266 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
newspapers, and in the “ Monthly Repository,” which were more 
according to his matured judgment than his previous periodical 
essays. 
His father died in June 1836. This seems to have freed him 
from some restraints and reticences. His friend Sir William 
Molesworth, a political and metaphysical thinker, had proposed 
to found a new Review, provided Mr Mill would agree to conduct 
it. In this way he was editor of the “London” — latterly the 
“London and Westminster — Review” in the years between 1835 
and 1840. This Review was the organ which he then used for 
the spread of his opinions. It enabled him to express in print 
the results of his altered modes of thought, and to separate him- 
self in a marked manner from the narrower Benthamism of his 
early writings. He resigned the editorship in 1840, after which 
he usually preferred for his essays the wider circulation of the 
“ Edinburgh Review.” 
The first use Mr Mill made of the leisure gained by freedom from 
the cares of a brilliant editorship was to resume his “Logic.” The 
preparation of this historically important treatise had occupied him 
at intervals for twelve years. In 1841 it was ready for the press, 
but circumstances delayed the publication till the spring of 1843. 
He now appeared for the first time as the author of a book, and of 
his greatest book — “A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and In- 
ductive, being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence 
and the Methods of Scientific Investigation.” It is the most 
elaborate treatise in the English language on the logical procedure 
in Induction. Since the publication of the “Novum Organum” and 
the “ Essay on Human Understanding,” no such comprehensive 
attempt in logical theory and the principles of the formation of 
knowledge. had been made by an Englishman. Mr Mill had not 
forgotten his early studies in Aristotelian logic, which, in his 
correlation of induction and syllogism, he tried to assimilate with 
the methods of modern science. If we do not accept the result 
as satisfactory, we may at any rate allow that it has usefully called 
attention to the one-sidedness of merely formal logic. If he fails 
to show that all inference is ultimately from observed particulars 
to unobserved particulars, without any need for general notions, 
he has at least helped to prove the fruitlessness of merely verbal 
