for which these terms stand. As might be expected, Mill applauds Mr. Lewis' aim, though in many cases he disagrees with his specific conclusion. But the part of the review that is most interesting has only casual reference to Mr. Lewis' book. "Mankind," Mill says, "have many ideas, and but few words. This truth should never be absent from the mind of one who takes upon him to decide if another man's language is philosophical or the reverse. Two consequences follow from it; one, that a certain laxity in the use of language must be borne with, if a writer makes himself understood; the other, that, to understand a writer who is obliged to use the same words as a vehicle for different ideas, requires a vigorous effort of co-operation on the part of the reader." And again; "It shall be recollected, too, that many a man has a mind teeming with important thoughts, who is quite incapable of putting them into words which shall not be liable to any metaphysical objection; that when this is the case, the logical incoherence or incongruity of the expression is commonly the very first thing which strikes the mind, and that which there is least merit in perceiving. The man of superior intellect, in that case, is not he who can only see that the proposition precisely as stated is not true; but he who, not overlooking the incorrectness at the surface, does, nevertheless, discern that there is truth._at_the bottom." The review closes with the following paragraph: "We have often thought that a really philosophical Treatise on the Ambiguities of the Moral Sciences would be one of the most valuable scientific contributions which a man of first-rate intellectual ability could confer upon his age, and upon posterity. But it would not be so much a book of criticism as of inquiry. Its main end would be, not to set people right in their use of words, which you never can be qualified to do, so long as their thoughts, on the subject treated of, are in any way different from yours; but to get at their thoughts through their words, and to see what sort of a view of truth can be got, by looking at it in their way. It would be seen, then, how multifarious are the prop mark them with, so that one word is sometimes all we have to denote a dozen different ideas, and that men go wrong less often than Mr. Lewis supposes, from using a word in many senses, but more frequently from using it only in one, the distinctions which it serves to mark in its other acceptations not being adverted to at all. Such a book would enable all kinds of thinkers, who are now at daggers-drawn, because they are speaking different dialects and know it not, to understand one another, and to perceive that, with the proper explanations, their doctrines are reconcilable; and would unite all the exclusive and one-sided systems, so long the bane of true philosophy, by placing before each man a more comprehensive view, in which the whole of what is affirmative in his own view would be included." "This is the larger and nobler design which Mr. Lewis should set before himself, and which, we believe, his abilities to be equal to did he but feel that this is the only task worthy of them. He might thus contribute a large part to what is probably destined to be the great philosophical achievement of the era, of which many signs already announce the commencement; viz., to unite all half-truths which have been fighting against one another ever since the creation, and blend them in one harmonious whole." 3 This is Mill writing in his finest spirit. The desire for fairness, the eagerness to understand points of view different from his own, is doubly significant when we recall his violent sectarianism of a few years before. He became, as he says in the Autobiography, "catholic and tolerant to an extreme degree." Goethe's device, "manysidedness," was one which he would most willingly have taken for his own. And the confidence here expressed that it would be possible by clear and sympathetic thinking to "unite all exclusive and onesided systems" in a more comprehensive view is a key to much of Mill's activity during the following years. The Logic was Mill's attempt to supply a treatise on the ambiguities of the moral sciences such as he felt the need of. Just how important from a social point of view Mill felt that it was to get the right sort of first principles will be seen in the next chapter. 'Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. I. (April to Sept., 1832) p. 164. From this time on there are two closely connected lines of development in Mill, which it will be worth while to trace out separately. The first is the story of his friendships and of his growing appreciation of the importance of social intercourse. The other is his emphasis on self-culture and his developing philosophy of the individual. As Mill's own circle of friendships increased, he realized more concretely the social ties which bind individuals together, and provide what he calls a "firm foundation" for society. And as he found a new and quiet sort of happiness in the cultivation of the inner life for its own sake, he began to lay more theoretical emphasis on the importance of self-culture. The story of Mill's friendships will provide the subject for this chapter; the development of his philosophy of the individual for that which follows. II. The writer of an article in the Edinburgh Review of January, 1874, in an unfavorable criticism of Mill's work, tries to show that Mill, being starved for friendship in his earlier youth, at this time and later in his life made very strong friendships and let his ideas be dominated by the ideas of his friends. He says, "Most of his literary criticisms were suggested by the desire to make known the merits of a friend, and his personal predilections are manifest in all of them." The innuendo in this criticism is certainly unfair, but there is much literal fact in it. For Mill's friends played an important part in his life and in the development of his ideas during the next few years. And it is true that this exuberance of friendliness is in some sort a reaction from the loneliness that went before. There is no doubt about Mill's isolation in his early years, though there is no evidence of any sense of loneliness until along about the time of the mental crisis. It was not till then that he realized that there was something he might have which he had not. But the picture we get of Mill's early days is of a precocious and self-opinionated little boy, much more at home arguing with grown people than in the companionship of others of his own age. In later years Mill realized the gaps in his early education. He said to Caroline Fox, "I never was a boy; never played at cricket. It is better to let Nature have her own way." Francis Place was visiting Bentham at Ford Abbey in 1817 while the Mills were there. In August he wrote his wife: "John is truly a prodigy, a most wonderful fellow; and when his Logic, his Languages, his Mathematics, his Philosophy, shall be combined with a general knowledge of mankind and the affairs of the world, he will be a truly astonishing man; but he will probably be morose and selfish. Mill sees this; and I am operating upon him, when the little time I can spare can be so applied, to counteract these propensities, so far as to give him a bias towards the management of his temper, and to produce an extensive consideration of the reasonings and habits of others, when the time shall come for him to observe and practise these things."" Between 1821 and 1826 (the years between fifteen and twenty in his own age) the period of his "youthful propagandism" his intimates were all older than himself. John Austin was thirty-seven in 1826, Grote, thirty-two the same year, Charles Austin, whom Mill looked upon as an "elder contemporary," was twenty-seven, William Ellis was twentysix, and George Graham and J. A. Roebuck were both twenty-five. The only member of the group younger than Mill was Eyton Tooke, who was born in 1808. Mill had a deep affection for Tooke, which scarcely shows itself in the Autobiography. But in writing to d'Eichthal after Tooke's suicide in 1830, Mill describes his sense of loss in terms which Caroline Fox, Memories of Old Friends, p. 19. •Wallas, Life of Place, p. 136. can be compared only with those he used in connection with Mrs. Mill's death thirty years later: "Ce n'est pas l'intensité, c'est la durée d'un tel chagrin qui pèse lourdement sur moi, et je le sens à l'énervement et presque à l'épuisement, pour le moment, de toute mon activité, de tout mon zèle pour l'humanité ou pour mes devoirs. Il me semble que je n'ai jamais eu d'attachement que pour lui, que je n'ai jamais travaillé que pour gagner sa sympathie et son approbation.... Plus tendrement je chéris sa mémoire, plus ardemment je poursuivrai ces grands objets auxquels il attachait un intérët si profond. Je ferais peu de cas de la vie, ou de l'humanité, si je ne pensais qu'il y dans le monde quelques hommes comme lui, et que tous one en eux-mêmes la capacité de devenir, au moins quelque chose d'approchant de ce qu'il était." In the passage in the Autobiography about the mental crisis Mill speaks of his sense of friendlessness at that time: "I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person, to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. .... Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition intelligible. It was however abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared." T Correspondence Inédite, p. 118. 'Autobiography, p. 95. Is this the passage Mill was referring to? "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff |