712 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



been very slovenly. In Mathematics, he had little or no assistance, but 

 in it there are self-acting tests. His readings in Physical Science were 

 also untutored : unless at Montpellier, he never had any masters, and 

 hisknowledge never came to maturity. 



If I were to compare him in his fifteenth year with the most intel- 

 lectual youth that I have ever known, or heard or read about, I would 

 say that his attainments on the whole are not unparalleled, although, I 

 admit, very rare. His classical knowledge, such as it was, could easily 

 be forced upon a clever youth at that age. The Mathematics could not 

 be so easily commanded. The best mathematicians have seldom been 

 capable of beginning Euclid at eight or nine,* and even granting that 

 in this, as in other subjects, he made small way at first, yet the Toulouse 

 diary shows us what he could do at fourteen ; and I should be curious 

 to know whether Herschel, De Morgan, or Airy could have done as 

 much. I have little doubt that, with forcino-, these men would all have 

 equaled him in his Classics and Mathematics combined. The one thing, 

 in my judgment, where Mill was most markedly in advance of his years, 

 was Logic. It was not merely that he had read treatises on the Formal 

 Logic, as well as Hobbes's " Computatio sive Logica," but that he was 

 able to chop Logic with his father in regard to the foundations and de- 

 monstrations of Geometry. I have never known a similar case of pre- 

 cocity. \Ye must remember, however, that while his father pretended 

 to teach him everything, yet, in point of fact, there were a few things 

 that he could and did teach eflFectually : one of these was Logic ; the 

 others were Political Economy, Historical Philosophy and Politics, all 

 which were eminently his own subjects. On these John was a truly 

 precocious youth ; his innate aptitudes, which must have been great, 

 received the utmost stimulation that it Avas possible to apply. His 

 father put enormous stress upon Logic, even in the scholastic garb ; but 

 he was himself far more of a logician than the writers of any of the 

 manuals. In that war against vague, ambiguous, flimsy, unanalyzed 

 words and phrases, carried on alike by Bentham and by himself, in the 

 wide domains of Politics and Ethics, he put forth a faculty not impart- 

 ed by the scholastic Logic ; and in this higher training the son was 

 early and persistently indoctrinated. To this were added other parts of 

 logical discipline which may also be called unwritten : as for example, 

 the weighing and balancing of arguments pro and con in every question ; 

 the looking out for snares and fallacies of a much wider compass than 

 those set down in the common manuals. (See the beginning of the 

 "Bentham" article for Mill's delineation of Bentham's "Logic") 



He returned to England in July, 1821, after a stay of fourteen months. 

 He sufficiently describes the fruits of his stay in France, which includ- 

 ed a familiar knowledge of the French language, and acquaintance with 



' Locke knew a young gentleman who could demonstrate several propositions in Euclid 

 before he was thirteen. 



