JOHN STUART MILL. 



Mill says of his father, that, 



" After many struggles, he yielded to 

 the conviction, that concerning the ori- 

 gin of things, nothing whatever can be 

 known " (p. 39) ; and that " he impress- 

 ed upon me from the first, that the man- 

 ner in which the world came into exist- 

 ence, was a subject on which nothing 

 was known " (p. 42). 



There was no necessity for any 

 " struggles " in a matter of this kind, 

 or " impressing " such a conviction 

 upon anyone, for anyone a very little 

 instructed in the doctrines of Chris- 

 tianity is well aware of the fact, that 

 the mind is a perfect blank on that 

 subject; and that the information 

 wanted can be found only in the Old 

 and New Testaments. It would have 

 been of more importance to have 

 been told when James Mill under- 

 went the struggles mentioned. Read- 

 ers of the classics, like the Mills, 

 could have found the same truth 

 well stated by Socrates, when he 

 said : 



" Regarding celestial matters, he dis- 

 suaded his disciples from becoming sub- 

 tile speculators regarding the way the 

 Deity contrived each of them. For he 

 considered that this could never be dis- 

 covered by man ; nor did he believe 

 that he acted gratefully to God, who 

 scrutinized such points as he did not 

 wish to make clearly known. He said, 

 moreover, that he was in danger of 

 losing his senses, who turned his mind 

 anxiously upon these investigations, just 

 as Anaxagoras lost his reason, who 

 prided himself most in explaining by 

 the power of his reason the plans of 

 the deities." Zenophon's Memorabilia, 

 English translation, p. 203. 



There is no evidence whatever to 

 show that Mill ever examined the 

 subject of religion in even the most 

 crude form of its natural aspects : 

 he seems merely to have echoed his 

 father's sentiments, imbibed from 

 him when a child, excepting that at 

 that stage of his " intellectual and 

 moral development," he tells us 

 " that he at the same time took care 

 that I should be acquainted with 

 what had been thought by mankind 



on these impenetrable problems " 

 (p. 43) ; which is decidedly incon- 

 sistent with what he had just said, 

 that " it would have been wholly 

 inconsistent with my father's ideas 

 of duty to allow me to acquire im- 

 pressions contrary to his convictions 

 and feelings respecting religion" 

 (p. 42). Mill the younger, in par- 

 ticular, seems to have lacked the 

 faculty for feeling or judging on 

 that subject; he certainly never had 

 any religious belief, as he admitted ; 

 so that it sounds strange to hear him 

 calling for a crusade against a sub- 

 ject about which he allows that 

 " nothing whatever can be known." 

 And it seems as strange for his fa- 

 ther to speak of religion as being 

 " not only false, but hurtful " (p. 45) ; 

 and that " the most perfect concep- 

 tion of wickedness which the human 

 mind can devise," is " embodied in 

 what is commonly presented to man- 

 kind as the creed of Christianity " 

 (p. 41) ; in which he was educated, 

 at the expense of other people, and 

 most solemnly promised, at the age 

 of twenty-five, to preach and defend. 

 The proper attitude to be assumed 

 by such a mind as Mill's towards the 

 phenomena of animated and inani- 

 mated nature, was to drift quietly 

 through life, looking at everything it 

 met with, with the eye of a dumb 

 animal. Even in the ordinary af- 

 fairs of life, a little degree of reason 

 and personal dignity should teach 

 us to call nothing wrong unless we 

 can show that it is wrong, and sub- 

 stitute something better for it ; 

 for how can a person say that a 

 thing is wrong without doing that ? 

 Mill, in his so frequently, so persist- 

 ently, and so prominently bringing 

 his atheism before the world, resem- 

 bled, at least in principle, the most 

 common-placed, the most vulgar- 

 minded (one might say blackguard) 

 infidel, who does it with everyone, 

 and on all occasions (except when 

 his personal interests would suffer, 

 and then he keeps very quiet on the 

 subject), as if it were a thing that 



