Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/502

486 which is popularly confounded with "hardness," is in no way bound up with want of sympathy or kindness; but people are so used to carry their sentiments into the decision of questions of fact, that when they find any one does not do so, they conclude that he is without feeling. Nothing could be a clearer proof of this than the instance brought forward by Lord Carnarvon. Mr. Mill, he says, "endeavored not merely to suppress but to trample down and to crush out every thing approaching to feeling in his nature." That this should be said of the most tender of husbands, the kindest of friends, the man whose sympathies were as wide as the animal creation, whose depth of feeling was such that there was not a noble or a beautiful thing in Nature but it mirrored itself on his heart—is convincing evidence of the utter blindness of Lord Carnarvon in the discernment of sentiment in others which takes a different direction from his own. What Mr. Mill did with unequaled success was that which we have already indicated. He endeavored, when engaged in the investigation of truth, to avoid the bias of sentiment; but it needs no prophet to tell us that in this he was impelled by a loyalty to truth springing out of his conviction of its importance to the interests of his kind. Indeed, if thoroughly scientific men were as devoid of feeling as Lord Carnarvon represented them, his fear of them would be ludicrous. They are a mere handful of men. They have arrayed against them the prejudices of mankind, the interests of the ruling classes all over Europe, and a powerful and well-paid ecclesiastical organization. What reason is there to be in "great dread" that a few men without feeling or devotion will triumph over such great odds? The truth is, that what is making the wearers of coronets and mitres tremble is, not the absence of religious feeling from social philosophy, but the union of the two. Mr. Mill has done more than any one in modern times to effect that union. It shines through his works on even the most abstract of subjects as a halo, and deep in the hearts of the most powerful intellects of our country are to be found the sentiments which he did so much to rouse and to direct. Hence these tears.

 

N making use of the sciences for purposes of intellectual cultivation, a distinction has been drawn between those that are fixed, or established, and those that are progressive, and it has been maintained that the former alone are to be admitted for the purposes of mental training. Foremost among these are Mathematics, Astronomy, and Molar Physics, or the laws of the motion of masses. These may be introduced as means of scientific education, while Molecular Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, from their unsettled character, are alleged 