JOHN STUART MILL 45 1 



JOHtf STTTAKT MILL 



By PERCY F. BICKNELL 



" T FIXD it hard to say why I dislike John Stuart Mill," writes 

 -*- Lowell to Leslie Stephen, " but I have an instinct that he has 

 done lots of harm." 



" For the sake of the House of Commons at large," says Gladstone 

 in a letter to Mr. W. L. Courtney, Mill's biographer, " I rejoiced in his 

 advent, and deplored his disappearance. He did us all good. In what- 

 ever party, whatever form of opinion, I sorrowfully confess that such 

 men are rare." " A wiser, more virtuous man I have never known, 

 and never hope to know," was Mr. John Morley's pronouncement in a 

 speech delivered soon after Mill's death. 



To continue a little further these contrasting opinions concerning a 

 philosopher and reformer, the centennial recurrence of whose birthday 

 directs our thoughts upon him at this time, we find Professor Jevons 

 somewhat petulantly exclaiming : " For my part I will no longer con- 

 sent to live silently under the incubus of bad logic and bad philosophy 

 winch Mill's works have laid upon us. . . . In one way or another Mill's 

 intellect was wrecked. The cause of injury may have been the ruthless 

 training which his father imposed upon him in tender years; it may 

 have been his own life-long attempt to reconcile a false empirical 

 philosophy with conflicting truth. But however it arose, Mill's mind 

 was essentially illogical." 



" Mill's intellect was essentially of the logical order," declares his 

 biographer and expounder, Sir Leslie Stephen. The late E. L. Godkin 

 called him " the most accomplished of modern dialecticians." Herbert 

 Spencer, referring to Mill's influence on current English philosophical 

 speculation, was of opinion that " by his ' System of Logic ' Mr. Mill 

 probably did more than any other writer to awaken it." Henry Sidg- 

 wick praised " the unequalled mastery of method which his logical 

 speculations developed." 



Xow that Mill has been dead a third of a century, it may be worth 

 while to take the occasion of this hundredth anniversary of his birth 

 to review briefly the estimation in which he was held by his contem- 

 poraries, and to consider how much and what part of his fame of thirty- 

 three years ago is now alive and likely to survive. His lasting influ- 

 ence, whether for good or for ill, is of course not accurately determin- 

 able; for, as Professor Bain has well said, " no calculus can integrate the 



