical, speculative and original view. Mr. Lowe’s strength lies in his acquired knowledge, memory, and dialectic skill; Mr. Mill’s in his intellectual resources and accumulated stores of thought. Their reading has been in different lines, and employed in a different manner; Mr. Lowe being the much superior classic, and Mr. Mill (we suspect) more at home in legislation, morals, metaphysics, and philosophy. Books, ancient and modern, are more familiar to Mr. Lowe, and have been better digested by Mr. Mill. The one has most imagination, the other most wit. The one almost rises to genius, whilst the palm of the highest order of talent must be awarded to the other. The one fights for truth, the other for victory. In conflict it is the trained logician against the matured thinker; not that the logician wants thought, or the thinker logic. A set combat between them would resemble one between the retiarius or netman of the Roman arena and a swordsman; and the issue would depend on whether Mr. Lowe could entangle his adversary in the close meshes of his reasoning by an adroit throw, or whether Mr. Mill could evade the cast by an intellectual bound, close, and decide the contest by a home thrust.’
We do not reproduce this parallel as agreeing with it, but as strikingly presenting some illustrative trait of each.
Of late years Mill has not come before the world with advantage. When he appeared in public it was to advocate the fanciful rights of women, to propound some impracticable reform or revolutionary change in the laws relating to the land; but, with all his error and paradoxes, he will be long remembered as a thinker and reasoner who has largely contributed to the intellectual progress of the age.
This is a deeply grudging notice of the career of a man whose work was to exert a profound influence over succeeding generations. The obituarist evidently draws on Mill’s Autobiography of 1873 but he eschews mention of