stand far greater mental exertion without injury, than the children of uncultivated parentage. Such a discipline as young Mill underwent would have reduced most children to idiocy, or killed them outright. Mr. Mill was an eminent student of mind, but it is very clear that he dealt with it from the ancient point of view, and knew very little of or cared very little for what modern science has had to say about it.
And even he, with his tough and vigorous organization, barely escaped the consequences of such gross error reduced to practice. At twenty he passed into a cloud of gloom and despondency. He became indifferent to his pursuits, sleep brought no relief, and he had thoughts of suicide. He became painfully anxious, under the notion that, if all he had been striving to attain could be realized, there would be nothing left to live for. Brain-disturbance from overtasking was evinced by delusion, like that of Martyn, who, when he had come out Senior Wrangler, was taken with the crazy fancy that mathematics were an invention of Satan, and that he had been led into a net of destruction. Mr. Mill had evidently reached the verge of a cerebral break-down, when he changed the course of his mental action by going into emotional literature, and ascribed his escape to Wordsworth's poetry. Had he been as deep in physiology as he was in Greek, and made use of his knowledge, this dangerous state might not only have been better interpreted, but probably quite avoided.
When, therefore, Mr. Mill, some fifty years later, in chalking out a system of education for the students of St. Andrew's, said of ancient and modern knowledge, "Why not both?" he was himself a living refutation of its possibility. He had worked himself up to the very breaking-point in the enormous accumulation of classical and other acquisitions, while modern thought had not been correspondingly mastered.
The law of mental limitations, by which one thing can only be had at the expense of another, was in as full force in his case as in that of inferior minds; and his classical surcharging involved a correlative deficiency in science which has unquestionably been an element of weakness in his own career. We do not deny that Mr. Mill had a very considerable acquaintance with science, and only insist that it was neither up to his own standard of thoroughness in other departments, nor was it sufficient for his own requirements as a thinker ambitious of controlling the mind of his age. His book on "Logic," undoubtedly a great work, would have been a greater if a part of the effort spent upon classical history had been given to the history of science. But, while demanding that students shall learn dead languages, to get at the originals of political history, he was content, or rather he was compelled, to take scientific history at secondhand.
Such was the deficiency of the work in this respect that, although, as Mr. Mill states in the Autobiography, Prof. Bain "went carefully through the manuscript before it was sent to press, and enriched it with a great number of additional examples and illustrations from science," yet it was exposed to the telling criticisms of Dr. Whewell, the eminent historian of science, for the faulty and ill-chosen character of the instances of discovery selected to exemplify and confirm his methods.
Mr. Mill was at the head of a school of thinkers which maintained what is called the Experiential Psychology; that is, in Mr. Mill's language, "there is not any idea, feeling, or power, in the human mind, which, in order to account for it, requires that its origin should be referred to any other source than experience." The problem of mind, as thus conceived, is one of the grandest openings of modern thought. Be the doctrine true or false, it brings
