And yet, when all is said, this error of his can have done little if

any social harm, while he may have done much good in combating the contrary and vulgar error which he pinned down in the case of English treatment of Ireland, and which is still one of the stock platitudes of what he called the stupid party. Dr. Bain says his error as to the physical conditions of mind was “practically injurious ;” but the reference here must be to Mill's own health. Doubtless that suffered, but he did not add to other men's burdens. And we come to a similar conclusion in regard to the fallacies we find in the foundation and in the exposition of his version of the principle of Utilitarianism. I think him historically and psychologically wrong in his position that the idea of justice arose out of the notion of conformity to law 1-a position which indeed he himself contradicts later in the “Subjection of Women," in the statement that “ Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising the relations they find already existing between individuals.”2 It is obvious enough that the idea of justice begins in the instincts of animals. But we do not find that this fallacy of Mill's ever injured the cause of practical ethics. And on the other hand, how shall we overrate the influence of his practical utilitarian teaching for good ? Who shall say how much it has contributed to the cultivation of rational moral science, and to its spread even in anti-rational regions? It has been well said by Professor Minto that the main service of his “ Logic” is not so much to effect his original technical purpose as to bring the principles of proof accepted in physical science to bear on human affairs; and that service is not affected by his technical fallacies, or even by his failures to apply his own principle in practice. Against such failures, balance his advances on all the ethic of his time. Ignorant people think of his Utilitarianism as a system that produces Gradgrinds, and exiles beauty from life. What are 1 he facts ? Both father and son were peculiarly concerned to preserve the beauties of English scenery from injury through the indifference of railway projectors; and John Mill was one of the

• Utilitarianism, p. 70.
* Subjection of Women, 2nd ed., p. 8.

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first writers to make an effective public protest on the subject. What Mr. Ruskin has done latterly, he sought to do in his day. James Mill, too, expressly impeached the English civilisation of his time for its starvation of the arts.

On the son's action as a public man, again, we have the most emphatic testimony from the most authoritative sources. While he was in Parliament the Speaker said, we are told, that he raised the tone of debate. But Mr. Gladstone has clothed that official tribute with a warmer than official utterance.

“We well knew," says the veteran statesman, " Mr. Mill's intellectual eminence before he entered Parliament. What his conduct there principally disclosed, at least to me, was his singular moral elevation. I re. member now thatat the time, more than twenty years back, I used familiarly to call him the Saint of Rationalism, a phrase roughly and partially expressing what I now mean. Of all the motives, stings, and stimulants that reach men through their egoism in Parliament, no part could move or even touch him. ... For the sake of the House of Commons at large, I rejoiced in his advent, and deplored his disappearance. He did us all good. In whatever party, whatever form of opinion, I sorrowfully confess that such men are rare.''3

That is the testimony of one who on many grave matters thought far otherwise than Mill, and who is not latterly inclined to be enthusiastic about the "saintly” possibilities of rationalism. It is the more convincing and conclusive, and it combines, as the same voice has at other times been able to combine, the feelings of the different camps among the armies of progress. In all directions has Mill's influence been feit for good. “No calculus," says his friend Bain, rising into something of grave poetry in his closing tribute, "no calculus can integrate the innumerable little pulses of knowledge and of thought that he has made to vibrate in the minds of his generation.” And I would add that, if his more toilsome labours were swept aside, if his repute among

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trained thinkers were in some measure to dwindle away,' he would still have deserved from his race a gratitude such as they give to those who mark out for humanity the upward and warn against the downward path, by the new eloquence and the new wisdom

1 I have not attempted in this general study to criticise Mill's I.ogic, though that is of all his works the one to the making of which there went the greatest amount of brain work. It stands to reason that, despite his admitted gift for abstract logic, a thinker who was capable of the errors above discussed must fall into some fallacies in a survey of the whole field of logic ; and to attempt to handle all of these would have made my lectures very ill-suited for a general audience. I am fain, however, to supplement them with an extract from Professor Minto's excellent article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, which gives at once a most impartial and à most compendious view of Mill's strength and weakness as a technical logician, and which is in many ways more instructive than the essentially partisan criticism of Mr. W. L. Courtney-at present perhaps the most widely circulated among “general readers ”

Epoch-making as his Logic undoubtedly was, from the multitude of new views opened up, from the addition of a new wing to the rambling old building, and from the inspiring force with which every dusty chamber was searched into and illuminated, Mill did not escape all the innumerable pitfalls of language that beset the pioneer in such a subject. It is evident from a study of his purposes and the books from which he started, that his worse perplexities were due to his determination to exhibit scientific method as the complement of scholastic logic. In his defence of the syllogism he con. founds the syllogistic forms with deductive reasoning. Every deductive reasoning may be thrown into the forms of syllogism, but not every syllogism is deductive. The reasoning in several of the syllogistic forms is not deductive at all in the sevse of involving a movement from general to particular. Although he knew Aristotle in the original, Mill did not recognise the fact that the syllogistic machinery was primarily constructed for the reasoning together of terms. As regards the word induction, Mill uses it in different connections to cover three or four distinguishable pieanings-induction viewed as the establishment of preilications about a general term ; induction viewed as inference from the known to the un. known; induction viewed as verification by experiment, and induction viewed as the proof of propositions of causation. The form of his system was really governed by the scholastic notion of induction as a means of establishing general propositions ; the inductive part of his system is introduced after the deductive under this character ; while the greater portion of the substance of what he treats of under the name of induction, and especially the so-called experimental methods, have nothing what. ever to do with the establishment of general propositions, in the technical sense of general propositions.

“But the permanent value and influence of Mill's inductive logic is not

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with which he preached to his fellows a doctrine that is ever being venomously assailed and too often being sullied, but which thus far by his help stands safer than ever before, alike from enmity and disgrace—the doctrine that the good of mankind is a dream if it is not to be secured by preserving for all men the possible maximum of liberty of action and of freedom of thought.

EMERSON.

I.

It is an instructive fact in the history of culture that the Englishspeaking population of North America, while considerably outnumbering for some time back that of the old country, has thus far contributed but a small part of the permanently important literature of the language. Save for the very notable works of Jonathan Edwards, which bring such remarkable reasoning power to the demonstration of the incredible, and for the vigorous rationality of Franklin, American authorship only began to exist for English readers within the present century; and only in the latter half of it have American books begun to get any cordial recognition. The novels of Fenimore Cooper represented no original or enduring culture force; and the pleasing works of Washington Irving were rather an assimilation of previous English culture than an addition to it. It is with Emerson that a visibly important American factor first appears in our higher literature; and while in Emerson's first generation there were at least two other American figures in the front literary rank, the number today is certainly no greater absolutely, and is smaller proportionally. Contemporary with the young Emerson were Edgar Poe, that singular apparition of pure intellect in the literature of imagination; and Hawthorne, nearly the first great novelist of the psychological school, and still the most individual. Longfellow, of course, has been much more popular than either of these, as Dr. Holmes has perhaps been more popular than Emerson, but these beloved writers hardly count as first-rate literary influences. And whereas the strangeness and subtlety of Hawthorne keep him the favourite of only a minority, and the electric light of Poe's intellect is too cold and unearthly to please average human nature, Emerson remains, of that gronp,