He which even a pedagogue cannot crush. began logic at twelve, went through a course of political economy, a science then itself in its infancy, and as immature as its youthful student, at thirteen. He began to contribute to the "Westminster Review" at eighteen, and at twenty may be said to have launched into life an ardent reformer, an enthusiast for the reformation of mankind by improving our external circumstances, but without one single spark of that higher wisdom which descendeth from above, which, as it dare not begin in self, also dare not end there. defect. It shuts out of view the entire spiritual side | treatment is a proof that there are some natures of our nature and the Being to whom these spiritual faculties tend as necessarily as a vine in a cellar to the light of heaven, which penetrates dimly within through the crevices of a shutter. "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart is restless till it rests in Thee." This golden saying of Augustine is not, as some think it, a grand piece of rhetoric about the dignity of the soul, its immensity, its insatiability with any good less than the "chief good." It means much more. It means that there is a faculty of worship in every human being which craves for God as instinctively as the eye craves for light, the ear for sound, or the intellect for the acquisition of knowledge. To define man, we must not merely say of him with the elder Darwin, that "he is an eating and a drinking animal, and endowed with five gateways of knowledge opening out on an external world." It is not enough to go on with Goethe to describe him as a ding an sich, a thinking animal that is able to create for himself a world of ideal truth and beauty. In the last analysis of all, we find that he is a being who must adore, and who, if he will not love what he worships, will end in worshipping what he loves. This instinct of worship is described by our Lord as a thirst which nothing but the water of life can slake. But, like other cases of genuine instincts, we may cloy the hungry edge of appetite with unwholesome food until the appetite itself becomes diseased; or we may starve it down till, by long repression, we lose the very desire for food. Mr. Mill's Autobiography is an instructive lesson on this subject. If we wished to find a comment on this golden saying of Augustine, we should select the life of an intellectual prodigy, such as Goethe, or Comte, or Mill; and as Dr. Chalmers proved the corruption of mankind not so much from their vices as their virtues, in the same way we should instance characters like these, in which the intellectual faculties were at the highest, while the spiritual was almost if not quite torpid, as proofs of our position that culture without godliness is a poor, shrunken, one-sided thing. The keenest perception of beauty, without any sense of the beauty of holiness, may make an aesthetic or art student; loyalty to truth without love to Him who came to bear witness to truth may make a philosopher; a certain zeal for goodness and a passionate hatred of oppression and wrong may make a moralist; and yet in all these three cases there will be something wanting, the character will be dwarfed and stunted in the most essential part, and the record of such a life's growth will be full of instruction and warning. We shall read it with a sense of pained surprise, moved as a spectator at a Greek tragedy by a feeling of "pity and terror." If the child is father to the man, we shall understand in James Stuart Mill's early years the secret of his after-life. It was a joyless youth, all work and no play. His father, James Mill, the historian of India, the ardent Benthamite, was by his son's own showing a hard taskmaster, expecting, as his son put it, "effects without causes." The child began Greek at three years old, had read a good deal of Plato at seven, and had undertaken to abstract Hooke's Roman History, and to write digests of Roman constitutional law at eleven years of age. In fact, he was an infant prodigy, and it is a wonder that he did not share the fate of such precocities. That any one should survive such It is not surprising, therefore, that, with this illassorted mental furniture, and turned out into a world of living human beings a perfect intellectual machine, Mill should have found his existence a solitary and joyless one. He had lived to think, but life is not a mere reflex of the Cartesian formula, cogito ergo sum. He had no outlet for his affections, and what was sadder still, no sense of reverence at the great mystery of the universe as a whole. If we may judge by his own confessions, he had never once been taught to pray. From his silence on the subject we infer that he had never known a mother's love, and thus one of the natural gateways of piety was closed from the first. He was thus like one blind from his birth. His father, as he tells us, had completely weaned his mind from all trace of superstition. The result was inevitable; there came a time when his affections stunted and his aspirations starved of their proper nutriment began to crave for something. He fell into a state of profound dejection. He had made happiness his being's end and aim, and had pursued it on the utilitarian basis of the acquisition of knowledge, and its application to remedy the external defects of society. He found out his mistake, and began partially to apply the remedy, but from not knowing how to go to the root of the question his remedy was empirical only, and it allayed but did not heal the malady. He discovered that happiness should not be pursued as an end in itself, that it is only a flower to be plucked on the way, growing like the "speedwell on the dusty road of duty. So far he was on the right track, and if he had taken one step further perhaps he might have come upon the true balm of Gilead, and found the true Physician. He resolved to discard the mere pursuit of happiness, having found that to increase knowledge was only to increase sorrow; but here his philosophy ended, it could lead him no further. He decided to take duty for his guide instead of happiness, and so far this was an advance. But this duty to others is at best a blind guide, unless itself directed by a higher hand. Coming out of the narrow school of philosophic Radicals who sought the regeneration of society in improving the external condition of man, he arrived at a wider conception of culture. He sought to cultivate the feelings by the sense of the sublime and beautiful in nature, and here Wordsworth and the Lake school of poets were especially serviceable to him. They widened the range of his sympathies, and taught him to understand culture as including the aesthetic and imaginative, as well as the intellectual side of his nature. In this respect his advance was not unlike that of Goëthe when he undertook his Italian journey, and so was introduced into the region of classic art, thus finally breaking with the "storm and stress" period of his earlier culture. 72 "O Father, touch the East, and light The light that shone when Hope was born," while it refers to the Light that shone on the morning of the Nativity, gives Christ one of his most precious titles "The Lord Jesus Christ, which is our Hope" (1 Tim. i. 1). The beautiful episode of Lazarus in the thirty-first and following poems is full of scriptural allusions, as might be supposed; and here again our Lord is recognised under another of his many titles, that of "The Life." sence of God from the worshipper, the veil beyond which the Saviour has now passed. "What reed was that on which I leant?" Here also an allusion to Isaiah (Poem lxxxiii.) xxxvi. 6 is manifest: "So thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed, on Egypt; whereon if a man lean it will go into his hand and pierce him." And Ezekiel xxix. 6, "They have been a staff of reed to the house of Israel." We close with what appear to be some further ideas taken from the Book of Job. In the ninth In the fourteenth of Job the changes that the earth has experienced are thus referred to: "The waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up" (ver. 11). "And surely the mountain falling cometh (fadeth, margin) to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place" (ver. 18). Tennyson thus writes (Poem cxxii.): "O Earth, what changes hast thou seen! The hills are shadows, and they flow Like clouds they shape themselves and go." We might adduce further examples which would show how stored the poet's mind is with scriptural references, but the present must suffice. No doubt one secret of the popularity of "In Memoriam," which we believe has passed through more editions than any other of the poet's works, lies in the fact that the writer has enriched thoughtful and solemn subjects with Scripture imagery, and has thus linked on the immortality of his own book to the higher immortality of that Book of books-the Bible. JOHN STUART MILL. J. C. R. MILL wisely decided some years ago to and opinions by writing it himself. He has been beforehand with the biographers, though not quite in the sense of Dr. Johnson, who once threatened in his rough way to take the life of any one who dared to attempt his. Some ten years ago, before he had entered Parliament, he began to draw up the singular sketch of the growth of his life and opinions now published as his "Autobiography" (Longmans), and he has brought it down almost to the closing scene at Avignon. The external details are only lightly traced; but as a picture of the growth of a mind, and the various stages of culture through which it passed, it leaves us little to desire. We may assume that our readers are already familiar with the outlines of that life from the reviews of it in the daily press. He was born in London on the 20th May, 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of "The History of British India," and during his latter years a despatch writer and confidential servant of the old East India Company. The elder Mill was the son of a petty tradesman and small farmer in the county of Angus, who was trained for the Scotch ministry, but having early conceived an aversion to theological studies, he removed to London, where he supported himself for many years by writing for the press, until in 1819 he obtained an appointment in the India House. Like the two Bernouillis, or the still more eminent instance of the two Herschels, in whom a genius for astronomical research almost seemed hereditary, so the two Mills, father and son, took the same path as thinkers, the elder, who was the head of a school of thought in his day, becoming the father of a yet more famous son. The philosophy of James Mill was that of the sensational school of Hartley and Priestley in its most exaggerated form. In religion, the elder Mill had come to the opinion that, since natural and revealed religion stood and fell together, and that the like objections which applied to the one extended to the other, they were both alike unworthy of credit. Hastily taking up the argument in "Bishop Butler's Analogy," and misconceiving its drift, he decided on the "all or nothing" principle -to reject all since he could not at once reconcile and receive it as a whole. The injunction of the Apostle, prove all things, hold fast that which is good," might have suggested to him a different course. He might have learned at last, if he had been more patient of difficulties, that doubts disappear of themselves as we grow in the knowledge of God. But his decision was early taken that all religion was a delusion, and this was founded on a shallow, onesided theory of human nature. In his philosophy there was no place for what Jonathan Edwards calls the religious affections, but which may be more correctly described as our spiritual instincts-those premonitions in man which mark him out as a being made to seek God, if haply he may feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from any one of He even went further than this. The imagination, that window of the soul, as the intellect is its door to the outer world, was in his case as good as closed. He had schooled himself to think of man as a being formed for the acquisition of "useful knowledge." Science, whether pure or applied-history, in so far as it turned on the details of real life-philosophy that took care to keep itself to that pedestrian view of life which is summed up in the word "utility". of these branches of learning he was a voracious stugeneral, he held them in contempt: it was the contempt of ignorance grafted on early prejudice. His was a singular type of mind, the product of the eighteenth century in its most exaggerated and onesided form. us. We have described the elder Mill's character at some length, because it is impossible to understand the son without knowing somewhat of the father. But it is singular that he tells us nothing whatever of his mother. From his silence on the subject, which is so marked that it almost seems intentional, we are led to infer that she had no influence whatever on his early training. It is enough to account for the extraordinary bringing up of the boy. His was home education of a kind which we cannot commend as an example. He was taught Greek so young that he could not remember the time when he began the study of it. As Greek was then taught through the medium of Latin, and the child was set by his father to the task of studying Greek before he understood Latin, we may leave the reader to conjecture the puzzle he was in in finding out a word in the dictionary, and asking his father the meaning of the Latin equivalent. In this way the boy read Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Lucian, and ploughed his way through pages of crabbed prose before he was allowed to look into a Latin book, or even to approach Homer. The elder Mill seemed to regard poetry as a kind of prose run mad, and the whole stress of his education of his son seemed to be to keep him within the narrow lines of useful knowledge and that common-sense philosophy which he had marked out for himself. From language to logic, from the instrument of thought to thought itself, young Mill was passed on by his stern preceptor at the tender age of twelve. What others may think of putting the Organon of Aristotle in the original in the hands of a lower fluence of his wife, he still continued to the last a Benthamite in politics and a Utilitarian in morals. form schoolboy we cannot say'; to us it seems little | later years, which can only be explained by the inless than monstrous. And yet this forcing-house system was carried on up to the age of eighteen with relentless pertinacity. The boy read with his father, walked with him, and talked with him of the day's studies, made digests of history, and wrote out abstracts of philosophy, till the wonder is that he had not verified Hobbes' sneer, "I should have been as stupid as you if I had read as much." At fourteen there came a brief reprieve; young Mill was sent to France, and spent two years in the south, principally in the Pyrenees, learning the language and acquiring a sense-it was his first escape from the prison-house of dull and spiritless fact-of the sublime and beautiful in nature. This became, as we conceive, a turning-point in his life, and the beginning of a new sense that the whole of existence was not summed up in becoming a walking encyclopædia of useful knowledge. Returning from France in 1822, he now began to take his place at his father's side-the champion in the press of the school of Utilitarians and Radical Reformers who centred around Bentham as their acknowledged chief. The younger Mill is a little sore on this point, as if the fame of his father as the head of the school had been eclipsed by Mr. Bentham. They should divide the crown. Mr. Bentham was its head in social position and length of purse, Mr. James Mill in literary ability and the power of wielding a fluent and facile pen. Bentham's defects in that direction were so marked that his great work on jurisprudence only gained attention in this country after passing through the sieve of a French version. It was M. Dumont, a French Benthamite, who, to use Sydney Smith's phrase, washed him, and dressed him, and put him into clean linen." But James Mill and Bentham together formed a combination strong enough to found a school and to attract disciples. Sir John Bowring and Sir William Molesworth, Joseph Hume and Roebuck, among politicians, were the earliest recruits to the new standard. Then came Grote, and Austen, John and Charles, and younger men, such as Macaulay and Romilly, Sterling and Carlyle, who soon branched off from the "Westminster Review," took their own course in life, and in some cases became decided opponents of the Utilitarian school in which they made their first introduction to life. Thus when the Benthamites branched off, like the school of Hegel in Germany, into a right and left wing, John Stuart Mill the younger followed his father's lead, and during his lifetime continued a member of the straitest sect of the Benthamites. After his father's death, in 1840, he began to construct for himself, but it was only the old house of utility, with a new gable and porch. He discarded the dry statement of the greatest-happiness-of-the-greatestnumber principle. He began to see that happiness, if our being's "end," must not be our "aim;" that we must hit the mark, as in artillery practice, by a kind of ricochet fire. In his later years he departed still further from this. He looked on the imagination and feelings as a class of faculties deserving of culture. His ideas of the State also enlarged; he no longer regarded it only as a machine for registering the popular will. He even took a sentimental view of some subjects, such as the Subjection of Women, and his stern economical law of laissez faire almost lapsed into Socialism. But with these heresies of Of his later phases of opinion, and his short and not very successful career in Parliament, we need say nothing; they are in the memories of all. Not without honour, though certainly without much effect on practical legislation, Mr. Mill retired from Parliament after a session or two, and devoted the concluding years of his life to one or two works, such as that on the rights of women, and that on Liberty," which some consider his greatest work, but which, in our judgment, contains with much that is true a principle which is false, from the fact that man is a social being, needing help above and around him, and unable to evolve any sound conception of liberty unless trained also in the school of law. Having thus glanced at the life as a whole, we now return to study the lessons which it seems to suggest. No one else but Mill could have told it half so well, and if he has not pointed out the moral, it is not for want of materials to do so. This Autobiography is the record of the growth of a mind; it is a history of thought, not a mere chronicle of things as they came and went, and of the passing impressions which they produced. On this account, for the real student of human nature, especially for one who has made. self-improvement his aim in life, the lessons from John Stuart Mill's life are most instructive. He has given us a perfect draft of onehalf of human culture, leaving the other and nobler half entirely out of account. It is a saying of Bernard of Citeaux that we pass from exterior things to interior, from interior to superior. This is the right order of growth, but sometimes it is unhappily the case that our advance lags at the second stage, and does not go on at all to the third. The force of early prejudice is too great, the revolt of the natural heart against some divine truth is too strong, particularly if that truth has been somewhat distorted and placed out of its true light and proportion in the Word of God by the injudicious teaching of men. In that case the mind conceives an invincible prejudice against religious truth, which it never afterwards overcomes. Its growth is stunted from the first, and it becomes a kind of mental monster developing the intellectual life prodigiously, but at the expense of the spiritual. As those who are born lame, or with defective growth in their lower limbs, develop enormous power of muscle in the shoulder and fore-arm, so there is the same disproportionate unfolding in "wisdom and in stature" with some persons. The true theory of culture is the harmonious progression and orderly succession of growth in each part of our nature, and through the three stages of our being. From body to soul, from soul to spirit, from animal to intellectual, from intellectual to spiritual things. If from malformation of brain, or neglect of parents and teachers, there is no intellectual growth whatever, then we have a state which we describe as idiotcy. But what shall we say of those whose intellectual faculties have been abnormally developed at the expense of their spiritual? A sound mind in a sound body was the ideal of education according to a Greek; music and gymnastics, the one teaching the rhythmical motion of the limbs, the other of the mind and its powers--this was the sum of education according to Plato. This is correct as far as it goes; it errs only on the side of defect. It shuts out of view the entire spiritual side | treatment is a proof that there are some natures of our nature and the Being to whom these spiritual which even a pedagogue cannot crush. Не faculties tend as necessarily as a vine in a cellar to began logic at twelve, went through a course of the light of heaven, which penetrates dimly within political economy, a science then itself in its infancy, through the crevices of a shutter. "Thou hast made and as immature as its youthful student, at thirteen. us for Thyself, and the heart is restless till it rests in He began to contribute to the "Westminster Review" Thee." This golden saying of Augustine is not, as at eighteen, and at twenty may be said to have some think it, a grand piece of rhetoric about the launched into life an ardent reformer, an enthusiast dignity of the soul, its immensity, its insatiability for the reformation of mankind by improving our with any good less than the "chief good." It means external circumstances, but without one single spark much more. It means that there is a faculty of wor- of that higher wisdom which descendeth from above, ship in every human being which craves for God as which, as it dare not begin in self, also dare not end instinctively as the eye craves for light, the ear for there. sound, or the intellect for the acquisition of knowledge. To define man, we must not merely say of him with the elder Darwin, that "he is an eating and a drinking animal, and endowed with five gateways of knowledge opening out on an external world." It is not enough to go on with Goëthe to describe him as a ding an sich, a thinking animal that is able to create for himself a world of ideal truth and beauty. In the last analysis of all, we find that he is a being who must adore, and who, if he will not love what he worships, will end in worshipping what he loves. This instinct of worship is described by our Lord as a thirst which nothing but the water of life can slake. But, like other cases of genuine instincts, we may cloy the hungry edge of appetite with unwholesome food until the appetite itself becomes diseased; or we may starve it down till, by long repression, we lose the very desire for food. Mr. Mill's Autobiography is an instructive lesson on this subject. If we wished to find a comment on this golden saying of Augustine, we should select the life of an intellectual prodigy, such as Goethe, or Comte, or Mill; and as Dr. Chalmers proved the corruption of mankind not so much from their vices as their virtues, in the same way we should instance characters like these, in which the intellectual faculties were at the highest, while the spiritual was almost if not quite torpid, as proofs of our position that culture without godliness is a poor, shrunken, one-sided thing. The keenest perception of beauty, without any sense of the beauty of holiness, may make an aesthetic or art student; loyalty to truth without love to Him who came to bear witness to truth may make a philosopher; a certain zeal for goodness and a passionate hatred of oppression and wrong may make a moralist; and yet in all these three cases there will be something wanting, the character will be dwarfed and stunted in the most essential part, and the record of such a life's growth will be full of instruction and warning. We shall read it with a sense of pained surprise, moved as a spectator at a Greek tragedy by a feeling of "pity and terror." If the child is father to the man, we shall understand in James Stuart Mill's early years the secret of his after-life. It was a joyless youth, all work and no play. His father, James Mill, the historian of India, the ardent Benthamite, was by his son's own showing a hard taskmaster, expecting, as his son put it, "effects without causes.' The child began Greek at three years old, had read a good deal of Plato at seven, and had undertaken to abstract Hooke's Roman History, and to write digests of Roman constitutional law at eleven years of age. In fact, he was an infant prodigy, and it is a wonder that he did not share the fate of such precocities. That any one should survive such It is not surprising, therefore, that, with this illassorted mental furniture, and turned out into a world of living human beings a perfect intellectual machine, Mill should have found his existence a solitary and joyless one. He had lived to think, but life is not a mere reflex of the Cartesian formula, cogito ergo sum. He had no outlet for his affections, and what was sadder still, no sense of reverence at the great mystery of the universe as a whole. If we may judge by his own confessions, he had never once been taught to pray. From his silence on the subject we infer that he had never known a mother's love, and thus one of the natural gateways of piety was closed from the first. He was thus like one blind from his birth. His father, as he tells us, had completely weaned his mind from all trace of superstition. The result was inevitable; there came a time when his affections stunted and his aspirations starved of their proper nutriment began to crave for something. He fell into a state of profound dejection. He had made happiness his being's end and aim, and had pursued it on the utilitarian basis of the acquisition of knowledge, and its application to remedy the external defects of society. He found out his mistake, and began partially to apply the remedy, but from not knowing how to go to the root of the question his remedy was empirical only, and it allayed but did not heal the malady. He discovered that happiness should not be pursued as an end in itself, that it is only a flower to be plucked on the way, growing like the "speedwell" on the dusty road of duty. So far he was on the right track, and if he had taken one step further perhaps he might have come upon the true balm of Gilead, and found the true Physician. He resolved to discard the mere pursuit of happiness, having found that to increase knowledge was only to increase sorrow; but here his philosophy ended, it could lead him no further. He decided to take duty for his guide instead of happiness, and so far this was an advance. But this duty to others is at best a blind guide, unless itself directed by a higher hand. Coming out of the narrow school of philosophic Radicals who sought the regeneration of society in improving the external condition of man, he arrived at a wider conception of culture. He sought to cultivate the feelings by the sense of the sublime and beautiful in nature, and here Wordsworth and the Lake school of poets were especially serviceable to him. They widened the range of his sympathies, and taught him to understand culture as including the aesthetic and imaginative, as well as the intellectual side of his nature. In this respect his advance was not unlike that of Goëthe when he undertook his Italian journey, and so was introduced into the region of classic art, thus finally breaking with the "storm and stress " period of his earlier culture. |