236 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



it in your own mind ? I think a third reference to your 

 differences with Comte, especially on the occasion of your 

 adoption of a new title for your system, would afford great 

 facility for misinterpretation ; and in the preface to the 

 new edition of First Principles, in explaining the reasons 

 for revision of title, I shall be glad to see a minimum recog- 

 nition of Comte. I incline to think that there is a good 

 deal in this, but you know best. 



I send you two notices of my own book by Fiske, clever 

 but partial.* Mr. Mill has unwittingly done the most atro- 

 cious thing for the cause of real improvement in this coun- 

 try that any living man could have done. The whole theo- 

 logical world are in ecstasies over his performance at St. 

 Andrew's as an unanswerable argument for the way things 

 are: All he says for science goes for less than nothing is 

 never referred to, and all his unqualified claims for the 

 classics are borne on the wings of the newspapers to the 

 remotest part of the land. 



The presidents of all the colleges in the land are re- 

 hashing his classical arguments in their this year's ad- 

 dresses, and scattering them broadcast and throwing up 

 their hats at a new and unexpected accession to their 

 forces, to which they must know they are not justly entitled. 

 The standard of classical attainment upon which Mill in- 

 sists (and insists that it shall be general) crowds out every- 

 thing else, and makes futile all talk about the educational 

 claims of science. The Catholic organ warns its clergy 

 against commending the Culture demanded by Modern 

 Life, and the Protestant theologians recommend the dif- 

 fusion of Mill's classical argument as an antidote to it. 



The worst difficulty about it is that the theological 

 party is skilfully working it as a gain of authority, and 

 Mill's name is so potent that the opposite party has us at 



* I. e., too much in favour of Greek and Latin ? Or, more likely, in 

 his excessive modesty he meant that I praised his work too highly. 



