his own intellect and self reflected. Her admiring assent to his opinions, joined to her greater knowledge of persons and things as they really exist, enchanted him, and no doubt consciously influenced him. "Her practical turn of mind, and her almost unerring estimate of practical obstacles, repressed in me all tendencies that were really visionary. Her mind invested all ideas in a concrete shape, and formed to itself a conception of how they would actually work; and her knowledge of the existing feelings and conduct of mankind was so seldom at fault, that the weak point in any unworkable suggestion seldom escaped her." Yes; the link between their minds was, that she supplied to some extent the gap which his father's education had made in his mind. He never had the power of dealing with concrete shapes, or of appreciating them, or understanding them aright. Whether men or women or institutions presented themselves, he could play round them with his formidable apparatus of logic and analysis, and discover a host of abstract qualities which had little or nothing to do with the concrete shape before him; but he had lost (thanks to his extraordinary education), or never possessed, that intuitive faculty by which we penetrate motives and character, appreciate the circumstances by which we are surrounded, and accurately conceive in our minds the reality of the objects with which we have to deal.

So far as the public know, either from a published article of Mrs Mill's entitled "The Enfranchisement of Women," or from private accounts of her, there seems to have been nothing in her to justify the astounding estimate which Mill formed of her intellect and capacity. The article itself is clearly written, and is a faithful reflex of opinions

which Mill held all his life before he knew her, of which he distinctly claims the originality, and says that the strength with which he held them was the originating cause of the interest which she felt in him. There is not a spark of genius or poetry, or even a facility of apt illustration in it. It is just the sort of article which a woman of average abilities, in the constant habit of conversing with and believing in Mill, would easily write. It is entitled to the merit of clear and forcible exposition, and nothing more. But Mill, in speaking of Mr Carlyle, says: "I never presumed to judge him with any definiteness until he was interpreted to me by 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."

Up to the time of Mill's first introduction to her, it appears that "her rich and powerful nature had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received type of feminine genius. To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with an air of natural distinction felt by all who approached her; to the inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic nature."

But after an intimate friendship sprang up, she is invested with every attribute of that ideal which a man of Mill's education and opinions would form and cherish. "In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition, and an earnest protest against many things which are still part of the established constitution of society, resulted not from the hard intellect, but from strength of noble and elevated feeling, and coexisted with a highly reverential nature." "In thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his poems were de

veloped in his short life, was but a child compared with what she ultimately became. Alike in the higher regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter, always seizing the essential idea or principle." Then he refers to her sensitive and mental faculties, her gifts of feeling and imagination, which fitted her to be "a consummate artist;" to her fiery and tender soul and vigorous eloquence, which fitted her for "a great orator;" to her knowledge, discernment, and sagacity, which fitted her to be "eminent among the rulers of mankind." Her moral character, the noblest and the best balanced ever met with; her unselfishness, her passion of justice, her boundless generosity, her genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride, her scorn of whatever was mean and cowardly; and her burning indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or dishonourable, are all duly set forth in a sufficient number of flowing periods.

Mill says that his own strength lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery intermediate region which lies between that of ultimate aims and that of the immediately useful and practically attainable, in other words, in the region of theory, of moral and political science. The priceless service which the lady rendered, or tried to render to him, was that she guarded him "against holding or announcing his conclusions with a degree of confidence which the nature of his speculations did not warrant.' That is the vice of Mr Mill's speculative philosophy. It may have been limited and restrained by the circumstance to which he refers. But the degree of confidence permitted to him was measured by the boundless devo

tion of an idolised friend or wife.

He was and felt himself to be deficient in that practical knowledge which would have enabled him to impose his own restraints and repression upon his speculative excursions. And this is his description of the value of any suggestion which she might occasionally make: "When I came into close intellectual communion with a person of the most eminent faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded itself in thought, continually struck out truths far in advance of me, but in which I could not detect any mixture of error, the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in the assimilation of those truths, and the most valuable part of my intellectual work was in building the bridges and clearing the paths which connected them with my general system of thought."

It is worthy of observation that the same extravagant eulogy (so much more creditable to Mill's affectionateness of disposition than to his soundness of judgment) is bestowed also upon the step-daughter, who, in editing this book, has plentifully substituted asterisks for these expressions of adoration. The similarity of the homage paid, while discussing talents and virtues which are probably far above the average, is very striking. "Though the inspirer of my best thoughts was no longer with me, I was not alone: she had left a daughter, my stepdaughter, whose ever-growing and ripening talents from that day to this have been devoted to the same great purposes. Surely no one ever before was so fortunate as after such a loss as mine to draw another prize in the lottery of life. Whoever, either now or hereafter, may think of me and the work I have done, must never forget that it is the product not of one intellect and conscience, but of three."

It throws so much light on Mill's character and the dependence of his mind, that it is worth while to mention the extent to which he was, or believed himself to be, indebted to his wife for her assistance in his literary productions. He says that the first of his books in which Mrs Taylor's share was conspicuous was the Political Economy,' and that it was her influence which gave to the work that general tone by which it is distinguished from all previous treatises on the same subject. All its readers must have wondered at and admired the way in which a scientific treatise upon a dry subject is treated, filling it with general interest. Mr Mill explains that this is effected by "making the proper distinction between the laws of the Production of Wealth, which are real laws of nature, dependent on the properties of objects, and the modes of its distribution, which, subject to certain conditions, depend on human will." He says that the 'Political Economy' illustrates the general character of Mrs Taylor's contributions to his writings. "What was abstract and purely scientific was generally mine -the properly human element came from her." That this was so in the main we do not doubt; and if it were so to the extent he describes, the readers of Mr Mill's books, and especially of the 'Political Economy,' owe Mrs Taylor much; but the genius with which he was able to treat the "human element," and light up even the driest of scientific subjects, serves to make us regret the more keenly the education which had striven so sedulously to isolate him from human interests and sympathies.

If James Mill, instead of experimenting upon his son's intellect, had striven to realise that son's conception of education, as unfolded to the students of the University of

St Andrews, "the strengthening, exalting, and purifying of our common nature, and the fitting out of mankind with the necessary mental implements for the work they have to perform through life," we are convinced that he had raw material in all its forms to work upon with which any father might have been well content, however high his aspirations. If the son's ardent, affectionate, and imaginative nature

which even his education failed to crush-had been trained and cultivated; if the faculties of head, hand, and heart had been developed simultaneously, instead of the intellect being fostered alone-we might have been mourning now the loss of one of the greatest men of the century.

Again referring to those works which he attributes to "his almost infallible counsellor," he says that "The Liberty' is likely to survive longer than anything else I have written (with the possible exception of the 'Logic'), because the conjunction of her mind with mine (i.e., in so many words, of two almost infallible minds) has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth." And in the 'Subjection of Women,' "All that is most striking and profound belongs to my wife, coming from the fund of thought which had been made common to us both, by our innumerable conversations and discussions on a topic which filled so large a place in our minds."

The particular form which this idolatrous worship of Mrs Taylor took is explicable only from the circumstance that, notwithstanding all philosophy, man is a being born to believe, to reverence and adore, as well as to think and feel; and the more the faculty of extra belief (i.e., belief which does not rest on pure reason) is crushed out of a man's moral being, the more fatally it will

reappear in the conditions of daily life, or in superstitious observances. There would be neither scope, nor depth, nor progress in human life, if the intellect of human beings were for ever wrapped in the tightest swaddling-clothes which metaphysicians and analysts can prepare. The poetry of life is perpetually bursting out, and neither in the affairs of this world nor the next can the spirit of man be restricted from believing and hoping and imagining more than it can either see or know. Religion has been in all ages, races, and climates, a universal instinct of mankind. It is the master-passion of the human race; it has been the basis of laws, of government, of customs and institutions; it has torn and lacerated society in all its forms; it has been the curse and consolation of mankind. We may denounce its particular manifestations, but that the spirit of man cleaves to the world to come is as true as that he stands erect in this.

Religion was crushed out of Mr Mill from his cradle by an artificial process. Here is the form which its irrepressible spirit assumed in after-life. Writing after the death of his wife he says "Her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all worthiness, I endeavour to regulate my life." "Because I know that she would have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of what life I have left, and to work on for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived from thoughts of her and communion with her memory." And in other of his published works he says "I venture to prophesy, that if mankind continue to improve, their spiritual history for ages to come will be the progressive working out of her thoughts, and realisation of her conceptions."

"Were I but capable," he adds, "of interpreting to the world onehalf of the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."

We know the spirit in which Mill, from education and his whole system of thought, approached the subject of religious belief. All his self-love, his philosophy, and his manhood, were staked upon a firm superiority to prejudice, the presumed necessity of making analysis the test of truth, and of ruthlessly excluding from belief everything which does not stand that test. But of all the lessons contained in this biography, nothing stands out more prominently than this, the inadequacy of an analytic training and habit of mind to secure accuracy of judgment even in the most ordinary affairs of life. To adopt this system of dogmatic unbelief-the theory that because nothing more is demonstrable about God and the next world by process of ratiocination than about the conditions of life in another planet, therefore religion must be disowned, and the world be forbidden to hope or believe, to worship or revere-is to exclude from the domain of human consciousness all the tradition, the experience, and the aspirations of mankind. If the notions of progress propounded by this new school of philosophy are fairly estimated, it will be found that such progress advances in a circle, and that (having regard to the disruption of faith and all social and sexual relations) it would bring us back to a state of savage independence and dark despair, which it has taken ages to supersede by social subordination and conscious hope.

Every opinion and social institution which civilised life has found necessary, and which involve the duty of the individual to society, are attacked in the interests of the rights and liberty of man. The disintegrating force of such philosophy upon society resembles the dissolving influence which Mill himself describes so forcibly of the habit of analysis upon the mind. It is a dissolvent of society, of hope, faith, and virtue. Demonstrable or not by analysis or syllogisms, the doctrines, however learnt, or imparted to mankind, that man is made in the image of his Creator, is destined to immortality, and has within him a spiritual consciousness which is capable of contact with and subjection to the laws of a spiritual life at present only partially and obscurely disclosed to us, are doctrines which commend themselves to men of reasonable culture as well as to the untaught instincts of mankind, and which the intelligence as well as the devotion of human beings has, in the course of ages, sanctioned and believed. The love of metaphysics which is inborn in some of the nations of the world, cannot, having regard to the universal wants and instincts of human nature, supersede or successfully conflict with the sense of religion with which other races, and especially the Semitic, are instinct, and with which the whole world has been permeated as part of the essential elements of human life. Mill says of his father that the approach of death did not cause "the smallest wavering (as in so strong and firm a mind. it was impossible that it should) in his convictions upon the subject of religion."

That is not the way in which mankind at large can treat the subject. Mr Maurice himself is referred to by Mr Mill as a man whose mental powers and system of

thought fitted him to be a great philosopher, but who refused to stifle the religious craving, and recoiled from that intrepid infidelity which is held up for admiration. His acceptance of "a worthless heap of received opinions" is attributed to "timidity of conscience, combined with original sensitiveness of temperament." It led him, says Mr Mill, to believe that the Church of England had known everything from the first; that all the truths used to assail the Church and orthodoxy are really expressed in the Thirty-nine Articles. It has driven other gifted men, he adds, into Romanism-it has produced an enormous waste of intellectual power. And then, with almost querulous impatience, he exclaims, that there seems to be a need in many minds of a firmer support than they can find in the independent conclusions of their own judgments. gradual efforts of countless ages of men, slowly feeling after more of the Divine Presence, and finding it, represent, in the words of an eloquent writer, far more faithfully than Mr Mill's over-confident conclusions, the onward march of human thought and experience.

The

The history, the conscience, and the experience of the human race, tell it that its relations to its Creator have a firm experimental basis on which to rest. No one, however refined or however untutored, can escape the inward control of conscience, or the external influence "of that power which makes for righteousness," which prescribes conduct, and gives or withholds personal happiness and inward peace. The sense of those relations is universal; it has been the very life of nations and individuals; it calls forth the whole power of the race, and alone of all the notions that have possessed mankind is capable of illuminating the