Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/459

Rh His adroitness in applying abstract principles to concrete realities, and thus making attractive to the many those studies of his that might otherwise have repelled even the few, is too well known to require illustration. As Herbert Spencer somewhere makes illuminative use of the shape of a present-day 'milk-jug' to illustrate the irrationality of fashion and convention, so Mill can strengthen an argument by happily introducing the diminishing vogue of fainting-fits among young ladies. And as in small things, so in large. The high degree of common sense inwrought in the philosophy of Mill and Spencer contributes no little to the readableness, the intelligibility and the popularity of their writings. That Mill was nothing but 'a book in breeches,' as he was so often called, can not rightly be made to appear, even in the most learned of his published works. Unless precision and clearness of thought, accuracy of expression, aptness of illustration, breadth of reading and of observation, and constant openness to conviction, constitute the pedant, he was no pedant. One may even wish that there were a little more of the bookish element in him; for, remembering the extent of his reading in both ancient and modern literature, we feel some disappointment at finding in his works so little of that common stock of graceful allusion and happy quotation that might have been expected to adorn and to light up his somewhat sombre pages. Nevertheless he can not properly be called 'a thing of mechanized iron.' If he was the 'steam-engine' that Carlyle pronounced him to be, he was at least an engine of that excellent sort that burns its own smoke, which is more than can be said of Carlyle.

Mr. Frederic Harrison, who knew Mill personally, is emphatic in asserting that his heart was "even richer than his brain." Mr. Morley places Mill's distinction in the "union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of rigorous sense of what is real and practical with bright and luminous hope." All readers will recall the purple patches in 'The Subjection of Women.' In spite of his proof armor of dry logic, the author is more than once carried away by what has been styled 'the logic of feeling.' Mr. Harrison calls him "excessively sensitive and indeed impressionable." As Condorcet said of Turgor, he resembled a volcano clothed in ice. Proofs of this warmth of feeling could be adduced in great number, but a very few must here suffice. For a whole year he took upon himself the duties of his friend and subordinate in the India House, W. T. Thornton, to enable the latter to recruit his health without relinquishing his post. Mill's offer to guarantee the expense of certain early publications of Spencer's and Bain's, and also his generous kindness to Comte, when the French philosopher had fallen on evil days, and at a time when Mill himself was suffering from heavy pecuniary losses, are matters of common knowledge. A considerateness for others, and a depreciation of self, that went even to extremes, may