754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



shop-windows where he never thought to see it. Whately spoke 

 handsomely of it, and desired his bookseller to get an additional copy 

 for him, and expose it in the window. 



While the work was printing, I prepared from the sheets a review 

 of it, which came out in the " Westminster " in the April number, and 

 was even more laudatory than Mill liked. The first adverse criticism 

 of importance was an article in the autumn number of the " British 

 Critic," of nearly a hundred pages, known to have been written by 

 Mr. W. G. Ward, the ally of Newman and Pusey. It was a most re- 

 markable production, and gave Mill very great satisfaction, all things 

 considered. It was not so much a review of the " Logic " as of Mill 

 altogether. Mr. Ward had followed him through his various articles 

 in the " London and Westminster," and had mastered his modes of 

 thinking in all the great questions ; and the present article takes these 

 up along with the " Logic." He expresses a warm interest in Mill 

 himself, remarking, " An inquirer, who bears every mark of a single- 

 minded and earnest pursuit of truth, cheers and relieves the spirits " ; 

 a pretty strong innuendo as to the prevailing dispositions of so-called 

 inquirers. He deplores Mill's " miserable moral and religious deficien- 

 cies," and says if his " principles be adopted as a full statement of the 

 truth, the whole fabric of Christian theology must totter and fall." 

 Accordingly, the article is devoted to counterworking these erroneous 

 tendencies ; and the parts chosen for attack are the experience-founda- 

 tions of the mathematical axioms, the derived view of conscience, and 

 necessity as against free-will. Mr. Ward has continued to uphold his 

 peculiar tenets against the experience-school. He had afterward, as 

 he informs me, a good deal of correspondence with Mill, and once met 

 him. At his instigation, Mill expunged from his second edition an 

 objectionable anecdote.* 



Without pursuing further at present the fortunes of the " Logic," 

 I will allude to the connection between Mill and Comte, and to the 

 share that Comte had in shaping Mill's political philosophy. Wheat- 

 stone always claimed to be the means of introducing Comte in Eng- 

 land. He brought over from Paris the first two volumes of the " Phi- 

 losophic Positive," after the publication of the second, which was in 

 1837. It would appear that the first volume, by itself, published in 

 1830, had fallen dead ; notwithstanding that the first two chapters 

 really contained in very clear language, although without expansion, 

 the two great foundations that Comte built upon the Three Stages 

 and the Hierarchy of the Sciences. Wheatstone mentioned the work 

 to his scientific friends in London, and among others to Brewster, who 

 was then a contributor of scientific articles to the " Edinburgh Re- 



* In regard to the " British Critic," he wrote, " I always hailed Puseyism, and pre- 

 dicted that thought would sympathize with thought though I did not expect to find my 

 own case so striking an example." I was told that he had written several letters in the 

 "Morning Chronicle" in this strain of subtile remark. 



