been very slovenly. In Mathematics, he had little or no assistance, but in it there are self-acting tests. His readings in Physical Science were also untutored: unless at Montpellier, he never had any masters, and his knowledge never came to maturity.
If I were to compare him in his fifteenth year with the most intellectual youth that I have ever known, or heard or read about, I would say that his attainments on the whole are not unparalleled, although, I admit, very rare. His classical knowledge, such as it was, could easily be forced upon a clever youth at that age. The Mathematics could not be so easily commanded. The best mathematicians have seldom been capable of beginning Euclid at eight or nine,[1] and even granting that in this, as in other subjects, he made small way at first, yet the Toulouse diary shows us what he could do at fourteen; and I should be curious to know whether Herschel, De Morgan, or Airy could have done as much. I have little doubt that, with forcing, these men would all have equaled him in his Classics and Mathematics combined. The one thing, in my judgment, where Mill was most markedly in advance of his years, was Logic. It was not merely that he had read treatises on the Formal Logic, as well as Hobbes's "Computatio sive Logica," but that he was able to chop Logic with his father in regard to the foundations and demonstrations of Geometry. I have never known a similar case of precocity. We must remember, however, that while his father pretended to teach him everything, yet, in point of fact, there were a few things that he could and did teach effectually: one of these was Logic; the others were Political Economy, Historical Philosophy and Politics, all which were eminently his own subjects. On these John was a truly precocious youth; his innate aptitudes, which must have been great, received the utmost stimulation that it was possible to apply. His father put enormous stress upon Logic, even in the scholastic garb; but he was himself far more of a logician than the writers of any of the manuals. In that war against vague, ambiguous, flimsy, unanalyzed words and phrases, carried on alike by Bentham and by himself, in the wide domains of Politics and Ethics, he put forth a faculty not imparted by the scholastic Logic; and in this higher training the son was early and persistently indoctrinated. To this were added other parts of logical discipline which may also be called unwritten: as for example, the weighing and balancing of arguments pro and con in every question; the looking out for snares and fallacies of a much wider compass than those set down in the common manuals. (See the beginning of the "Bentham" article for Mill's delineation of Bentham's "Logic")
He returned to England in July, 1821, after a stay of fourteen months. He sufficiently describes the fruits of his stay in France, which included a familiar knowledge of the French language, and acquaintance with
- ↑ Locke knew a young gentleman who could demonstrate several propositions in Euclid before he was thirteen.
