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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tablished facts, I believe there is much 

 in his system which will abide; and I 

 adhere to the opinion that ' his bold 

 generalizations are always instructive, 

 and that some of them may in the end 

 be established as the profoundest laws 

 of the knowable universe.' '.' * 



That eminent logician and mathe- 

 matician. Professor J, Stanley Jevons, 

 has been recently reviewing the philos- 

 ophy of J. S. Mill in a series of arti- 

 cles in the " Contemporary Eeview." 

 In the November number he takes up 

 Mill's " Utilitarianism," and considers 

 his contributions to the subject of mo- 

 rality in relation to the present state of 

 knowledge. He recognizes that Mill 

 belonged to a past dispensation, and 

 was incompetent to deal scientifically 

 with those great moral problems by the 

 handling of which Herbert Spencer 

 has made a new epoch in philosophic 

 thought. "We give some of the closing 

 passages of his article : 



Such are the intricacies and wide extent 

 of etliical questions, that it is not practicable 

 to pursue the analysis of Mill's doctrine in 

 at all a full manner. We can not detect the 

 fallacious reasoning with the same precision 

 as in matters of geometric and logical sci- 

 ence. This analysis is the less needful, too, 

 because, since Mill's essays appeared, moral 

 philosophy has undergone a revolution. I 

 do not so much allude to the i-eform effected 

 by Mr. Sidgwick's " Methods of Ethics," 

 though that is a great one, introducing as it 

 does a precision of thought and nomencla- 

 ture which was previously wanting. I al- 

 lude, of course, to the establishment of the 

 Spencerian theory of morals, which has 

 made a new era in philosophy. Mill has 

 been singularly imfortunate from this point 

 of view. He might be defined as the last 

 great philosophic writer conspicuous for his 

 ignorance of the principles of evolution. . . . 

 The whole tone of Mill's moral and political 

 writings is totally opposed to the teaching 

 of Darwin and Spencer, Tylor and Maine. 

 Mill's idea of human nature was that we 

 came into the world like lumps of soft clay, 

 to be shaped by the accidents of life, or the 

 care of those who educate us. Austin in- 



* This estimate Dr. McCosh had the sagacity 

 to make and the courage to express many years 

 ago in his " Intuitions of Mind." 



sisted on the evidence which history and 

 daily experience afford of " the extraordinary 

 pliability of human nature," and Mill bor- 

 rowed the phrase from him. No phrase 

 could better express the misapprehensions of 

 human nature which, it is to be hoped, will 

 cease for ever with the last generation of 

 writers. Human nature is one of the last 

 things which can be called " pliable." Gran- 

 ite rocks can be more easily molded than the 

 poor savages that hide among them. We 

 are all of us full of deep springs of uncon- 

 querable character, which education may 

 in some degree soften or develop, but can 

 neither create nor destroy. The mind can 

 be shaped about as much as the body ; it 

 may be starved into feebleness, or fed and 

 exercised into vigor and fullness ; but we 

 start always with inherent hereditary powers 

 of growth. The non-recognition of this fact 

 is the great defect in the moral system of 

 Bentham. The great Jeremy was accus- 

 tomed to make short work with the things 

 which he did not understand, and it is thus 

 he disposes of " the pretended system" of a 

 moral sense : " One man says he has a 

 thing made on purpose to tell him what is 

 right and what is wrong, and that it is called 

 a moral sense ; and then he goes to his work 

 at his ease, and says such a thing is right 

 and such a thing is wrong. Why ? Because 

 my moral sense tells me it is." Bentham 

 then bluntly ignored the validity of innate 

 feelings, but this omission, though a great 

 defect, did not much diminish the value of 

 his analysis of the good and bad effects of 

 actions. Mill discarded the admirable Ben- 

 thamist analysis, but failed to introduce the 

 true evolutionist principles; thus he falls 

 between the two. It is to Herbert Spencer 

 we must look for a more truthful philosophy 

 of morals than was possible before his time. 

 The publication of the first part of his 

 principles of morality, under the title " The 

 Data of Ethics," gives us, in a definite form, 

 and in his form, what we could previously 

 only infer from the general course of his 

 philosophy and from his brief letter on utili- 

 tarianism addressed to Mill. Although but 

 fragments, these writings enable us to see 

 that a definite step has been made in a mat- 

 ter debated since the dawn of intellect. The 

 moral sense doctrine, so rudely treated by 

 Bentham, is no longer incapable of recon- 

 ciliation with the greatest happiness princi- 

 ple, only it now becomes a moving and de- 

 velopable moral sense. An absolute and un- 

 alterable moral standard was opposed to the 

 palpable fact that customs and feelings dif- 

 fer widely, and Paley, on this ground, was in- 



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