Mill
Poetry and Philosophy. A Study in the Thought of John Stuart Mill. By Thomas Woods. (Hutchinson, 25s.)
To readers pressed for time, it should be said at the start that neither this book nor (by consequence) this reliiv: need be read. To the leisured few who continue with the latter, the reason why this is so may be put briefly. Mr. Woods hints that he is an amateur in the fields into which his study of Mill has taken him; in that ease, his book ranges widely enough to have a certain kind of impressiveness. But in what it allegedly sets out to do—'define the influence that poets and their poetry have on philosophers and their philosophy'--it is a non-starter. The 'test case,' Wordsworth's influence on Mill, is out of sight nearly all the time, and the generalising last chapter on 'Poetry and Philosophy' is a mere • drift. This is plain from expressions like 'the ghost of the hand-washing Pilate stands reproach- fully in the way of such an argument,' or 'the poet and the philosopher are both in pursuit of the: same perhaps eternally elusive princess(' lointaine—the Truth,' with which it abounds.
In fact, Mr. Woods's book is simply a brief critical exposition of most sides of 'Mill's Thought.' Mill wrote in many difficult fields, and the enterprise is praiseworthy and ambitious. But the simple truth is that the author does not recognise the standard of discussion below which, in such matters, no contribution is made. 'The old quarrel between Induction and Deduction, in which Induction, the brash newcomer, is likely ' to come off worst . . .'; 'only analytic propositions can be Made to behave in the drill- like manner of the syllogism' (an elemcntary howler)—to debate like this is not to debate at all. Nor do things like 'uncomfortable for the philosopher;' somewhat dubious' and lin- plausible' belong to a language in which mental operations take place. I am sorry to seem brusque, but as an exposition of Mill's theories this book is a whoreson zed, an unnecessary letter.
Yet one need not be an analyst and a precisian to make something of Mill: therein lies his interest and power. He combines in high degree two qualities of which most men have but one. He knows how realities may have a vital, even splendid, individuality and uniqueness; and how, for all that, they belong to an intricate order of logic, law or tendency. The duality runs through his ethics, where he sees the relevance both of calculating practical consequences and of re- cognising absolutes like justice and self-sacrifice; through his work on social science, where he shows a vital sense of how social realities can be fluid yet mensurable; and through his subtle awareness in politics of how institutions and individuals interact. It shows in another way in perhaps his best work, the Subjection of Women (which Mr. Woods ignores, heaven knows why). Here his almost magisterial vision of a whole order of argument and counter-argument is suffused with a richer, more immediate sense of plain human realities stifled and affronted. Finally, the duality shows in his style, .with its constant movement between the formal and the sudden, poignant or direct. These things (if any one figure stands behind the second of them, it is Coleridge not Wordsworth) make Mill one of the most fertile and helpful writers of his period, the superior in some ways of Arnold (whom he may have much influenced) or even Newman. In this paradoxical duality we have the centre from which all his distinctiveness proceeds.
JOHN HOLLOWAY
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