347 
Christ Himself had a charm for Mr. Mill ; Strauss, at length, 
seemed blind to it. 
There is a painful account, if we remember rightly, in the 
Letters of Byron, or in the notes, about Shelley’s having had the 
conviction that, to get rid of the alleged ineradicable tendency 
of man to Theism, it would be desirable to form an artificial 
community from which the very name and thought of God 
should be rigorously shut out, and the children be 
brought up entirely without the tradition of a Deity stfeney* 0t<? ° f 
in any form. It is said that Shelley purchased an 
island in the /Egean, with a view of carrying out this barbarous 
project. It might, by excluding all literature, have been possible, 
in this unnatural way of determining our nature, (as Coleridge 
would say), to “hunt men out of their humanity”; but the plan was 
abortive through the unhappy poet’s death. The vessel in which 
he put forth to go to his island foundered, and he was lost. We 
had thought the theory had been lost too. 
In truth, such idea of excluding the thought of God from the 
nature and mind of man resembles that of the king; 
in Herodotus, who shut up a child in order to ascer- Hero dotus. m 
tain, by excluding him from definite knowledge of 
human speech, what would be the first sounds he might produce, — 
as if he might so determine what were the aboriginal elements 
of “ natural” language. Such treatment might possibly produce 
imbecility, if attempted on any child, or elicit entirely unhealthy 
development even in the strong. 
43. But we can hardly help being thus reminded of Mr. Mill’s 
own training, excluded from the ways of men. It may 
explain so much of his apparent inability to deal with the 
natural, and his misapprehension of tradition, and especially 
also of the a priori. Shut out too much from common homes 
and habits, he seemed scarcely one of his kind. There is a gentle 
self-contemplation in his life which touches the Mr. Mill’s 
reader at times profoundly, as it gives us glimpses account of his 
of what he might have been. Our feeling concerning 
him is deepened by the fact that he really wrestled with the ruinous 
predestinarian philosophy, and only succumbed to it as a ma- 
terialist for want of the a priori, which had withered in him from 
his earliest hours. It was with him, then, no mere theory to be 
“ without God.” 
The Essay is in Five Parts: the First of them, in its mis- 
cellaneous subdivisions, contains the germs of what 
follows. “ Theism,” and its “Evidences,” “ Causa- 0 f theEssay" 1 
tion,” the “ Consensus omnium “ Consciousness,” 
and “ Design,” pass rapidly before us ; and afterwards, in Parts 
