RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 69 



are full of the intellectual honesty and moral 

 courage in which Mill perhaps surpassed all his 

 contemporaries. But they are instructive in 

 another way. Mill's career immediately pre- 

 ceded the great trend in the direction of the 

 scientific treatment of human problems which we 

 owe mainly to the influence of Darwin and 

 Spencer. His letters remarkably illustrate the 

 distinction which I have drawn between the 

 rationalist and the scientific way of considering 

 problems of conduct and sociology. The 

 rationalist is self-confident, fully trusting in argu- 

 ment, ready to assert his principles in season and 

 out of season. The man of science is, or ought 

 to be, modest, laborious, most anxious to omit no 

 phenomena, having a deep respect for every view 

 which has actually worked among men. A letter 

 of Mill's in regard to the religious observance of 

 Sunday is very typical.* One would expect the 

 great advocate of Utilitarian Ethics, before con- 

 demning this institution, to consider what part it 

 had played in the history of England and Scot- 

 land, and what practical results might follow from 

 its destruction. But the rationalist in Mill is far 

 too strong for any such investigation. To attri- 

 bute any sacredness to the day, he writes, ' is as 

 mere a superstition as any of the analogous pre- 

 judices which existed in times antecedent to 

 Christianity.' The preservation of the Sunday 



* Letters, I, 100. 



