To her who had at first reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a character of strong feeling [was that inspiration?] there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be derived from one who had arrived at many of the same results by study and reasoning: and in the rapidity of her intellectual growth, her mental activity, which converted everything into knowledge, doubtless drew from me [there she must have bamboozled him], as it did from other sources, many of its materials (p. 188).

,,

That was a subject upon which Mill appears to have remained ignorant to the last, and it may become one of discussion to such as feel interested in it.

V.

MILL AND SON.

It is remarkable that Mill, depending so much upon others, directly and indirectly, for his opinions, and the details, as well as some of the execution, of so many of the writings published in his name,

should have looked upon himself as an Apostle : for he says:

"A person of high intellect should never go into unintellectual society unless he can enter it as an Apostle; yet he is the only person with high objects who can safely enter it at all" (p. 228),

The only real apostleship which characterized him was that of rank atheism, acquired at second hand, and preached by his executors; which society" of any kind can well dispense with. The writer in the Edinburgh Review, alluded to,

says:

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"What education would he have given them? What has he ever done to promote their education in any one respect which would make the peasant and the artizan a better and a happier man?" "In truth, if the whole work of his life be examined, it will be found to be eminently destructive, but not to contain one practical constructive idea.” And the writer in Blackwood's Magazine says :

'There was not an opinion or an institution cherished by his countrymen which he did not attack,

with a view to its absolute extinction." "Marriage was the institution which he especially assailed," "and called upon the whole female sex to revolt against it, as unworthy and to the lowest degree degrading."

As illustrative of the mischiefmaking intentions or tendencies of his nature and teaching, like those of a child starting machinery which it could not control, the following may be given, when he says that he

only in the matter of religion, but in many other things, when he

wrote:

"He disliked people quite as much for any other deficiency, provided he thought it equally likely to make them act ill. He disliked, for instance, a fanatic in any bad cause, as much or more than one who adopted the same cause from self-interest, because he thought him even more likely to be practically mischievous" (p. 50).

Mill was to a very great extent, and in a very marked degree, a "made or manufactured man, having had a certain impress of opinions stamped on him which he could only reproduce" (p. 155), notwithstanding what he says about his ideas of Wordsworth and Byron, whether the impress was made on him by his father, Mrs. Taylor, or whoever they were that "attached him to their cars."

"I felt that what my father had said respecting my peculiar advantages was exactly the truth and common sense of the matter, and it fixed my opinion and feeling from that time forward" (p. 35), [viz:] "that it was no matter of praise

to me if I knew more than those who had not had a similar advantage, but the deepest disgrace to me if I did not ' (p. 34).

His case was not that of a boy brought up and educated in the ordinary way, and depending on no one but himself, or one brought up in circumstances of destitution, and deprived of every advantage of even the most elementary instruction, and yet who educated himself and rose to distinction; but one who was educated and trained as a stalled ox is fed. He was a forced, hot-house plant, that had everything done for it, and crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people" (p. 31), which his training enabled him to manipulate and transpose this way and that way, as a person acquires a trade, business or art, on being put to it; some show

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ing greater merits in proportion to their application, and natural talents running in that way. This is what Mill was substantially, leaving it as an open question his estimate of himself when he said:-"My own strength lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery intermediate region, that of theory or moral and political science" (p. 189).

A person appearing before the world advocating an idea or a fact that may have incidentally presented itself to him, and taking up others that the first may have as incidentally led to, is a kind of person totally different from one like Mill, whose "cramming" urged him to become a "reformer of the world" at the time he was fifteen, when he had no practical knowledge of the world (and never really acquired it), or of what there was in it that required reformation. The latter is almost sure to become, in some things at least, little better than a demagogue, or pest generally, especially when his capacity or training qualifies him, for the most part, to but level and fire off the guns of others' loading.

Mill's premature studies really not spoiled him, for they were counteracted, modified, or controlled by subsequent practical knowledge. They led him, at the early age mentioned, to say that

"The most transcendent glory I was capable of conceiving was that of figuring, successful or unsuccessful, as a Girondist in an English convention" (p. 3). An idea doubtless imbibed from his father. And when he was a young man he said: The French philosophes of the eighteenth century were the example we sought to imitate, and we hoped to accomplish no less results [!]. No one of the set went to so great excesses in this boyish ambition as I did (p. 108).

Ambition and desire

of distinction I had in abundance; and zeal for what I thought the good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet little else, at that

period of my life [and at no other period], than zeal for speculative opinions" (p. 109).

As we have seen, his capacity, as he admitted, never went further, at any time, than to entertain speculative opinions and theories. It led him, when in his twenty-first year, to give expression to crude ideas about his "love of mankind and of excellence for its own sake" (p. 135), when he did not love anyone sufficiently to justify him in confiding in him the particulars of a nervous disorder with which he was afflicted. And still he clung to his ideal:

"For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general [in this world only] was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life must be a flaw in life itself" [!] (p. 145). Mill never had a real boyhood, and apparently for that reason retained, in a great measure, the character of a raw lad" to the last, as his Autobiography to a great extent shows, in many ways, and especially in the high-flown language which he uses in panegyrizing any and every one connected or associated with himself. His opinions, and the language in which they are expressed, are generally so extreme that they merit very little notice or credit. As illustrative of his rawlad-like peculiarities, we may collect from the Autobiography the following expressions, in addition to those set down at page 81:

Mental changes. Mental development. Mental history. Mental progress. Mental superiority. Mental work.

Radical amendment.

Self-improvement.
Thinking faculties.
Ultimate aims.

There is much in the Autobiography in relation to himself, his wife and his father, that need not have been made public, as Mill has done it. In regard to his father, he committed a worse than Ham-like action, for Ham was cursed for not

immediately covering his father's nakedness, while Mill exposed his parent's, such as it was, to the gaze of all mankind. Indeed, Mill seems to have been very deficient, not only in common sense, as I have already said, but in delicacy or manliness of feeling, having little or no regard for the ordinary proprieties, or the sensibilities of others, were it only those of his followers, who cannot look on his Autobiography but with a sense of mortification, however interesting it may be to others, as the history of what might be called an irregularity in nature; but not possessing a single quality to justify its being put into the hands of youth, notwithstanding all its professions and fine phrases to that end. There is another point that Mill should have considered in his lifetime, that it is the custom, indeed the law, that no government officer is allowed to express, far less publish, opinions for or against the law or government of the country, past or present; and although he was not directly employed by the Crown, he stood somewhat in the same position, and should have governed himself accordingly. But it appears to have been no part of Mill's nature to entertain points of delicacy or etiquette of that kind.

It may interest the reader to know how Mill the elder, whose coat-of

During the whole of 1835 his health had been declining: his symptoms became unequivocally those of pulmonary consumption, and after lingering to the last stage of debility, he died on the 23d of June, 1836. Until the last few days of his life, there was no apparent abatement of intellectual vigour; his interest in all things and persons that had interested him through life was undiminished; nor did the approach of death cause the smallest wavering (as in so strong and firm a mind it was impossible that it should) in his convictions on the subject of religion [as to its being a great moral evil']. His principal satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, seemed to be the thought of what he had done to make the world better than he found it [did he do that?]; and his chief regret in not living longer, that he had not time to do more (p. 203).

The following are some of his opinions, in addition to those already given :

He thought human life a poor thing at best [as it is, if its end is no better than a dog's], after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied [satisfied ?] curiosity had gone by, This was a topic on which he [naturally enough] did not often speak, especially, it may be supposed, in the presence of young persons; but when he did, it was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes say that if life were made what it might be, by good government and good education [such as he gave to his son, which excluded everything connected with the imagination and the heart], it would be worth having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility" (p. 48).

My father never was a great admirer of Shakspeare, the English idolatry of whom he used to attack with some severity" (p. 16).

"For a long time I saw nothing in these [early articles of Carlyle] (as my father saw nothing in them to the last) but insane rhapsody" (p. 161). "I did not, however, deem myself a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a

a man of intuition, which I was not [and there he spoke the truth, for he acquired his knowledge as a sponge takes in water]; and that as such he not only saw many things long before me, which I could only, when they were pointed out to me, hobble after [like an impotent man] and prove, but that it was highly probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out. [He must have been dull in the apprehension.] I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be certain that I saw over him; and I never presumed to judge him with any definiteness until he was interpreted to me by [his almost infallible counsellor'] one greatly the superior of us both-who was more a poet than he, and more a thinker than I-whose own mind and nature included his, and infinitely more (p. 176). [The nymph appearing to Numa at the fountain was nothing compared with her.]

In considering what Mill further says of his father, we must make great allowance for the peculiarity of his nature, and his general want

of judgment, especially when displayed in bragging, however indirectly, about himself, or directly in regard to any one connected with himself, or indeed, any person what

ever.

"

he

His place is an eminent one in the literary and even in the political history of his country; and it is far from honourable to the generation which has benefited by his work [?] that he is so seldom mentioned, and, compared with men far his inferiors, so little remembered ' (p. 203). He did not revolutionize, or rather create, one of the great departments of thought. But will be known to posterity as one of the greatest names in that most important branch of speculation on which all the moral [?] and political sciences ultimately rest. As Brutus was called the last of the Romans, so was he the last of the eighteenth century (p. 204). By his writings and his personal influence he was a great centre of light to his generation" (p. 205).

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