Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/458

454 flowing into the organic freedom of a living dialectic, remarkable skill in laying out his subject symmetrically before the eye and presenting its successive parts in clear and happy lights. No one has more successfully caught the fortunate gift of the French men-of-letters—the art of making readers think better of their own understanding and less awfully of the topics discussed." The same keen critic points out a glaring self-contradiction in Mill's theorizing. Mill resolves all knowledge into self-knowledge, since we have no cognitive access to either qualities or bodies external to ourselves. On the other hand, however, we know nothing but the phenomena of ourselves, we are but phenomena of the world, and the sensations from which all within us begins are merely the results of outward experience. Thus the pretended a priori ideas turn out to be a posteriori residues; the volitions that claim to be spontaneities are necessary effects of antecedent causes earlier than we. "And thus," the critic well concludes, "we are landed in this singular result: our only sphere of cognitive reality is subjective: and that is generated from an objective world which we have no reason to believe exists. In our author's theory of cognition, the non-ego disappears in the ego; in his theory of being, the ego lapses back into the non-ego. Idealist in the former, he is materialist in the latter."

We find, then, that in matters of abstract speculation Mill produced little that will live. But where he could bring his thought to the service of humanity, his achievement is noteworthy; and for this we honor him. Even in his contributions to inductive logic, of which he is often called the founder, he was working for the enlightenment of human error in the practical concerns of life; how much more so in his political and economic writings, their greater concreteness makes evident. He was far from being a philosopher for the mere love of 'divine philosophy.' There was no art-for-art's-sake enthusiasm in him. For a luxury of that sort he had too little tendency to passive enjoyment, and too much of the militant, apostolic fervor of the reformer. The will-o'the-wisp pursuit of ultimate truth for its own sake might well have seemed to him, as did philosophical speculation in general to an eminent contemporary of his, very much like the motions of a squirrel in its cage. Mill's studies demanded a humanitarian motive, and that motive became with him a religion. He himself, in his review of Comte, declares: "Candid persons of all creeds may be willing to admit, that if a person has an ideal object, his attachment and sense of duty towards which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, that person has a religion." Mill's two chief characteristics, the love of thinking out difficult problems, and the love of mankind, were made to serve each other; and the gratification of these two passions may be regarded as the expression of his natural piety.