and a friend of Carlyle's; and a second visit to France still further helped to broaden his views and sympathies, more especially through the influence of the St. Simonian school and Comte. Important also among the friendships which affected his development was that with Mrs Taylor, an invalid lady of whose intellectual powers Mill had the most exalted opinion, and whom he ultimately married.
In 1835, the "London Review," later combined with the "Westminster Review," and for a time owned by Mill, was started as the organ of the "philosophical radicals"; and till he gave it up in 1840 he wrote much in it on political and literary topics, and sought to make it an influence in practical politics. But the party it represented fell for the time into obscurity, and Mill resumed his logical studies, which culminated in 1843 in the publication of his "Logic." This work, which met with great and immediate success, established Mill as the leader of the empirical school of thought in England, and it holds its position still as a standard work on the subject.
His interest now passed for the time to economics, and within five years he issued his "Principles of Political Economy," a treatise which stands on the political side, as his "Logic" does on the philosophical, as the representative statement of the principles of the school of philosophical radicalism. Much in its teaching is still regarded by economists as valuable, and the book ranks as perhaps the most important systematic treatise on the subject since "The Wealth of Nations."
In 1858 the East India Company was dissolved, the administration of India being taken over by the English Government, and Mill retired on a pension. The same year his wife died, just after completing with her husband the revision of his famous "Essay on Liberty." In this book, along with his "Representative Government" (1860) and his "Utilitarianism" (1861) one may find an exceedingly compact presentation of his views on the most important questions of social and political philosophy. His function with regard to the Utilitarian doctrines in which he had been trained by his father was that of broadening and elevating the conception of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" as the true end of human conduct, by the recognition of difference of quality among pleasures, and by the addition of a new sanction for altruism in a "feeling of unity with his fellow creatures" which makes it a "natural want" of a person of "properly cultivated moral nature" that his aims and theirs should harmonize. With the rise of the evolutionist school on the one hand and the spread of the doctrines of Kant and his successors on the other, the influence of Mill's philosophy has declined.
