Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/329

Rh MILL 311 seemed able or willing to do that we find him in the heat of the struggle in 1831 writing to the Examiner a series of letters on &quot;The Spirit of the Age&quot; which drew from Carlyle the exclamation, &quot;Here is a new mystic!&quot; We can easily see now what it was in these remarkable essays that fascinated Carlyle ; it was the pervading opinion that in every natural state of society power must be in the hands of the wisest. This was the condition of stability; when power and wisdom ceased to coincide, there was a disturbance of the equilibrium till this coincidence was again effected. But whether Carlyle was right in the epithet &quot;mystic&quot; may be judged from the fact that Mill s inductive logic was the direct result of his aspirations after political stability as determined by the dominion of the wisest. &quot; Why is it,&quot; he asked, &quot; that the multitude accept implicitly the decisions of the wisest, of the specially skilled, in physical science 1 &quot; Because in physical science there is all but complete agreement in opinion. &quot; And why this agreement ? &quot; Because all accept the same methods of investigation, the same tests of truth. Is it possible then to obtain unanimity as to the methods of arriving at conclusions in social and political matters, so as to secure similar agreement of opinion among the specially skilled, and similar general respect for their authority? The same thought appears in a review of Herschel s Natural Philosophy, written about the same time. Mill remarks that the uncertainty hanging over the very elements of moral and social philosophy proves that the means of arriving at the truth in those sciences are not yet properly understood. &quot;And whither,&quot; he adds, &quot;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 acknowledg ment the greatest number of truths have been ascertained, and the greatest possible degree of certainty arrived at?&quot; By 1831 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. From the platform on which Carlyle and Mill met in 1831 they travelled different roads, the one to preach the duty of obedience to the wisest, the other to search for a means by which wisdom might be acquired such as would command respect and win the assent of free conviction. 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 school man 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 Scotch philosophers who talk of &quot; superseding &quot; it by &quot; a supposed system of inductive logic.&quot; His inductive logic must &quot;supplement and not supersede.&quot; It must be concatenated with the syllogistic logic, the two to be incorporated in one system. But for several years he searched in vain for the means of con catenation. 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, expatiating over a wide range of political, social, economical, and philosophical questions. The working of the new order in France, and the personalities of the leading men, had a pro found 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 con tributed many essays to Taifs Magazine, the Jurist, and the Monthly Repository. In 1835 the London Review was started, with Mill as editor ; it was amalgamated with the Westminster in 1836, and Mill continued editor 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 investi gation and joining on the new logic as a supplement to the old. Epoch-making as his logic undoubtedly was, from the multitude of new views opened up, from the addition of a new wing to the rambling old building, and from the inspiring force with which every dusty chamber was searched into and illuminated, Mill did not escape all the innumerable pitfalls of language that beset the pioneer in such a subject. It is evident from a study of his purposes and the books from which he started that his worst perplexities were due to his determination to exhibit scientific method as the complement of scholastic logic. In his defence of the syllogism he confounds the syllogistic forms with deductive reasoning. Every deductive reason ing may be thrown into the form of a syllogism, but not every syllogism is deductive. The reasoning in several of the syllogistic forms is not deductive at all in the sense of involving a movement from general to particular. Although he knew Aristotle in the original, Mill did not recognize the fact that the syllogistic machinery was primarily constructed for the reasoning together of terms. As regards the word induction, Mill uses it in different connexions to cover three or four distinguishable meanings induction viewed as the establishment of predications about a general term, induction viewed as inference from the known to the unknown, induction viewed as verifica tion by experiment, and induction viewed as the proof of propositions of causation. The form of his system was really governed by the scholastic notion of induction as a means of establishing general propositions ; the inductive part of his system is introduced after the deductive under this character ; while the greater portion of the substance of what he treats of under the name of induction, and especially the so-called experimental methods, have nothing whatever to do with the establishment of general proposi tions, in the technical sense of general propositions. But the permanent value and influence of Mill s inductive logic is not to be measured by technical inaccuracies and inconsistencies, to which an academic mind may easily attach undue importance. In the technical history of the science, Mill s Logic may be viewed as an attempt to fuse