TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 85 



Martineau to examine the sources from which Mill 

 had unconsciously borrowed ; to dissociate the 

 Utilitarianism of Mill from that of Bentham ; and 

 to rescue ethics from its bondage to physical law. 



There is a special attractiveness in this part of 

 Dr. Martineau's work, because, as he tells us in 

 his most interesting Preface, he himself only slowly 

 won his freedom. It was not the influence of any 

 great thinker, but "a fusillade of questions from a 

 class of sharpshooters " which roused him from his 

 dogmatic slumber. Till then, he tells us 



"Steeped in the ' empirical' and 'necessarian' mode of 

 thought, I served out successive terms of willing captivity to 

 Locke and Hartley, to Collins, Edwards, and Priestley, to 

 Bentham and James Mill ; and though at times I was driven 

 to disaffection by the dogmatism and acrid humours of the 

 last two of these philosophers, my allegiance was restored 

 and brightened by literary and personal relations with the 

 younger Mill." 



But a new intellectual birth was at hand, and its 

 beginnings were seen in a growing dissatisfaction 

 with Mill's metaphysics : 



" I seemed to discover a hitherto unnoticed factor in all 

 the products which I had taken as explained ; to recognize, 

 after resolving all knowledge into relations, the presence of 

 an invisible condition of relation itself. ... I had to con- 

 cede to the self-conscious mind itself, both as knowing and 

 as willing, an autonomous function distinct from each and 

 all the phenomena known and changes willed a self-identity 

 as unlike as possible to any growing aggregate of miscellane- 

 ous and dissimilar experiences^" 



