386 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



thusiasni not only often casts a fatal chill over the character, but is re- 

 sented as an injury never to be forgiven. The most humble youth 

 would have found in Mr. Mill the warmest and most kindly sympathy. 



HIS TOSITION AS A PHILOSOPHER. 



BY W. A. HUNTEB. 



It is always hazardous to forecast the estimation in which any man 

 will be held by posterity. In one sense truly we have no right to an- 

 ticipate the judgment of the future, sufficient for us to form opinions 

 satisfactory within the limits of our own generation. Sometimes, by 

 evil chance, a great name is covered with undeserved reproach, and it 

 is reserved for a distant future to do it justice. But, such a work as 

 Mr. Carlyle did for Cromwell we may confidently anticipate will never 

 be required for the name of John Stuart Mill. He is already enrolled 

 among the first of contemporary thinkers, and from that list his name 

 will never be erased. The nature of Mr. Mill's work is such as to 

 make it easy to predict the character of his future reputation. His 

 is the kind of philosophy that is destined to become the commonplace 

 of the future. "We may anticipate that many of his most remarkable 

 views will become obsolete in the best sense, they will become worked 

 up into practice, and embodied in institutions. Indeed, the place that 

 he will hold, will probably be closely resembling that of the great 

 father of English philosophy, John Locke. There is, indeed, amid dis- 

 tinguishing differences, a remarkable similarity between the two men, 

 and the character of their influence on the world. What Locke was 

 to the liberal movements of the seventeenth century, Mr. Mill has 

 more than been to the liberal movement of the nineteenth century. 

 The intellectual powers of the two men had much in common, and 

 they were exercised upon precisely similar subjects. The "Essay on 

 the Human Understanding" covered doubtless a field more purely 

 psychological than the "Logic," but we must remember that the 

 "Analysis of the Mind" by the elder Mill had recently carried the 

 inductive study of mind to an advanced point. If, however, we regard 

 less the topics on which these two illustrious men wrote, than the spe- 

 cial service rendered by each of them to intellectual progress, we may 

 not unfittingly compare the work of Locke the descent from meta- 

 physics to psychology to the noble purpose of redeeming logic from 

 the superstition of the Aristotelians, and exalting it to something 

 higher than a mere verbal exercise for school-boys. The attack that 

 Locke opened with such tremendous effect on the a priori school of 

 philosophy was never more ably supported than by the " Logic " and 

 controversial writings of Mr. Mill. 



The remarkable fact in regard to both these great thinkers these 

 conquerors in the realms of abstract speculation is their relation to 

 politics. Locke was the political philosopher of the Revolution of 

 1688 ; Mr. Mill has been the political philosopher of the democracy 



