BOOKS.
MILL'S DISSERTATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS.* Mn. MILL has republished in a permanent form the more valuable of those papers contributed by him, during a series of years, to various organs of our periodical literature. Though not a " faithful representation of his present state of opinion and feeling," he has removed from them every proposition " which he has altogether ceased to think true ; " confiding in the reader's own power to supply the deficiency of fair but inexhaustive state- ment, " the rather as he will, in many cases, find the balance re- stored in some other part of this collection." We have thus not only a repository of profound thought and interesting reflection, on the most engrossing subjects of human meditation, theology excepted, but we have a proximately correct exhibition of the philosophical opinions of a powerful and disciplined intellect. The impartial and comprehensive character of Mr. Mill's mind, its analytic qualities and synthetic tendencies, examining, pro- bing, dissecting, yet recombining and estimating life as a whole, his great attainments and extensive culture, imply a catholicity of thought and feeling very attractive, and very unusual, in this or in any age. He has not studied Aristotle and neglected Plato ; he is not a mere rationalist, with an ignorant contempt of art, of human activity, human sentiment, and human passion ; his ac- ceptance of the Inductive Logic, of which he is the unrivalled ex- positor, has not impelled him to a dogmatic denial of all Trans- cendental Existence ; his admiration and advocacy of free in- quiry still allow him to proclaim the moral grandeur and re- novating agency of the religion of " the crucified God." If, in ethics, lie holds that the moral aspect of an action depends on its foreseeable consequences, he insists on the recognition of its two remaining aspects, that of its beauty and that of its loveableness ; if he denies the doctrine of an innate moral sense, he does not over- look the feeling of an approving and disapproving conscience, the product not of artificial associations, but of congenial and natural emotions; if, in politics, he announces that Representation ought ultimately to be coextensive with population, he also announces that the decision of political questions must be referred to the in- dependent judgment of a select and specially educated few, " the idea of a national government being not that the people them- selves govern, but that they have security for good government." Strongly opposed to the meddlesome intervention of the State, ho contends that while it is bound to abstain from fettering the free agency of others, it may exercise a free agency of its own in pro- moting the public welfare. Distrusting Socialist remedies for the correction of unjust inequalities in the lot of mankind, our author yet holds that equality is one of the ends of good social arrange- ments. In education, while duly valuing the machinery of schools and colleges, he includes among the means of making men wiser and better, all those agencies "by which the people can be reached either through their intellects or their sensibilities; from preaching and popular writing to national galleries, theatres, and public games." But perhaps this intellectual equity is nowhere more strikingly manifested than in Mill's protests against the defective views of the revolutionary school of Analysis. Thus he " honours Coleridge for having vindicated against Bentham and Adam Smith and the whole eighteenth century the principle of an endowed class, for the cultivation of learning and for diffusing its results among the community ; " he opposes, with Coleridge, " the let alone doctrine, or the theory that governments can do no better than do nothing," as a doctrine generated by the manifest selfishness and incompetence of modern European governments : regarding Bentham as a great benefactor of mankind, and be- lieving that general utility is the foundation of morality, he ex- poses the shortcomings of that " eyeless heroism," Bentham's theory of life ; elsewhere he regrets that the chivalrous spirit has almost disappeared from books of education ; that the youth of both sexes of the educated classes are universally growing up un- romantic, and declares that— "Catechisms, whether Pinnock's or the Church of England's, will be found a poor substitute for those old romances, whether of chivalry or of faery, which if they did not give a true picture of actual life, did not give a false one, since they did not profess to give any, but (what was much better) filled the youthful imagination with pictures of heroic men and of what are at least as much wanted, heroic women."
In " Poetry and its Varieties," as also in the admirable essay on " Alfred de Vigny," we find a thorough appreciation of high imaginative art. "The truth of poetry," says Mr. Mill, "is to paint the human soul truly : the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of human life." Thus the love and admiration of excel- lence are, in his view, necessary to noble and manly action ; and these emotions are capable of being awakened and developed, not by didactic appliances, but by direct appeals to the affections, such as nature and art supply. In his excellent paper on " Civi- lization" we find Mr. Mill complaining of the torpidity and cowardice which mark the progress of civilization, and will con- tinue to mark it until met by a system of cultivation adapted to counteract it. The relaxation of individual character, the moral effeminacy, the inaptitude for struggle which (in 1836 at least) distinguished the more patrician classes, are directly attributed i to the effects of an imperfect civilization. The remedy for its ac- companying evil tendencies consists, he tells us, in establishing counter tendencies. To call out personal energy he recommends
• Dissertations and Discussions, political,philosophical and historieal,reprinted chiefly from the Edinburgh and Westminster Reviews. By John Stuart Mill. Two volumes. Published by J. W. Parker.
national institutions of education and forms of polity calculated to invigorate the individual character. To check the multiplica- tion of competitors in all branches of business and iu all profes- sions, he points to the limiting principle in the progress of the spirit of cooperation. It is with a strong conviction of the ne- cessity of this system of intellectual antagonism, that in his re- view of De Tocqueville " On Democracy in America," we find Mill, in opposition to a growing popular opinion, attaching great importance to the study of Greek and Roman literature.
" Not only," he says, "do these literatures furnish examples of high finish and perfection in workmanship to correct the slovenly .habits of modern hasty writing, but they exhibit in the military and agricultural common- wealths of antiquity, precisely that order of virtues in which a commercial society is apt to be deficient ; and they altogether show human nature on a grander seals ; with less benevolence but more patriotism, less sentiment but more self-control : if a lower average of virtue, more striking individual examples of it ; fewer small goodnesses but more greatness and appreciation of greatness; more which tends to exalt the imagination and inspire high conceptions of the capabilities of human nature. If, as every one may see, the want of affinity of these studies to the modern mind is gradually lower- ing them in popular estimation, this is but a confirmation of the need of them, and renders it more incumbent upon those who have the power, to do their utmost towards preventing their decline."
In the important essay on "Democracy," which we have al- ready mentioned, Mill shows that the moral and social influences in operation in republican America are equally noticeable in aris- tocratic England. Though the decay of authority and the in- creasing irreverence for traditional opinion are more directly con- nected with the progress of democracy, they are not exclusively connected with it. Wherever science and knowledge are cul- tivated, respect for old opinions diminishes. The matter-of-fact spirit, the dogmatism of common sense, which M. de Tocqueville finds in America, require no democracy to account for it. It " needs only the habit of energetic action without a proportional development of the taste for speculation"; its excess being greatly encouraged by the diffusion of half instruction. The evil that Mr. Mill dreads is not the preponderance of a democratic class, but of any class. A homogeneous community is, he says, naturally a stationary community. The collective opinion, in- deed, must be the ruling power, but in order to the formation of the best public opinion, a social support for antagonistic opinion must exist, the elements which compose it being an agricultural class, a leisured class, and a learned class, of which the first re- presents the spirit of local attachment and personal loyalty, and the two remaining classes serve to control the excess of the commercial spirit by a contrary one. The ascendency of the commercial class in our modern civilization Mill regards as inevitable. But be- cause it must be the most powerful it need slot therefore be om- nipotent. The principle of intellectual opposition is perhaps most splendidly illustrated in the masterly dissertations on Jeremy Bentham and S. T. Coleridge, "the two great seminal minds of England in their age " ; the former a Progressive, the latter a Conservative Philosopher ; Bentham more particularly discerning those truths with which existing doctrines and institutions are at variance, Coleridge the neglected truths which lay in them. For lucid exposition, distinctness in the statement of conflicting views, affluence of thought and judicial completeness of survey, these two essays are specially worthy of commendation.
A consistent disciple of the Experience philosophy, Mr. Mill would make the area of Induction coextensive with human life, maintaining in the spiritual realm of thought and feeling, no less than in that of material nature, the existence of prevailing uniformity and regular succession. Thus he would apply the se- quential theory to the domain of human volition ; and in esti- mating the past state of the human race, he would conceive " all history as a progressive chain of causes and effects," regarding " the facts of each generation as one complex phenomenon, caused by those of the generation preceding, and causing in its turn those of the next in order." A true interpretation of the phe- nomena of nature, material and spiritual, the connexion of all subordinate and isolated facts with some supreme and universal fact, has been the problem of all philosophy. Under the Meta- physical or Platonic method, the solution of this problem, if sug- gested, has not been satisfactorily applied ; under the Physical or Aristotelian method, science has advanced rapidly to its preap- pointed gaol,—the explanation of all observable or inferrible phenomena. So "bnich has been reclaimed from Chaos ; and we have at least the promise of indefinite conquest in the future. It is true, on the other hand, that the reality of its success and its security of possession have accorded with a marked circumscrip- tion of province and limitation of survey. To shut out for ever the prospect into the realms of a Diviner Life, to exclude all gleams from remoter worlds, is not a procedure that a being like man, " with thoughts that wander through eternity," can readily bring himself to accept. A regeneration of the human mind that would begin with cutting off from existence the infinite love and hope that give it its profoundest charm, seems scarcely other than a degeneration. The problem is a perplexing one, but there must be some mode of solving it. Does the solution lie in the as- cension and spiritualization of positive science ?—so that, after having traversed all the lower grades of being, " till body up to spirit work," it arrive at the "First Good, First Perfect, and First Fair." Will the Tree of Knowledge, springing from the "root" of material fact, take for its green stalk and airy leaves " the high instincts and secret monitions of the soul, till, completing the beautiful representation of the poet, it produce the "the bright, consummate flower" of a divinely-human reve- lation ?
Mr. Mill is one of the very few men in England who have a voice of their own. May we hope to hear from him, as a foremost champion of the Experience Philosophy, that "strain of higher mood" which it yet wants, and of which his previous utterances do not entirely preclude the hope ?
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