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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
tablished facts, I believe there is much in his system which will abide; and I adhere to the opinion that 'his bold generalizations are always instructive, and that some of them may in the end be established as the profoundest laws of the knowable universe.'"[1]
That eminent logician and mathematician, Professor J. Stanley Jevons, has been recently reviewing the philosophy of J. S. Mill in a series of articles in the "Contemporary Review." In the November number he takes up Ann 'a "Utilitarianism," and considers his contributions to the subject of morality in relation to the present state of knowledge. He recognizes that Mill belonged to a past dispensation, and was incompetent to deal scientifically with those great moral problems by the handling of which Herbert Spencer has made a new epoch in philosophic thought. We give some of the closing passages of his article:
Such are the intricacies and wide extent of ethical questions, that it is not practicable to pursue the analysis of Mill's doctrine in at all a full manner. We can not detect the fallacious reasoning with the same precision as in matters of geometric and logical science. This analysis is the less needful, too, because, since Mill's essays appeared, moral philosophy has undergone a revolution. I do not so much allude to the reform effected by Mr. Sidgwick's "Methods of Ethics," though that is a great one, introducing as it does a precision of thought and nomenclature which was previously wanting. I allude, of course, to the establishment of the Spencerian theory of morals, which has made a new era in philosophy. Mill has been singularly unfortunate from this point of view. He might be defined as the last great philosophic writer conspicuous for his ignorance of the principles of evolution. . . . The whole tone of Mill's moral and political writings is totally opposed to the teaching of Darwin and Spencer, Tylor and Maine. Mill's idea of human nature was that we came into the world like lumps of soft clay, to be shaped by the accidents of life, or the care of those who educate us. Austin insisted on the evidence which history and daily experience afford of "the extraordinary pliability of human nature," and Mill borrowed the phrase from him. No phrase could better express the misapprehensions of human nature which, it is to be hoped, will cease for ever with the last generation of writers. Human nature is one of the last things which can be called "pliable." Granite rocks can be more easily molded than the poor savages that hide among them. We are all of us full of deep springs of unconquerable character, which education may in some degree soften or develop, but can neither create nor destroy. The mind can be shaped about as much as the body; it may be starved into feebleness, or fed and exercised into vigor and fullness; but we start always with inherent hereditary powers of growth. The non-recognition of this fact is the great defect in the moral system of Bentham. The great Jeremy was accustomed to make short work with the things which he did not understand, and it is thus he disposes of "the pretended system" of a moral sense: "One man says he has a thing made on purpose to tell him what is right and what is wrong, and that it is called a moral sense; and then he goes to his work at his ease, and says such a thing is right and such a thing is wrong. "Why? Because my moral sense tells me it is." Bentham then bluntly ignored the validity of innate feelings, but this omission, though a great defect, did not much diminish the value of his analysis of the good and bad effects of actions. Mill discarded the admirable Benthamist analysis, but failed to introduce the true evolutionist principles; thus he falls between the two. It is to Herbert Spencer we must look for a more truthful philosophy of morals than was possible before his time.
The publication of the first part of his principles of morality, under the title "The Data of Ethics," gives us, in a definite form, and in his form, what we could previously only infer from the general course of his philosophy and from his brief letter on utilitarianism addressed to Mill. Although but fragments, these writings enable us to see that a definite step has been made in a matter debated since the dawn of intellect. The moral sense doctrine, so rudely treated by Bentham, is no longer incapable of reconciliation with the greatest happiness principle, only it now becomes a moving and developable moral sense. An absolute and unalterable moral standard was opposed to the palpable fact that customs and feelings differ widely, and Paley, on this ground, was in-
- ↑ This estimate Dr. McCosh had the sagacity to make and the courage to express many years ago in his "Intuitions of Mind."
