XL MR. J. S. MILL'S RELIGIOUS CONFESSION 1874 I HAVE just received more posthumous confessions of John Stuart Mill's. I do not pretend to have studied or even completely read as yet the Essays on Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism, which Messrs. Longman have just published. But the fragments of these Essays which unaccountably leaked out in the Northern papers, with the fuller expositions of the book itself, are, at all events, sufficient to give a very clear general impression of his point of view. And it is obvious that the moral and intellectual authority for which, in future, his name will be quoted in theological controversy, will be one of a very complex, hesitating, and ambiguous character. No one could have anticipated, at the time when Mr. Mill published his Logic and his : Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, that when his career came to an end, he would have influenced his age chiefly as a kind of potent intellectual yeast or ferment, instead of as a great inculcator of definite truths. He began life chiefly as the antagonist of the a priori school of philosophy and as an advocate of the empirical school which found the germs of all our knowledge in particular sense - impressions and the law of association; partly also as one of the most severe disciples of the great teachers of the dismal science,' -Malthus and Ricardo. But we of the present generation shall now look upon these elements of his teaching as mere infinitesimal constituents in the powerful stimulus which he gave to the various conflicting tendencies of the seething and distracted thought of our times. The general effect of his writings will not be any definite teaching at all, but a sort of impregnation of the waters of a cold and empirical school of thought with foreign sources of agitation and ebullition rendering them apparently ardent and exciting. His experience - philosophy was soon saturated with at least the deepest admiration for the methods, if not for the results of Coleridge's speculations; his political economy was modi- / fied by the warmest sympathy with the peasant and the labouring class, and the profoundest desire to mingle moral with economical motives in the distribution of wealth and industry. In politics his abstract democratic principles soon exhibited a strong deflection in the direction of Conservative scorn for the vaunted omnipotence of Radical machinery; and then afterwards, during his short political career, displayed a strong reaction towards "heroic measures" and popular sympathies. And in the region of ethics and religion his name is likely to be remembered chiefly for the heterogeneous character of the intellectual germs which floated about his mind like the light seed-vessels of plants of the most mutually incompatible habits of growth and nutrition. It will be said of him that while he was a strict Utilitarian, finding the sanctions of all the ethical principles he admitted in their tendency to promote the happiness of the race, he yet thought it not only right, but obligatory on a high-minded man to defy even an omnipotent being who should threaten men with eternal sufferings for refusing to surrender their finite notions of virtue to his own arbitrary will and law; that he regarded the direct pursuit of happiness-i.e. of the only final end of life-as fatal to the happiness pursued; and that he felt far more reverence for the enthusiastic emotions which arise incidentally during the pursuit of benevolent objects, than even for those benevolent objects themselves. And now that the posthumous Essays on Nature, Religion, and Theism have appeared, it must be added, that while he doubted everything, from the existence of God and the divine mission of Christ to the immortality of the soul, he distinctly rejected nothing, except the divine omnipotence, nay, that he preached the duty of saturating the imagination with possibilities of religious truth which he did not rate high, rather than stint the elastic force of hope by a rigid adherence to a rational standard of intellectual expectation. In short, Mr. Mill professed his wish that human nature should feed itself, consciously and deliberately, on very dubious, not to say slender hopes, without, however, disguising from itself the slight character of those hopes,-by way of reinforcing its otherwise too small resources of aspiration; that it should store up for itself new impulses through the habitual contemplation of spiritual contingencies the prospect of ever realising which would hardly exceed the chance of a prize in a very hazardous lottery, and this solely on the ground that all the anticipations in which men may indulge themselves with real confidence, are inadequate to the work of providing sufficiently inspiring and elevating themes. The following are his words: : "To me it seems that human life, small and confined as it is, and as, considered merely in the present, it is likely to remain, even when the progress of material and moral improvement may have freed it from the greater part of its present calamities, stands greatly in need of any wider range and greater height of aspiration for itself and its destination which the exercise of imagination can yield to it, without running counter to the evidence of fact; and that it is a part of wisdom to make the most of any, even small, probabilities on this subject which furnish imagination with any footing to support itself upon. And I am satisfied that the cultivation of such a tendency in the imagination, provided it goes on pari passu with the cultivation of severe reason, has no necessary tendency to pervert the judgment; but that it is possible to form a perfectly sober estimate of the evidences on both sides of a question, and yet to let the imagination dwell by preference on those possibilities which are at once the most comforting and the most improving, without in the least degree overrating the solidity of the grounds for expecting that these rather than any other will be the possibilities actually realised" (pp. 245-6). Thus, Mr. Mill was an empiricist who attached more importance to the secondary than to the primary forms of pleasurable satisfaction; a Utilitarian who was more of a believer in the sacredness of disinterested emotion than transcendentalists themselves; an economist who carried sentiment with a high hand into the very heart of questions affecting the accumulation and distribution of wealth; a necessarian who was the most passionate advocate of liberty; a democrat who eagerly defended the rights of culture and the full representation of independent thought; nay, he was a sceptic who held the character of Christ all but divine, and who wished men to cling to the belief in even a slender hope of divine guidance and personal immortality for the sake of the new moral resources such a hope must give; and in practical matters, he was the enthusiastic advocate of a change which would tend to deprive women of the highest influence they have, while gaining for them a power for which they seem to most of us little suited. Of course, the mind which threw so much ardour into such paradoxical positions must appear to future ages as one of the most incalculable of the intellectual influences of his day,-one who fostered enthusiasms rooted in doubt, and revolutionary changes founded on visionary hopes,-one who acted like a ferment on almost all schools of intellectual tendency, developing rapidly all the floating germs in their authors' minds, and yet which robbed even that which it stimulated most, of anything like the firmness and stability of a steady conviction. And no doubt the total influence which John Stuart Mill will exercise on the development of English thought will be rather this, that he will have rendered it difficult for sceptics to shut themselves up in a shell of repellent theory,—that he will have taught them to sound all the doubtfulness of doubt, to enter into all the paradoxes of an empirical philosophy, to appreciate the religious enthusiasm consistent with a utilitarian belief,-than that he will have made any fundamental truth or any fundamental denial clearer than it was before. He will have given an ideal tone to political economy, and |