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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



stand far greater mental exertion with- 

 out injury, than the children of uncul- 

 tivated parentage. Such a discipline 

 as yonng Mill underwent would have 

 reduced most children to idiocy, or 

 killed them outright. Mr. Mill was an 

 eminent student of mind, but it is very 

 clear that he dealt with it from the an- 

 cient point of view, and knew very lit- 

 tle of or cared very little for what mod- 

 ern science has had to say about it. 



And even he, with his tough and 

 vigorous organization, barely escaped 

 the consequences of such gross error 

 reduced to practice. At twenty he 

 passed into a cloud of gloom and de- 

 spondency. He became indifferent to 

 his pursuits, sleep brought no relief, 

 and he had thoughts of suicide. He 

 became painfully anxious, under the 

 notion that, if all he had been striving 

 to attain could be realized, there would 

 be nothing left to live for. Brain-dis- 

 turbance from overtasking was evinced 

 by delusion, like that of Martyn, who, 

 when he had come out Senior Wran- 

 gler, was taken with the crazy fancy 

 that mathematics were an invention of 

 Satan, and that he had been ied into a 

 net of destruction. Mr. Mill had evi- 

 dently reached the verge of a cerebral 

 break-down, when he changed the 

 course of his mental action by going 

 into emotional literature, and ascribed 

 his escape to Wordsworth's poetry. 

 Had he been as deep in physiology as 

 he was in Greek, and made use of his 

 knowledge, this dangerous state might 

 not only have been better interpreted, 

 but probably quite avoided. 



When, therefore, Mr. Mill, some fifty 

 years later, in chalking out a system 

 of education for the students of St. 

 Andrew's, said of ancient and modern 

 knowledge, " Why not both ? " he was 

 himself a living refutation of its possi- 

 bility. He had worked himself up to 

 the very breaking-point in the enor- 

 mous accumulation of classical and oth- 

 er acquisitions, while modern thought 

 had not been correspondingly mastered. 



The law of mental limitations, by which 

 one thing can only be had at the ex- 

 pense of another, was in as full force in 

 his case as in that of inferior minds ; 

 and his classical surcharging involved 

 a correlative deficiency in science which 

 has unquestionably been an element of 

 weakness in his own career. We do 

 not deny that Mr. Mill had a very con- 

 siderable acquaintance with science, 

 and only insist that it was neither up 

 to his own standard of thoroughness 

 in other departments, nor was it suffi- 

 cient for his own requirements as a 

 thinker ambitious of controlling the 

 mind of his age. His book on " Log- 

 ic," undoubtedly a great work, would 

 have been a greater if a part of the 

 effort spent upon classical history had 

 been given to the history of science. 

 But, while demanding that students 

 shall learn dead languages, to get at the 

 originals of political history, he was 

 content, or rather he was compelled, 

 to take scientific history at second- 

 hand. 



Such was the deficiency of the work 

 in this respect that, although, as Mr. 

 Mill states in the Autobiography, Prof. 

 Bain " went carefully through the man- 

 uscript before it was sent to press, 

 and enriched it with a great number 

 of additional examples and illustrations 

 from science," yet it was exposed to 

 the telling criticisms of Dr. Whewell, 

 the eminent historian of science, for 

 the faulty and ill-chosen character of 

 the instances of discovery selected to 

 exemplify and confirm his methods. 



Mr. Mill was at the head of a school 

 of thinkers which maintained what is 

 called the Experiential Psychology; 

 that is, in Mr. Mill's language, " there 

 is not any idea, feeling, or power, in 

 the human mind, which, in order to ac- 

 count for it, requires that its origin 

 should be referred to any other source 

 than experience." The problem of 

 mind, as thus conceived, is one of the 

 grandest openings of modern thought. 

 Be the doctrine true or false, it brings 



