at length he came to speak as if the universe were a mere medley of forces of evil. Let us above all things shun the darkness into which he fell. We are even now just beginning, as a nation, to acknowledge the central truth on which he insisted, that our affairs will never go aright if we proceed on the principle of each for himself, with an ever vaster stratum of misery and an ever wider area of dwarfed life, a mere spurious semblance of civilisation. At such a time it is fitting that, in the act of scanning narrowly the counsels of all who offer guidance, we should deny none the credit of having at least seen that the road ahead lay among precipices and morasses, in which of old whole nations have sunk, and nations may sink again.

JOHN STUART MILL.

I.

To pass from the presence of Carlyle to that of Mill is to turn from a stormy and sinister to a serene and humane spirit, whose traits are the more winning and welcome from the contrast. The difference might be loosely expressed by the figure of two landscapes: one, say, that of a rugged and volcanic land, lit by the fitful flame of recurrent eruptions, in whose blaze at times hill and valley are lit up with an unearthy clearness, so that close at hand in the ancient lava you see the serpent crawl; while the vista, picked out in distances by peaks of fire, is the more menacing and oppressive. The other picture is, let us say, of a sunlit land on a morning towards the end of winter, ere spring has come. The trees, stirred by no wind, stand out leafless but graceful in the pure daylight; and though clouds veil some of the farther mountain tops, the vistas are clear and fair; while in the cool benignant air there is an unspeakable promise of warmth and life to come. But all figures are confessions of imperfect conception, and to many an eye the two landscapes of our fancy, seen under changed skies, will look strangely different.

What all will admit is that these two thinkers represent a profound temperamental difference, affecting all their ways of thinking and by consequence all their conclusions, so that, though both dubbed heretical, and though their ideals at one point almost coincided, they are almost more disparate than any conventionally opposed types, such as Radical and Tory, poet and scientist, or Catholic and Atheist. But it is important to remember that when they first came together as young men they attracted and liked each other; and it is interesting to note how they both come of northern stocks, different and yet both characteristically Scotch. James Mill is as recognisable a northern type-though I suspect

there are such different types in all races-as James Carlyle; only we naturally compare him, a man of culture, with Thomas Carlyle rather than with the uncultured father. The younger Mill, in one of his most famous books, long afterwards propounded his belief that any general system of education was a

mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another." 1 It would have puzzled him, I think, to find two more different minds than his father and Thomas Carlyle, though the educational system under which these two were trained was substantially the same. James Mill's mother, a proud woman of some claims to family descent, and with aspirations to revert upwards through her son, seems to have had a large share in persuading her husband, a well-to-do country shoemaker, to give their boy at the outset an education better even than was thought to suffice for a minister-this before a patron intervened to send the lad to college. Thus James Mill had a more thorough training than Carlyle. The former went to Edinburgh at eighteen ; the latter at fourteen, as the majority in those days did. In one point the two took the same course both intended for the ministry, they both thought themselves into unbelief, and both turued aside from their proposed career; Mill, however, being actually licensed to preach, and making his renunciation the more deliberately, as befitted his maturer age. There, as regards opinions, the identity ends. At one time Carlyle was a Radical, but he never was one in James Mill's way; and the two men were wholly opposed in their general attitude to life. Mill was, what Carlyle never became, a good Greck scholar; and in his youth, rationalist and utilitarian as he even then was, he nourished himself largely on Plato, which again is a proof that line of education. is not at all certain to determine line of thought. You would expect Carlyle and not Mill to be the Platonist, but it was the other way. Carlyle, even in his would-be-mystic period, does not seem to have studied Plato; and later, even on Emerson's urging, he

1 On Liberty, ch. v. Pop. ed. p. 63.

2 He was licensed in his twenty-sixth year, Dr. Bain's James Mill: a Biography, p. 22.

could not endure him; though he did afterwards enjoy him as an opponent of democracy; while the Mills, father and son, successively found in the philosopher who for Emerson was a transcendentalist, the best preparation for the pursuit of exact moral science.

To some extent James Mill and Thomas Carlyle compare generally in their self-reliance, their simplicity of life, and their indifference to what men ordinarily pursue as pleasure; but Mill after coming to London worked much the harder of the two, and, what is more, made no outcry about it, which I hope is the more Scotch-like course. Both men were excellent talkers; but James Mill talked to persuade, and did do so, while Carlyle, as I have before said, did not in talk try to persuade, and convinced men, when at all, rather by magnetism than by reasoning. For the rest, alike independent, inaccommodating and masterful, they were far asunder in their aims. James Mill, though of an irritable and warm temperament, was essentially a thinker, a reasoner, an analyst, and a lover of freedom; while Carlyle was a feeler, a prophet, and in theory an apostle of tyrannous power. They seem never to have met, Mill having died soon after Carlyle settled in London; and from his opinion of Carlyle's early essays in the reviews 1 we may safely decide that they could never have drawn together. John Mill, in a remarkable way, held at that time a hand of each.

II.

One vainly speculates as to what a son of Carlyle's would have been like, if he had had one. Human heredity is thus far a science incapable of a precise prediction, though convincing enough in its retrospects, and though John Mill's case, for instance, raises no perplexities. James Mill married an English wife, a woman apparently of little force of character, and in her son the father's northern granite is seen transmuted into something less 1 He " saw nothing in them to the last but insane rhapsody.”—J. S. Mill's Autobiography, p. 161.

hard, more plastic, more loveable, and at the same time perhaps less strong. What qualities he clearly inherited were the high public spirit, the rectitude, the unwavering devotion to truth and justice, and the logical faculty which marked his father; and, coming as he did of such a stock, and beginning his remarkable education at his father's hands in his tenderest years, he represents a very high intellectual evolution indeed-two generations of the highest rational culture in a highly advantageous soil. You may say John Mill was a generation and a half nearer moral science than Carlyle, when they met. To the criticism of life Carlyle brought his masterful intuitions, his prejudices, his imagination, his earnestness, his negations and antagonisms, his fundamental intolerance and want of philosophy; where the young Mill brought a mind sensitive to the most various influences, lacking perhaps in some kinds of native power, but singularly and eminently fitted to get good from other men's intuitions where these were good, and to escape their contagion where they were evil. He had been trained, too, as no English youth of his time had been trained, to analyse beliefs and arguments, and to reach his own by connected and consistent reasoning. Between this training and his native amenity of temper he had become a rationalist of the most attractive type, catholic and yet earnest, vowed to science but spontaneously interested in the ideas of men of a quite different bias.

I have said of him1 that he had a genius for justice, and that this was the secret of his influence; and yet on weighing the phrase I am in doubt as to its entire fitness. That open-minded receptivity of his is indeed one of the most winning of gifts; but perhaps a genius for justice, or the highest genius for justice, would be something less a matter of susceptibility, and a little more a matter of science. On freshly surveying his life and work, one becomes conscious of a certain sympathetic waywardness which every now and then took him a little to one or other side of truth, sometimes in pessimism, sometimes in optimism, sometimes in hostility, sometimes in eulogy, oftenest and furthest in the latter direction indeed, but always in a pure and high-minded way, and 1 In the syllabus of the lecture, and elsewhere.

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