NEWS OF THE WEEK.
WE have lost in Mr. John Stuart Mill a great and lucid thinker, though not one who, to our mind, has led English philosophy into the right track towards Truth. He died on Thursday of erysipelas, at Avignon,—where he will be buried, we suppose, beside his wife, who already rests there,—having nearly completed his sixty-seventh year. Ile was a very great expositor both of economical and philosophical thought ; indeed, one was sometimes tempted to think he made his expositions too elaborate and easy, so as to seem to dissipate, without really dissipating, -the difficulty with which he was dealing. Every question was apt to look simpler and clearer in his pages than it was in reality. But if there were sometimes a defect in his power to retain a firm hold of a difficulty he could not fully explain away, his great power of lucid illustration was one of the chief fascinations of his style, and lent—to his economical works especially—a singular brightness and beauty. Negative as were his views, or rather, perhaps, his published views, on religious matters, there was a loftiness and enthusiasm in his principles that seemed to be almost inconsist- ent with their utilitarian origin, and in his book on Liberty and his reply to Mr. Mansel's view of "the limits of religious thought" there were passages of the purest and noblest eloquence. No man of our age has influenced the springs of intellec- tual conviction so powerfully,—Oxford, for instance, has been simply converted (though not, as we hold, to the truth) by Mr. Mill's System of Logic,—while hardly any one has done so much to deepen, to widen, and to elevate the study of political science. He had his father's abilities softened by a touch of poetry and a capacity for wide sympathy which raised talent into genius. He still has his part, and it is a large part, in the mind of every English thinker he has left behind him.
