454 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



flowing into the organic freedom of a living dialectic, remarkable skill 

 in laying out his subject symmetrically before the eye and presenting 

 its successive parts in clear and happy lights. No one has more suc- 

 cessfully caught the fortunate gift of the French men-of -letters — the 

 art of making readers think better of their own understanding and less 

 awfully of the topics discussed." The same keen critic points out a 

 glaring self-contradiction in Mill's theorizing. Mill resolves all knowl- 

 edge into self-knowledge, since we have no cognitive access to either 

 qualities or bodies external to ourselves. On the other hand, however, 

 we know nothing but the phenomena of ourselves, we are but phenomena 

 of the world, and the sensations from which all within us begins are 

 merely the results of outward experience. Thus the pretended a priori 

 ideas turn out to be a posteriori residues; the volitions that claim to 

 be spontaneities are necessary effects of antecedent causes earlier than 

 we. " And thus," the critic well concludes, " we are landed in this 

 singular result : our only sphere of cognitive reality is subjective : and 

 that is generated from an objective world which we have no reason to 

 believe exists. In our author's theory of cognition, the non-ego disap- 

 pears in the ego; in his theory of being, the ego lapses back into the 

 non-ego. Idealist in the former, he is materialist in the latter." 



We find, then, that in matters of abstract speculation Mill produced 

 little that will live. But where he could bring his thought to the service 

 of humanity, his achievement is noteworthy ; and for this we honor him. 

 Even in his contributions to inductive logic, of which he is often 

 called the founder, he was working for the enlightenment of human 

 error in the practical concerns of life ; how much more so in his political 

 and economic writings, their greater concreteness makes evident. He 

 was far from being a philosopher for the mere love of * divine philoso- 

 phy.' There was no art-for-art's-sake enthusiasm in him. For a luxury 

 of that sort he had too little tendency to passive enjoyment, and too 

 much of the militant, apostolic fervor of the reformer. The will-o'- 

 the-wisp pursuit of ultimate truth for its own sake might well have 

 seemed to him, as did philosophical speculation in general to an emi- 

 nent contemporary of his, very much like the motions of a squirrel in 

 its cage. Mill's studies demanded a humanitarian motive, and that 

 motive became with him a religion. He himself, in his review of 

 Comte, declares : " Candid persons of all creeds may be willing to 

 admit, that if a person has an ideal object, his attachment and sense 

 of duty towards which are able to control and discipline all his other 

 sentiments and propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, that 

 person has a religion." Mill's two chief characteristics, the love of 

 thinking out difficult problems, and the love of mankind, were made 

 to serve each other; and the gratification of these two passions may be 

 regarded as the expression of his natural piety. 



