JOHN STUART MILL. 755 



view." Comte's volumes struck him at once as a good topic ; and he 

 wrote an article on them in the August number for 1838. Any one 

 knowing him would have predicted as the strain of his review an in- 

 dignant or else contemptuous exposure of the atheism, a fastening on 

 the weak points in his own special subjects, as optics, and a cold rec- 

 ognition of his systematic comprehensiveness. This, however, was to 

 leave out of the account one element his antipathy to Whewell ; 

 sufficiently marked in a review of the " History of the Inductive 

 Sciences" in the previous year. He found with joy a number of ob- 

 servations on hypothesis and other points, that he could turn against 

 Whewell, and the effect was, I have no doubt, to soften the adverse 

 criticisms, and to produce an article on the whole favorable to the 

 book, and one that even Comte himself regarded with some compla- 

 cency. Mill got wind of the two volumes in the end of 1837, after he 

 had completed the draft of his book on Induction. The " Autobiog- 

 raphy " gives (pp. 210-214) the general effect produced upon him by 

 the whole work, which he perused with avidity as the successive vol- 

 umes appeared ; but does not adequately express the influence in de- 

 tail, nor the warmth of esteem and affection displayed in the five years 

 of their correspondence from 1841 to 1846. In our many conversa- 

 tions during the summer of 1842, Mill occasionally mentioned Comte, 

 but not in a way to give me any clear conception of what his merits 

 consisted in. Among his associates at that time was William Smith, 

 lately dead, and known as the author of " Thorndale " and various 

 other works. He was a pupil of the Mills in philosophy, and occupied 

 himself in contributing to magazines. In the winter of that year, he 

 wrote a review of Comte in " Blackwood " (March, 1843), giving very 

 well-selected extracts ; and from these I derived my first impression 

 of the peculiar force of the book. I remember particularly being 

 struck with the observations on the metaphysical and critical stage, as 

 a vein of remark quite original. 



It was in the summer of that year (1843) that I read the work for 

 myself. I was in London as before, and had the same opportunities 

 of conversing with Mill. We discussed the work chapter by chapter, 

 up to the last volume, which I had not begun when I left town. We 

 were very much at one, both as to the merits and as to the defects of 

 the work. The errors were mostly of a kind that could be remedied 

 by ordinary men better informed on special points than Comte ; while 

 the systematic array was untouched. The improvement effected in 

 the classification of the sciences was apparent at a glance ; while the 

 carrying out of the hierarchy, involving the dependence of each 

 science upon the preceding, first as to doctrine, and next as to method, 

 raised the scheme above the usual barrenness of science-classifications. 

 Mill had already seized with alacrity, and embodied in the " Logic," 

 Comte's great distinction between social statics and social dynamics ; 

 and I was even more strongly impressed than he respecting the value of 



