This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature, and happily one of those which tend to become stronger, even without express inculcation, from the influences of civilization. Men are under a necessity of conceiving themselves as at least abstaining from all the grosser injuries, and (if only for their own protection) living in a state of constant protest against them. They are also familiar with the fact of cooperating with others, and proposing to themselves a collective, not an individual, interest, as the aim (at least for the time being) of their actions. . . . Not only does all strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth of society, give to each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consulting the welfare of others; it also leads him to identify his feelings more and more with their good or at least with an ever greater degree of practical consideration for it. He comes, as though instinctively, to be conscious of himself as a being who of course pays regard to others. The good of others becomes to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence. . . . In an improving state of mind, the influences are constantly on the increase which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest; which feeling, if perfect, would make him never think of, or desire, any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included.

because "the course of natural phenomena is replete with everything that when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence; so that any one who endeavored in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men." This poignant piece is perhaps the only chapter to be found in his writings where he throws aside his ordinary measure of reserve, and allows himself the stern relief of vehement and exalted declamation. The same wrath that blazes in him when he is asked to use glozing words about the moral atrocities of Nature to man, breaks out unabated when he recounts the tyrannical brutalities of man to woman.

Nor even

did the flame of his indignation burn low, when he thought of the callous recklessness of men and women to helpless animals-our humble friends and ministers whose power of loyalty, attachment, patience, fidelity so often seems to deserve as good a word as human or a better.

The great genius of Pity in that age was Victor Hugo, and a superb genius it was. But in Mill pity and wrath at the wrong and the stupidities of the world nerved him to steadfast work and thought in definite channels. His postulate of a decided predominance of the active over the passive meant devotion of thought to practical ends. His life was not stimulated by mere intellectual curiosity, but by the resolute purpose of furthering human improvement. Nor had he the love that prompts some strong men for dialectic for its own sake; he would have cared as little for this vain eristic, as he cared for the insipid pleasures and spurious business that go to make up the lower species of men of the world. His daily work at the old East India House; vigorous and profitable disputation with a chosen circle of helpful friends; much travelling; lending a hand in reviews or

wherever else he saw a way of spreading the light--such were the outer events. In all he was bent on making the most of life as a sacred instrument for good purposes. The production of two such works as the "Logic" (1843) and the "Political Economy" (1848) was drain enough on vital energy. They were the most sustained of his efforts. But he never desisted or stood still. His correspondence with Comte, to whom he owed and avowed so large a debt, is the most vivid illustration of the vigor and tenacity with which he threw himself day after day and year after year into the formation and propagation of what he took for right opinions.

He sat in the House of Commons for Westminster during a short and a bad Parliament (1865-68) where old parties were at sea, new questions were insincerely handled, and the authority of leaders was dubious and disputable. The oratory happened to be brilliant, but Mill was never of those who make the ideal of government to be that which consists "in the finest speeches made before the steadiest and largest majority." Fawcett, the most devoted of all his personal and political adherents, and at that time himself a member, used to insist that Mill's presence in the House was of value as raising the moral tone of that powerful but peculiar assembly. At the same time he could not but deplore the excessive sensitiveness to duty and conscience that made Mill nail himself to his seat from the opening of every sitting to its end. Mill would perhaps have had a better chance of real influence in our more democratic House to-day, than in that hour of unprincipled faction and bewildered strategy. As it was, members felt that his presence was in some way an honor to them, and they listened with creditable respect to speeches that were acute, well-argued, apt for the occasion, and not too long nor too many.

But, after all, Mill was not of them, and he was not at home with them. Disraeli is said to have called him "a political finishing governess." Bright, when privately reproached for dissenting on the ballot or something else from so great a thinker, replied in his gruffest tone that the worst of great thinkers is that they generally think wrong. The sally would have been ungrateful if it had been serious, for on all the grand decisive issues-American Slavery, Free Trade, Reform-Mill and Bright fought side by side. He was sometimes spoken of for the India Office when the time should come, and he undoubtedly knew more of India than all Secretaries of State ever installed there put together. But he had refused a seat on the Indian Council when it was first formed, for the reason that he doubted the working of the new system; and as it happened, he lost his seat in Parliament before the Liberals returned to power (when, by the way, India was proposed to Bright). So we cannot test Mill by the old Greek saw that office shows the man. His true ambition, and a lofty one it must be counted, was to affect the course of events in his time by affecting the course of thought.

It is a curious irony that the author of the inspiring passage on Social Feeling above quoted should be a target for slings and arrows from Socialist sects, as the cold apostle of hardened individualism. As if the obnoxious creed in this, its narrow sense, were in those days possible to any reflective mind of Mill's calibre. The terrific military surge that swept and roared over Europe for a quarter of a century after the fall of the French Monarchy in 1789, no sooner drew back from the shore than there emerged, what we summarily style the Social Question. Catholic writers of marked grasp and vision entered upon the field of social reconstruction with Conservative sword

and trowel in their hands, to be followed in due time by champions from within the same fold, and aiming at the same reconciliation, but armed with the antagonistic principles of Liberalism. In England Bentham and his school applied themselves to social reform, mainly in the sphere of law, with the aid of democratic politics. All that was best and soundest in Benthamism was absorbed by Mill. He widened its base, deepened the philosophic foundations, and in his "Logic" devised an approach to reform from a novel direction, far away from platforms, Cabinets, Bills, and electioneering posters. "The notion," he says in his Autobiography, "that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation or 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 such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices."

The "Logic" was an elaborate attempt to perform the practical task of dislodging intuitive philosophy, as a step towards sounder thinking about society and institutions; as a step, in other words, towards Liberalism.

In 1861 Taine wrote a chapter on the book, and Mill said no more exact or complete idea of its contents as a body of philosophic doctrine could be found. But he demurred to Taine's description of its psychology as peculiarly English, and Mill's words give an interesting glimpse of his own view of his place in the filiation of philosophy. The psychology was peculiarly English, he says, in the first half of the eighteenth

century, beginning with Locke, down to the reaction against Hume. This reaction, beginning in Scotland, long dressed itself in German form, and ended by invading the whole field. "When I wrote my book, I stood nearly alone in my opinion; and though my way of looking at matters found a degree of sympathy that I did not expect, there were still to be found in England twenty a priori and spiritualist philosophers for one partisan of the doctrine of experience. Throughout the whole of our reaction of seventy years, the philosophy of experience has been regarded as French, just as you qualify it as English. Each view is a mistake. The two systems follow each other by law of reaction all over the world. Only the different countries never exactly coincided either in revolution or counter-revolution."

There is no room here to state, discuss, estimate, or classify Mill's place in the stream of philosophic history. The volume of criticism to which he exposed such extensive surface was immense, and soon after his death the hostile tide began pretty rapidly to rise. T. H. Green, at the height of his influence in Oxford, assailed Mill's main positions both in logic and metaphysic. Dr. Caird urged fresh objections. They multiplied. It was inevitable that they should. Those later writings of his which brought Mill's vogue to a climax, appeared at the very moment when there broke upon the scene the overwhelming floods of evolutionary speculation, which seemed destined to shift or sweep away the beacons that had lighted his philosophic course. "Liberty," for instance, was published in 1859, the very year of Darwin's "Origin of Species." As one of the most ardent disciples of the school has put the matter in slightly excited form-when the new progressive theories burst upon the world, Comte was left stranded, Hegel was relegated with a bow to a few

Oxford tutors, Buckle was exploded like an inflated windbag, and "even Mill himself—clarum et venerabile nomen -was felt to be lacking in full appreciation of the dynamic and kinetic element in universal nature." Mill has not been left without defenders. One of them (Mr. Hobhouse in his "Theory of Knowledge") holds that the head and front of his offending was that, unlike other philosophers, he wrote intelligibly enough for inconsistencies to be found out. Mr. Haldane, who regards the "Examination of Hamilton" as the greatest of Mill's writings, vindicates a place for him as going far down in the deepest regions of ontology, as coming near to the old conclusions of the Germans long ago, "conclusions to which many writers and thinkers of our time are now tending." The third book of the "Logic" (on Induction) is counted by competent judges to be the best work he ever did. So far, the most elaborate exposition, criticism, and amplification of Mill's work and thought has come from the brave and truehearted Leslie Stephen, in one of his three volumes on the Utilitarians.

Whether Mill tried to pass "by a highway in the air" from psychological hedonism to utilitarianism; whether his explanation of the sentence, "the Marshal Niel is a yellow rose," be right or wrong; whether the basis on which he founds induction be strong or weak; whether his denial of the accuracy of geometry has or has not a real foundation; whether his doctrine of "inseparable association" exposes the radical Idefect in the laws of association these, and the hundred other questions over which expert criticism has ranged ever since his time are not for us today. Even those who do not place him highest, agree that at least he raised the true points, put the sharpest questions, and swept away the most tiresome cobwebs. If the metaphysical controversy has not always been good

natured, perhaps it is because on ne se passionne que pour ce qui est obscur.

In point of literary style - - a thing on which many coxcombries have sprung up since Mill's day - although both his topics and his temperament denied him a place among the greatest masters, yet his writing had for the younger men of his generation a grave power well fitted for the noble task of making men love truth and search for it. There is no ambition in his style. He never forced his praise. Even when anger moves him, the ground does not tremble under him, as when Bossuet or Burke exhorts, denounces, wrestles, menaces, and thunders. He has none of the incomparably winning graces by which Newman made mere siren style do duty for exact, penetrating, and coherent thought; by which, moreover, he actually raised his Church to what would not so long before have seemed a strange and incredible rank in the mind of Protestant England. Style has worked many a miracle before now, but none more wonderful than Newman's. Mill's journey from Bentham, Malthus, Ricardo, to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Comte, and then on at last to some of those Manichean speculations that so perplexed or scandalized his disciples, was almost as striking, though not so picturesquely described, as Newman's journey from Evangelicalism to Rome. These graces were none of Mill's gifts, nor could he have coveted them. He did not impose; he drew, he led, he quickened with a living force and fire the commonplace that truth is a really serious and rather difficult affair, worth persistently pursuing in every path where duty beckons. He made people feel, with a kind of eagerness evidently springing from internal inspiration, that the true dignity of man is mind.

We English have never adopted the French word justesse, as distinct from justice; possibly we have been apt to

fall short in the quality that justesse denotes. "Without justesse of mind," said Voltaire, "there is nothing." If we were bound to the extremely unreasonable task of finding a single word for a mind so wide as Mill's in the range of its interests, so diversified in methods of intellectual approach, so hospitable to new intellectual and moral impressions, we might do worse than single out justesse as the key to his method, the key to what is best in his influence, the mastermark and distinction of his way of offering his thoughts to the world. Measure and reserve in mere language was not the secret, though neither teacher nor disciple can be the worse for measuring language. In a country where, as has often been said, politics and religion are the two absorbing fields of discussion, and where politics is the field in which men and newspapers are most incessantly vocal and vociferous, justesse naturally seems but a tame and shambling virtue. For if we were always candid, always on the watch against over-statement, always anxious to be even fairer to our adversary's case than to our own, what would become of politics? Why, there would be no politics. In that sphere we must, as it might seem, accept the dictum of Dr. Johnson that "to treat your opponent with respect is to give him an advantage to which he is not entitled."

If it be true that very often more depends upon the temper and spirit in which men hold their opinions than upon the opinions themselves, Mill was indeed our benefactor. From begin ning to end of his career he was forced into the polemical attitude over the whole field; into an incessant and manful wrestle for what he thought true and right against what he regarded as false or wrong. One of his merits was the way in which he fought these battles - the pains he took to find out the

strength of an opposing argument; the modesty that made him treat the opponent as an equal; an entire freedom from pedagogue's arrogance. In one or two of his earlier pieces he knows how to give a trouncing; to Brougham, for instance, for his views on the French Revolution of 1848. His private judgments on philosophic or other performances were often severe. Dean Mansel preached a once celebrated set of Bampton lectures against him, and undergraduates flocked to Saint Mary's to hear them, with as much zest as they would to-day manifest about fiscal reform or the Education Bill. Mill privately spoke of Mansel's book as "loathsome," but his disdain was usually mute. A philosopher once thought that a review of his theory of vision was arrogant and overbearing. Mill replied in words that are a good example of his canons for a critic:

We are not aware of any other arrogance than is implied by thinking ourselves right and by consequence Mr. Bailey wrong. We certainly did not feel ourselves required, by consideration for him, to state our difference of opinion with pretended hesitation. We should not have written on the subject unless we had been able to form a decided opinion on it, and having done so, to have expressed that opinion otherwise than decidedly would have been cowardice not modesty; it would have been sacrificing our conviction of truth to fear of offence. To dispute the soundness of a man's doctrines and the conclusiveness of his arguments may always be interpreted as an assumption of superiority over him; true courtesy, however, between thinkers is not shown by refraining from this sort of assumption, but by tolerating it in one another.

It was this candid, patient, and selfcontrolled temper that provoked the truly remarkable result - a man immersed in unsparing controversy for most of his life, controversy, too, on