Autobiography by John Stuart Mill (easy books to read txt) 📖

as yet divided

our opinions. He told me how he and others had looked upon me (from

hearsay information), as a "made" or manufactured man, having had a

certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce;

and what a change took place in his feelings when he found, in the

discussion on Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all which that

name implies, "belonged" to me as much as to him and his friends. The

failure of his health soon scattered all his plans of life, and

compelled him to live at a distance from London, so that after the first

year or two of our acquaintance, we only saw each other at distant

intervals. But (as he said himself in one of his letters to Carlyle)

when we did meet it was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full

sense of the word, a profound thinker, his openness of mind, and the

moral courage in which he greatly surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow

the dominion which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised over his

intellect; though he retained to the last a great but discriminating

admiration of both, and towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in that

short and transitory phasis of his life, during which he made the

mistake of becoming a clergyman, his mind was ever progressive: and the

advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after an interval,

made me apply to him what Goethe said of Schiller, "er hatte eine

furchtliche Fortschreitung." He and I started from intellectual points

almost as wide apart as the poles, but the distance between us was

always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he,

during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to

several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to

prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much

further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded.

 

After 1829 I withdrew from attendance on the Debating Society. I had had

enough of speech-making, and was glad to carry on my private studies and

meditations without any immediate call for outward assertion of their

results. I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in

many fresh places, and I never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was

incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I never, in the course of my

transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused

and unsettled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I

had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly

how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them.

 

The conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in defending the

theory of government laid down in Bentham's and my father's writings,

and the acquaintance I had obtained with other schools of political

thinking, made me aware of many things which that doctrine, professing

to be a theory of government in general, ought to have made room for,

and did not. But these things, as yet, remained with me rather as

corrections to be made in applying the theory to practice, than as

defects in the theory. I felt that politics could not be a science of

specific experience; and that the accusations against the Benthamic

theory of _being_ a theory, of proceeding _a priori_ by way of general

reasoning, instead of Baconian experiment, showed complete ignorance of

Bacon's principles, and of the necessary conditions of experimental

investigation. At this juncture appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_,

Macaulay's famous attack on my father's _Essay on Government_. This gave

me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of

politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of

treating political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in

physical science his notions of philosophizing might have recognised

Kepler, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help

feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which the

writer, at a later period, made the most ample and honourable amends),

there was truth in several of his strictures on my father's treatment of

the subject; that my father's premises were really too narrow, and

included but a small number of the general truths on which, in politics,

the important consequences depend. Identity of interest between the

governing body and the community at large is not, in any practical sense

which can be attached to it, the only thing on which good government

depends; neither can this identity of interest be secured by the mere

conditions of election. I was not at all satisfied with the mode in

which my father met the criticisms of Macaulay. He did not, as I thought

he ought to have done, justify himself by saying, "I was not writing a

scientific treatise on politics, I was writing an argument for

parliamentary reform." He treated Macaulay's argument as simply

irrational; an attack upon the reasoning faculty; an example of the

saying of Hobbes, that When reason is against a man, a man will be

against reason. This made me think that there was really something more

fundamentally erroneous in my father's conception of philosophical

method, as applicable to politics, than I had hitherto supposed there

was. But I did not at first see clearly what the error might be. At last

it flashed upon me all at once in the course of other studies. In the

early part of 1830 I had begun to put on paper the ideas on Logic

(chiefly on the distinctions among Terms, and the import of

Propositions) which had been suggested and in part worked out in the

morning conversations already spoken of. Having secured these thoughts

from being lost, I pushed on into the other parts of the subject, to try

whether I could do anything further towards clearing up the theory of

logic generally. I grappled at once with the problem of Induction,

postponing that of Reasoning, on the ground that it is necessary to

obtain premises before we can reason from them. Now, Induction is mainly

a process for finding the causes of effects: and in attempting to fathom

the mode of tracing causes and effects in physical science, I soon saw

that in the more perfect of the sciences, we ascend, by generalization

from particulars, to the tendencies of causes considered singly, and

then reason downward from those separate tendencies, to the effect of

the same causes when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate

analysis of this deductive process; the common theory of the syllogism

evidently throwing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from Hobbes and

my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best

concrete instances I could find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics,

occurred to me as the most complete example of the logical process I was

investigating. On examining, accordingly, what the mind does when it

applies the principle of the Composition of Forces, I found that it

performs a simple act of addition. It adds the separate effect of the

one force to the separate effect of the other, and puts down the sum of

these separate effects as the joint effect. But is this a legitimate

process? In dynamics, and in all the mathematical branches of physics,

it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not; and I then

recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the

distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena, in the

introduction to that favourite of my boyhood, Thompson's _System of

Chemistry_. This distinction at once made my mind clear as to what was

perplexing me in respect to the philosophy of politics. I now saw, that

a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the

province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are

not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate.

It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared,

that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the

method of philosophizing in politics to the purely experimental method

of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive

method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of

deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches

of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry,

which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or

admit of any summing-up of effects. A foundation was thus laid in my

thoughts for the principal chapters of what I afterwards published on

the Logic of the Moral Sciences; and my new position in respect to my

old political creed, now became perfectly definite.

 

If I am asked, what system of political philosophy I substituted for

that which, as a philosophy, I had abandoned, I answer, No system: only

a conviction that the true system was something much more complex and

many-sided than I had previously had any idea of, and that its office

was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from

which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be

deduced. The influences of European, that is to say, Continental,

thought, and especially those of the reaction of the nineteenth century

against the eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me. They came from

various quarters: from the writings of Coleridge, which I had begun to

read with interest even before the change in my opinions; from the

Coleridgians with whom I was in personal intercourse; from what I had

read of Goethe; from Carlyle's early articles in the _Edinburgh_ and

Foreign Reviews, though for a long time I saw nothing in these (as my

father saw nothing in them to the last) but insane rhapsody. From these

sources, and from the acquaintance I kept up with the French literature

of the time, I derived, among other ideas which the general turning

upside down of the opinions of European thinkers had brought uppermost,

these in particular: That the human mind has a certain order of possible

progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which

governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an

unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are

relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not

only _will_ have, but _ought_ to have, different institutions: that

government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of

whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is,

does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: that any

general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of

human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of

history. These opinions, true in the main, were held in an exaggerated

and violent manner by the thinkers with whom I was now most accustomed

to compare notes, and who, as usual with a reaction, ignored that half

of the truth which the thinkers of the eighteenth century saw. But

though, at one period of my progress, I for some time undervalued that

great century, I never joined in the reaction against it, but kept as

firm hold of one side of the truth as I took of the other. The fight

between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth always reminded me of

the battle about the shield, one side of which was white and the other

black. I marvelled at the blind rage with which the combatants rushed

against one another. I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many

of Coleridge's sayings about half truths; and Goethe's device,

"many-sidedness," was one which I would most willingly, at this period,

have taken for mine.

 

The writers by whom, more than by any others, a new mode of political

thinking was brought home to me, were those of the St. Simonian school

in France. In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted with some of their

writings. They were then only in the earlier stages of their

speculations. They had not yet dressed out their philosophy as a

religion, nor had they organized their scheme of Socialism. They were

just beginning to question the principle of hereditary property. I was

by no means prepared to go with them even this length; but I was greatly

struck with the connected view which they for the first time presented

to me, of the natural order of human progress; and especially with their

division of all history into organic periods and critical periods.

During the organic periods (they said) mankind accept with firm

conviction some positive creed, claiming jurisdiction over all their

actions, and containing more or less of truth and adaptation to the

needs of humanity. Under its influence they make all the progress

compatible with the creed, and finally outgrow it; when a