Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 | Page 2

with
unselfish and magnanimous living.
* * * * *
Much will one day have to be said as to the precise value of Mr. Mill's
philosophical principles, the more or less of his triumphs as a
dialectician, his skill as a critic and an expositor. However this trial
may go, we shall at any rate be sure that with his reputation will stand
or fall the intellectual repute of a whole generation of his countrymen.
The most eminent of those who are now so fast becoming the front line,
as death mows down the veterans, all bear traces of his influence,
whether they are avowed disciples or avowed opponents. If they did not
accept his method of thinking, at least he determined the questions
which they should think about. For twenty years no one at all open to
serious intellectual impressions has left Oxford without having
undergone the influence of Mr. Mill's teaching, though it would be too
much to say that in that gray temple where they are ever burnishing
new idols, his throne is still unshaken. The professorial chairs there and
elsewhere are more and more being filled with men whose minds have
been trained in his principles. The universities only typify his influence
on the less learned part of the world. The better sort of journalists
educated themselves on his books, and even the baser sort acquired a
habit of quoting from them. He is the only writer in the world whose
treatises on highly abstract subjects have been printed during his
lifetime in editions for the people, and sold at the price of railway
novels. Foreigners from all countries read his books as attentively as
his most eager English disciples, and sought his opinion as to their own
questions with as much reverence as if he had been a native oracle. An
eminent American who came over on an official mission which brought
him into contact with most of the leading statesmen throughout Europe,
said to the present writer:--'The man who impressed me most of them
all was Stuart Mill; you placed before him the facts on which you
sought his opinion. He took them, gave you the different ways in which

they might fairly be looked at, balanced the opposing considerations,
and then handed you a final judgment in which nothing was left out.
His mind worked like a splendid piece of machinery; you supply it with
raw material, and it turns you out a perfectly finished product.' Of such
a man England has good reason to be very proud.
He was stamped in many respects with specially English quality. He is
the latest chief of a distinctively English school of philosophy, in which,
as has been said, the names of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, and
Bentham (and Mr. Mill would have added James Mill) mark the line of
succession--the school whose method subordinates imagination to
observation, and whose doctrine lays the foundations of knowledge in
experience, and the tests of conduct in utility. Yet, for all this, one of
his most remarkable characteristics was less English than French; his
constant admission of an ideal and imaginative element in social
speculation, and a glowing persuasion that the effort and wisdom and
ingenuity of men are capable, if free opportunity be given by social
arrangements, of raising human destiny to a pitch that is at present
beyond our powers of conception. Perhaps the sum of all his distinction
lies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of rigorous
sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminous hope. He
told one who was speaking of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, that in his
younger days whenever he was inclined to be discouraged, he was in
the habit of turning to this book, and that he never did so without
recovering possession of himself. To the same friend, who had printed
something comparing Mr. Mill's repulse at Westminster with the
dismissal of the great minister of Lewis the Sixteenth, he wrote:--'I
never received so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to
Turgot; it is indeed an honour to me that such an assimilation should
have occurred to you.' Those who have studied the character of one
whom even the rigid Austin thought worthy to be called 'the godlike
Turgot,' know both the nobleness and the rarity of this type.
Its force lies not in single elements, but in that combination of an ardent
interest in human improvement with a reasoned attention to the law of
its conditions, which alone deserves to be honoured with the high name
of wisdom. This completeness was one of the secrets of Mr. Mill's

peculiar attraction for young men, and for the comparatively few
women whose intellectual interest was strong enough to draw them to
his books. He