336 
is natural, since “ it is necessary to the very subsistence of the 
world that injury, injustice, and cruelty should be punished.” 
Had not Mr. Mill failed to examine then what he meant bv 
“ Goodness,” (as well as Power), he would not have given his 
present account of “ Nature ” ; for even if “ Nature ” is taken as a 
Again, what name for “every thing,” “ Goodness,” is not a name 
idea M of good! for nothing. Mr. Mill saw that “every thing” is 
ness? not now good; he owns, however, that “every 
thing” is not evil. If something is good, what is it? That 
question he did not consider. 
27. Again : — Socrates, to whom, as we now know so well, 
Mr. Mill thought to appeal, never found fault with 
with th™ Meas phenomena, mental or physical, generally approved 
Socmtes!° d ° f hy the human experience and understanding. But 
that kind of optimism which would exclude from the 
world all possibility of failure, or evil, would be automatism, 
unknown to Socrates and his method. His object always was to 
ascertain Nature. A universe of automata is perhaps conceivable ; 
but it was the reverse of the hypothesis of Socrates. A machine 
is not regarded by the Socratic thinker as the ultimate perfection 
of being, even though the alternative of conscious action and 
volition must involve the possibility of moral failure. But it 
must be added, that possible injury is no peculiarity of moral 
life. All phenomenal being implies possible change , and there- 
fore alternative results. The “ absence of all possible collision 
or disaster ” can hardly be reckoned as a scientific supposition, 
even if at all conceivable in physical life where evil may be phy- 
sically irremediable, any more than it is in moral life where new 
moral causation may happily be found. 
This again, most inconsistently, is recognized by Mr. Mill 
in such a passage as the following: — (p. 54), where he is 
once more a “ backslider ” from Materialism, and his previous 
principles. “ The artificially-created, or at least artificially-per- 
fected Nature of the best and noblest human beings is the only 
Nature that is commendable to follow ” ! — And so, after all, it is 
as Butler in his matchless Three Sermons on Human Nature 
says: “ The perfection of Nature is ‘ Nature, 1 ” or as Aristotle has 
it ( Eth ., x.), the t£\uo c is the law of virtue. But then this is 
the entire meaning of the Sequi Naluram in Morals, — which 
Mr. Mill so mis-states. 
28. The recognition in some way of the evils that afflict our 
world both physically and morally can be avoided by 
ah must re- no one. It is Mr. Mill’s peculiarity, as it was that 
a°flct ze ev *i #s of some Gnostic sects, to confound those evils with 
Nature itself ; which we now see to be impossible. 
He was first misled in this by his own attempted definitions, in 
