consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely personal.” ” As to Mrs. Mill's influence on her husband on the intellectual side, there will always remain a good deal of uncertainty. Mill's own estimate of her intellectual ability is so extravagantly eulogistic that if it had come from a less. considerable person it would have little weight. He compares her to Shelley, but says that "in thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his powers were developed in his short life, was but a child compared with what she ultimately became. "Her memory was to him "a religion," and every reference to her is in an exalted tone. She seemed the embodiment of wisdom: "As during life she continually detected, before any one else had seemed to perceive them, those changes of times and circumstances which ten or twelve years later became subjects of general remark; so! venture to prophesy, that, if mankind continued to improve, their spiritual history for ages to come will be the progressive working-out of her thoughts, and realization of her conceptions." Bain considers the suggestion that she might have been simply a clever and attractive woman who gave him back his own ideas, but points out that Mill always liked opposition in conversation, and expresses the opinion that their intercourse could not have been as deep and lasting as it was simply on that basis." As for Mill's own estimate of her influence on himself, he felt that his best work was in the field of abstract principles, and that what she added was a common sense opinion about application. "Her mind invested all ideas in a concrete shape, and formed to itself a conception of how they would actually work; and her knowledge of the existing feelings and conduct of mankind was Autobiography, p. 161. "Autobiography, p. 131. Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. III. p. 94. so seldom at fault that the weak point in any unworkable sugger tion seldom escaped her."" When he first met Mrs. Taylor, Mill was at the height of his reaction from the early utilitarian kind of individualism. The attractive and clever young woman, with the atmosphere of Fox's radicalism about her, gave new value and impetus to his faith in liberty and democracy, a faith which had for a time been pushed into the background by the pressure of the new and interesting opinions of Coleridge and Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians. Mill says: "There was a moment in my mental progress when I might easily have fallen into a tendency towards over-government, both social and political; as there was also a moment when, by reaction from a contrary excess, I might have become a less thorough radical and democrat than I am. In both these points, as in many others, she benefited me as much by keeping me right where I was right, as by leading me to new truths and ridding me of errors. My great readiness and eagerness to learn from everybody, and to make room in my opinions for every new acquisition by adjusting the old and the new to one another, might, but for her steadying influence, have seduced me into modifying my early opinions too much."" These years of expanding interests and new friendships thus taught Mill the joy of friendly discussion with people of different points of view, and the exhilaration of the sense of a growing personality, making part of itself new experiences, and new interpretations of experience. Specifically they taught Mill two things. In the first place they made him realize how far down into human nature go the roots of friendship, and sympathy, and fellow feeling. They made him see how superficial was the older utilitarian analysis of unselfishness as a sort of enlightened selfishness, a thing built up in some artificial way from instincts in themselves disruptive. In Utilitarianism Mill points out that "moral associations which are wholly of artificial creation, when intel " Autobiography, p. 176. lectual culture goes on, yield by degrees to the dissolving force of analysis." So unless they "harmonize" with a "powerful class of sentiments," these associations will not give a firm foundation for morality. "But," he goes on to say, there is a "basis of powerful natural sentiment." "This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature. . . . The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body." " The foundations of morality are not to be built up out of pure or "artificial" associations, but rest somehow in the structure of things. The world is of such a sort that it will support the identification by association of one's own good with the good of others. In the Essay on Sedgwick, Mill says of the moral feelings: "It is not pretended that they are factitious and artificial associations, inculcated by parents and teachers purposely to further certain social ends, and no more congenial to our natural feelings than the contrary associations. The idea of the pain of another is naturally painful; the idea of the pleasure of another is naturally pleasurable. From this fact in our natural constitution, all our affections, both of love and aversion towards human beings, insofar as they are different from those we entertain towards mere inanimate objects which are pleasant or disagreeable to us, are held, by the best teachers of the theory of utility, to originate. In this, the unselfish part of our nature, lies a foundation, even independently of inculcation from without, for the generation of moral feelings." In the second place this broadening out of his own social experience made him realize how different real "society" was from that strange abstraction, compounded of identical atoms, the individuals which his father and Jeremy Bentham and the rest had discoursed about. His friendships with people of many different sorts, his contacts with new points of view, brought home to him the fact of the uniqueness of each personality. He was beginning to see that much that was interesting and important was to be discovered along the path of the realization of people's differences, as well as by the emphasis of their similarities. And as far as Mill's own personality was concerned, these new friendships and this growing realization of the importance of individuality was providing for him a new interest in life, and was making him forget, by degrees, the bleak days of the mental crisis. Chapter IV. The Internal Culture of the Individual. I. In the years around 1840 we find Mill beginning to narrow the circle of his friendships and to withdraw more and more from public life. It was about this time that he decided that "society was at best an insipid affair" and began to devote himself more and more to Mrs. Taylor and to his literary work. The disapproval of his family and friends in the matter of his increasing intimacy with Mrs. Taylor, as recounted in the last chapter, was one cause for this. But there was, nevertheless, behind Mill's withdrawal from social life a very real conviction on his part of the importance of his own literary work and of the danger of wasting too much time in the general run of social affairs. He wrote Mazzini in 1858: “I sympathize too strongly both with your taste for solitude and with the devotion of your time and activity to the great object of your life, to intrude on you with visits or invitations. We, like you, feel that those who would either make their lives useful to noble ends, or maintain any elevation of character within themselves, must in these days have little to do with what is called society. But if it can be any pleasure to you to exchange ideas with people who have many thoughts and feelings in common with you, my wife and I reckon you among the few persons to whom we can sincerely say that they may feel sure of being welcome." Another cause for his withdrawal is to be found in his |