Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/457

Rh merits and a considerable bar to the recognition of their originality. In whatever field of learning he worked, he always sought to knit his thoughts into the body of pre-existing knowledge, and to make his current of speculation flow easily and naturally from sources already familiar to his readers, however widely that current might afterward diverge from the well-worn channels. Thus he was actually at more pains to conceal his originality than most writers are to bring theirs into prominence. In political economy he wrote as an expounder and popularizer of Ricardo, in morals as a disciple and interpreter of Bentham, in the philosophy of mind as a commentator on the works of his father and of Sir William Hamilton, and even in his 'Logic' he is so scrupulously careful to acknowledge indebtedness to earlier thinkers that an undiscerning reader might easily undervalue Mill's contributions in his own name. Recognizing the breadth and fullness of his mind, one is in danger of doing less than justice to its originality. Mill has been compared with Locke, his influence on the nineteenth century being likened to the earlier philosopher's on the seventeenth. As parts of Locke's teachings have long since passed into the body of common thought and conviction, and have thus lost for us their originality and interest, so there are many of Mill's doctrines that have in this best sense become obsolete, because by general adoption they have ceased to be matter of argument. In addition to the practical reforms he inaugurated or promoted, we may ask at this time, what is his significance and value to us as a philosopher? By example as well as precept he has elevated and purified the utilitarian scheme of ethics. The greatest-happiness principle was with him a religious principle. We may hold that he was fundamentally wrong in his theory of morals, but we can not refuse to applaud his practise. In the abstruser regions of thought, his neat and clear exposition of the experience-philosophy is suggestive rather of the French than of the German school. One can hardly read three pages of German metaphysics without a depressing sense of the futility of human reasoning, whereas a French philosophical treatise fills us with a surprised delight at the efficiency of our own powers. The German is too fond of directing our gaze into fathomless abysses and of leading our feet into bottomless quagmires; the Frenchman conducts us easily and pleasantly over a macadamized road, where all steep ascents are carefully graded, precipitous declivities guarded against by walls and fences, and ugly or disquieting outlooks screened by flowering hedges. As Martineau long ago so admirably expressed it, Mill's distinguishing characteristics as a philosopher are "sharp apprehension of whatever can be rounded off as a finished whole in thought, analytic adroitness in resolving a web of tangled elements and measuring their value in the construction, reasoning equal to any computation by linear coordinates, though not readily