I have now followed Mill's mental history until the period at which the follower was fully competent to become the guide.It would be difficult to mention any thinker who has gone through a more strenuous and continuous discipline.From his earliest infancy till the full development of his powers he had been going through a kind of logical mill.No student in the old schools employing every waking hour in,syllogising,could have been more assiduously trained to the use of his weapons.If his boyish years had been passed in a kind of intellectual gymnasium,he had as a youth proved and perfected his skill ill the open arena.His official position was making him familiar with business and with the ordinary state of mind of the commonplace politician.He had been interested in fresh lines of thought through the writings of French Liberals,and especially the St.Simonians,and through his arguments with the Socialists who followed Owen,and with the young men who looked up to Coleridge as their great teacher.His own experience had brought home to him the sense of a certain narrowness and rigidity in the Utilitarians;his friendly controversies had led him to regard opponents with more toleration than his party generally displayed,and he was sincerely anxious to widen the foundations of his creed,and to assimilate whatever was valuable in conflicting doctrines.
Meanwhile his practice as a writer had by this time enabled him to express himself with great clearness and vigour;and young as he still was,he was better qualified than any of his contemporaries to expound the views of his party.
One point,however,must be marked.Mill's training left nothing to be desired as a system of intellectual gymnastics.It was by no means so well calculated to widen the mental horizon.
His philosophical reading was not to be compared to that,for example,of Sir William Hamilton,who was at this time accumulating his great stores of knowledge.He learned German,as people were beginning to learn it,but he did not make himself familiar with German thought.On 13th March 1843,having just sent a copy of his Logic to Comte,he observes that he owes much to German philosophy as a corrective to his exclusive Benthamism.
He has not,he adds,read Kant,Hegel,or any chief of the school,but knows of them from their French and English interpreters --presumably Cousin,Coleridge,and Sir W.
Hamilton.He tried some of the originals afterwards,but found that he had got all that was useful in them,and the remainder was so fastidieux that he could not go on reading.(25)Considering all his occupations,his official duties,his editing of Bentham,his many contributions to journalism,and the time taken up by the little societies of congenial minds,the wonderful thing is that he read so much else.He kept himself well informed on the intellectual movement of France;he had made a special study of the French revolution;and was fairly familiar with many other provinces of historical inquiry.It was impossible,however,that he should become learned in the strict sense.His studies,that is,were more remarkable for intensity than for extent.The vigorous discussions with his friends upon political economy,logic,and psychology,while implying an admirable training,implied also a limitation of study;they did not get beyond the school of Ricardo in political economy,nor beyond the school of James Mill in psychology,nor beyond a few textbooks in formal logic.They argued the questions raised thoroughly,and until they had fully settled their own doubts.
But it would be an inevitable result that they would generally be satisfied when they had discovered not so much a thorough solution as the best solution which could be given from the Utilitarian point of view.The more fundamental questions as to the tenability of that view would hardly be raised.Therefore,though Mill deserves all the credit which he has received for candour,and was,in fact,most anxious to receive light from outside,it is not surprising that he will sometimes appear to have been blind to arguments familiar to thinkers of a different school.The fault is certainly not peculiar to Mill;indeed,it is his genuine desire to escape from it which makes it necessary to ask why the escape was not more complete.Briefly,at any,rate,Mill,like most other people,continued through life to be penetrated by the convictions instilled in early youth.
III.THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS
The period which followed the Reform Bill showed a great change in Mill's personal position.The Utilitarians had taken their part in the agitation,and expected to share in the fruits of victory.Several of them were members of the first reformed parliament,especially Grote and Roebuck,who now entered the House for the first time.Charles Buller (1806-1848)and Sir William Molesworth (1810-1855)were also new members,and both were among the youngest recruits of the Utilitarian party Buller had been a pupil of Carlyle,and afterwards one of the Cambridge orators.He was evidently a man of very attractive nature,though he seems to have been too fond of a joke --the only Utilitarian,probably,liable to that imputation --and was gaining a high reputation by the time of his early death.Molesworth,after a desultory education,which included a brief stay at Cambridge about Buller's time,and some study on the continent,became a friend of Grote upon entering parliament.He was a man of many intellectual interests,and an ardent Utilitarian.These and a few more formed the party known as 'the philosophical Radicals.'
