properly understood. “And whither,” he adds, “can mankind so advantageously turn, in order to learn the proper means, and to form their minds to the proper habits, as to that branch of knowledge in which by universal acknowledgment the greatest number of truths have been ascertained, and the greatest possible degree of certainty arrived at?”
By 1831 the period of depression had passed; Mill’s enthusiasm for humanity had been thoroughly reawakened, and had taken the definite shape of an aspiration to supply an unimpeachable method of search for conclusions in moral and social science. No mystic ever worked with warmer zeal than Mill. But his zeal encountered a check which baffled him for several years, and which left its mark in various inconsistencies and incoherences in his completed system. He had been bred by his father in a great veneration for the syllogistic logic as an antidote against confused thinking. He attributed to his early discipline in this logic an impatience of vague language which in all likelihood was really fostered in him by his study of the Platonic dialogues and of Bentham, for he always had in himself more of Plato’s fertile ingenuity in canvassing the meaning of vague terms than the schoolman’s rigid consistency in the use of them. Be this as it may, enthusiastic as he was for a new logic that might give certainty to moral and social conclusions, Mill was no less resolute that the new logic should stand in no antagonism to the old. In his Westminster review of Whately’s Logic in 1828 (invaluable to all students of the genesis of Mill’s logic) he appears, curiously enough, as an ardent and brilliant champion of the syllogistic logic against highfliers such as the Scottish philosophers who talk of “superseding” it by “a supposed system of inductive logic.” His inductive logic must “supplement and not supersede.” But for several years he searched in vain for the means of concatenation.
Meantime, while recurring again and again, as was his custom, to this cardinal difficulty, Mill worked indefatigably in other directions where he saw his way clear. The working of the new order in France, and the personalities of the leading men, had a profound interest for him; he wrote on the subject in the Examiner. He had ceased to write for the Westminster in 1828; but during the years 1832 and 1833 he contributed many essays to Tait’s Magazine, the Jurist, and the Monthly Repository. In 1835 Sir William Molesworth founded the London Review with Mill as editor; it was amalgamated with the Wesminster (as the London and Westminster Review) in 1836, and Mill continued editor (latterly proprietor also) till 1840. Much of what he wrote then was subsequently incorporated in his systematic works: some of his essays were reprinted in his first two volumes of Dissertations and Discussions (1859). The essays on Bentham and Coleridge constituted the first manifesto of the new spirit which Mill sought to breathe into English Radicalism. But the reprinted papers give no just idea of the immense range of Mill’s energy at this time. His position in the India Office, where alone he did work enough for most men, cut him off from entering parliament; but he laboured hard though ineffectually to influence the legislature from without by combating the disposition to rest and be thankful. In his Autobiography he admits that the attempt to form a Radical party in parliament at that time was chimerical.
It was in 1837, on reading Whewell’s Inductive Sciences and re-reading Herschel, that Mill at last saw his way clear both to formulating the methods of scientific investigation and joining on the new logic as a supplement to the old. The Logic was published in 1843. In 1844 appeared his Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy. These essays were worked out and written many years before, and show Mill in his first stage as a political economist. Four out of the five essays are elaborate and powerful solutions of perplexing technical problems—the distribution of the gains of international commerce, the influence of consumption on production, the definition of productive and unproductive labour, the precise relations between profits and wages. Though Mill appears here purely as the disciple of Ricardo, striving after more precise statement, and reaching forward to further consequences, we can well understand in reading these essays how about the time when he first sketched them he began to be conscious of power as an original and independent thinker.
That originality and independence became more conspicuous when he reached his second stage as a political economist, struggling forward towards the standpoint from which his systematic work was written. It would seem that in his fits of despondency one of the thoughts that marred his dreams of human improvement was the apparently inexorable character of economic laws, condemning thousands of labourers to a cramped and miserable existence, and thousands more to semi-starvation. From this oppressive feeling he found relief in the thought set forth in the opening of the second book of his Political Economy—that, while the conditions of production have the necessity of physical laws, the distribution of what is produced among the various classes of producers is a matter of human arrangement, dependent upon alterable customs and institutions. There can be little doubt that this thought, whether or not in the clear shape that it afterwards assumed, was the germ of all that is most distinctive in his system of political economy. This system, which for many years subsequently was regarded as authoritative, has been subjected to vigorous criticism by later economists, and it is perhaps not too much to say that it now possesses mainly an historical interest. Its chief importance is perhaps the stress which it laid on the vital connexion which must subsist between true economic theory and the wider facts of social and national development.
While his great systematic works were in progress, Mill wrote very little on events or books of the day. He turned aside for a few months from his Political Economy during the winter of the Irish famine (1846–1847) to advocate the creation of peasant-proprietorships as a remedy for distress and disorder in Ireland. He found time also to write elaborate articles on French history and Greek history in the Edinburgh Review apropos of Michelet, Guizot and Grote, besides some less elaborate essays.
The Political Economy was published in 1848. Mill could now feel that his main work was accomplished; he remained, however, on the alert for opportunities of useful influence, and pressed on with hardly diminished enthusiasm in his search for useful truth. Among other things, he made a more thorough study of socialist writers, with the result that, though he was not converted to any of their schemes as being immediately practicable, he began to look upon some more equal distribution of the produce of labour as a practicability of the remote future, and to dwell upon the prospect of such changes in human character as might render a stable society possible without the institution of private property. This he has called his third stage as a political economist, and he says that he was helped towards it by the lady, Mrs Taylor,[1] who became his wife in 1851. It is generally supposed that he writes with a lover’s extravagance about this lady’s powers when he compares her with Shelley and Carlyle. But a little reflection will show that he wrote with his usual accuracy and sobriety when he described her influence on him. He expressly says that he owed none of his technical doctrine to her, that she influenced only his ideals of life for the individual and for society; the only work perhaps which was directly inspired by her is the essay on the enfranchisement of women (Dissertations, vol. ii.). It is obvious from what he says that his inner life became very different after he threw off his father’s authority. This new inner life was strengthened and enlarged by Mrs Taylor.
During the seven years of his married life Mill published less than in any other period of his career, but four of his most
- ↑ Mrs Taylor (Harriet Hardy) was the wife of John Taylor, a wholesale druggist in the city of London. She was a confirmed invalid, and lived in the country, where Mill visited her regularly for twenty years, with the full consent of her husband, a man of limited mental powers, but of high character and unselfishness. Mill’s friendship with Mrs Taylor and their marriage in 1851 involved a break with his family (apparently due to his resentment at a fancied slight, not to any bitterness on their part), and his practical disappearance from society. (On these points see Mary Taylor, Mrs Mill’s grand-daughter, in Elliott’s edition of the Letters.)
