JOHN STUART MILL 453 



merits and a considerable bar to the recognition of their originality. 

 In whatever field of learning he worked, he always sought to knit his 

 thoughts into the body of pre-existing knowledge, and to make his 

 current of speculation flow easily and naturally from sources already 

 familiar to his readers, however widely that current might afterward 

 diverge from the well-worn channels. Thus he was actually at more 

 pains to conceal his originality than most writers are to bring theirs 

 into prominence. In political economy he wrote as an expounder and 

 popularizer of Eicardo, in morals as a disciple and interpreter of 

 Bentham, in the philosophy of mind as a commentator on the works 

 of his father and of Sir William Hamilton, and even in his ' Logic ' he 

 is so scrupulously careful to acknowledge indebtedness to earlier 

 thinkers that an undiscerning reader might easily undervalue Mill's 

 contributions in his own name. Eecognizing the breadth and fullness 

 of his mind, one is in danger of doing less than justice to its originality. 

 Mill has been compared with Locke, his influence on the nineteenth 

 century being likened to the earlier philosopher's on the seventeenth. 

 As parts of Locke's teachings have long since passed into the body of 

 common thought and conviction, and have thus lost for us their 

 originality and interest, so there are many of Mill's doctrines that have 

 in this best sense become obsolete, because by general adoption they 

 have ceased to be matter of argument. In addition to the practical 

 reforms he inaugurated or promoted, we may ask at this time, what is 

 his significance and value to us as a philosopher? By example as well 

 as precept he has elevated and purified the utilitarian scheme of ethics. 

 The greatest-happiness principle was with him a religious principle. 

 We may hold that he was fundamentally wrong in his theory of morals, 

 but we can not refuse to applaud his practise. In the abstruser regions 

 of thought, his neat and clear exposition of the experience-philosophy 

 is suggestive rather of the French than of the German school. One 

 can hardly read three pages of German metaphysics without a de- 

 pressing sense of the futility of human reasoning, whereas a French 

 philosophical treatise fills us with a surprised delight at the efficiency 

 of our own powers. The German is too fond of directing our gaze 

 into fathomless abysses and of leading our feet into bottomless quag- 

 mires; the Frenchman conducts us easily and pleasantly over a mac- 

 adamized road, where all steep ascents are carefully graded, precipitous 

 declivities guarded against by walls and fences, and ugly or disquieting 

 outlooks screened by flowering hedges. As Martineau long ago so ad- 

 mirably expressed it, Mill's distinguishing characteristics as a philoso- 

 pher are " sharp apprehension of whatever can be rounded off as a 

 finished whole in thought, analytic adroitness in resolving a web of 

 tangled elements and measuring their value in the construction, reason- 

 ing equal to any computation by linear coordinates, though not readily 



