JOHN STUART MILL. 



379 



true picture of actual life, did not give a false one, since they did not 

 profess to give any, but (what was much better) filled the youthful 

 imagination with pictures of heroic men, and of what are at least as 

 much wanted heroic women." 



If it is asked why Mr. Mill, with all his width of knowledge and 

 sympathy, has achieved so little of a reputation as a miscellaneous 

 writer, part of the reason no doubt is, that he sternly repressed his 

 desultory tendencies and devoted his powers to special branches of 

 knowledge, attaining in them a distinction that obscured his other 

 writings. Another reason is, that, although his style is extremely 

 clear, he was for popular purposes dangerously familiar with terms 

 belonging more or less to the schools. He employed these in literary 

 generalizations, without remembering that they were not equally fa- 

 miliar to his readers ; and thus general readers, like Tom Moore, or the 

 author of the recent notice in the Times, who read more for amuse- 

 ment than instruction, were disposed to consider Mr. Mill's style 

 " vastly unreadable." 



HIS WORK IN PHILOSOPHY. 



BY J. H. LEVY. 



To a savage contemplating a railway-train in motion, the engine 

 would present itself as the master of the situation the determining 

 cause of the motion and direction of the train. It visibly takes the 

 lead, it looks big and important, and it makes a great noise. Even 

 people a long way up in the scale of civilization are in the habit 

 of taking these attributes, perhaps not as the essential ones of leader- 

 ship, but at all events as those by which a leader may be recognized. 

 Still, that blustering machine, which puffs and snorts, and drags a vast 

 multitude in its wake, is moving along a track determined by a man 

 hidden away from the public gaze. A line of rail lies separated from 

 an adjacent one, the pointsman moves a handle, and the foaming giant, 

 that would, it may be, have sped on to his destruction and that of the 

 passive crew who follow in his rear, is shunted to another line, running 

 in a different direction and to a more desirable goal. 



The great intellectual pointsman of our age the man who has 

 done more than any other of this generation to give direction to the 

 thought of his contemporaries has passed away, and we are left to 

 measure the loss to humanity by the result of -his labors. Mr. Mill's 

 achievements in both branches of philosophy are such as to give him 

 the foremost place in either. Whether we regard him as an expounder 

 of the philosophy of mind, or the philosophy of society, he is facile 

 princeps. Still it is his work in mental science which will, in our opin- 

 ion, be in future looked upon as his great contribution to the progress 

 of thought. His work on political economy not only put into thor- 

 ough repair the structure raised by Adam Smith, Malthus, and Ricar- 

 do, but raised it at least one story higher. His inestimable " System 



