.COMTE AND MILL 
 
 By 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 * THE NEO-PLATONISTS,' * THE LIBERAL STATE,' ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 214-220 EAST 23RD STREET 
 
BZZi^Z 
 
 )10CI 
 
M^1 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. Antecedents, 1 
 
 11, Comte's First Phase, . . . . . 9 
 
 III. The Positive Philosophy, .... 18 
 
 IT. Mill's Logic and Metaphysics, ... 33 
 
 V. The Religion of Humanity, .... 46 
 
 — VL Mill's Politics, Economics, and Ethics, . 60 
 
 VII. The Essays on Religion, 75 
 
 VIII, Aspects of Later Thought, .... 81 
 
 Selected Works, 92 
 
 ^26768 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.arGhive.org/details/comtemillOOwhitrich 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ANTECEDENTS 
 
 The two thinkers who have been brought together 
 as the subjects of this volume spring out of what 
 is broadly the same movement of modern thought. 
 If within it they are in some respects antithetic, 
 this makes them all the better adapted for 
 simultaneous treatment. Both, on the intellec- 
 tual side, were adherents of the philosophy called 
 in general experiential ; and with both alike the 
 whole effort of thought was inspired by a social aim. 
 The difference is that by the younger of the two 
 the experience regarded as the ground of know- 
 ledge was supposed to be explicable by impressions 
 on the individual mind; whereas the elder had7 
 transcended 'individualism' in this sense, andr 
 conceived of knowledge as fundamentally a social} 
 product. For Mill, the individual human being 
 is a component of society known prior to the 
 composition. For Comte, he cannot be known as 
 
 A I 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 human except in relation to it, and can only be 
 thought of apart from it by abstraction. 
 
 This change of view is often said to characterise 
 the advance made by the nineteenth century on 
 the eighteenth. Because Mill had not appreciated 
 this advance, it is sometimes said that he ought 
 to be classed as still belonging in spirit to the 
 eighteenth century. Comte, in this resembling 
 Hegel in spite of his very different general 
 philosophy, was one of those who had most 
 unquestionably made the new point of view their 
 own. At first sight therefore he might appear 
 to have all the advantage over his younger con- 
 temporary. This impression, however, Avould be 
 wrong. The whole value of a philosopher's 
 thought cannot be tested by any single point of 
 view ; and there were lines on which Mill, though 
 not so systematic and powerful a thinker all 
 round, went deeper and achieved more than 
 Comte 
 
 There is not space to say much of the biography 
 of either; but the leading facts must be given. 
 Auguste Comte ^vas born at Montpellier on the 
 19th January 1798, and died at Paris on the 
 5th September 1857. John Stuart Mill was born 
 at Pentonville on the 20th May 1806, and died at 
 Avignon on the 8th May 1873. Comte's system- 
 
ANTECEDENTS 
 
 atic training was in mathematical and physical 
 science; first at the Lycee of Montpellier and 
 afterwards at the Ecole Poly technique in Paris. 
 In youth he also accumulated extensive know- 
 ledge of history and literature, and an extremely 
 tenacious memory gave him ever afterwards full 
 command of his material. Henceforth, however, 
 he only elaborated and did not add to the store. 
 His later abstinence from the reading of contem- 
 porary literature and journalism h6 described as 
 * cerebral hygiene.' The greater part of his life 
 (1816 to 1851) was more or less absorbed by the 
 private teaching of mathematics and by the 
 duties of posts as public teacher and examiner. 
 What he always regarded as his distinctive work 
 had to be done in the intervals of obligatory 
 tasks; till at length, having been deprived first 
 of one post and then of another through the 
 hostility of scientific specialists whom he had 
 failed to conciliate either for his philosophy or 
 for himself personally, he was supported, in 
 further developing his doctrine, by the subsidies 
 of disciples and sympathisers. In one respect 
 Miir^ external circumstances were similar. He 
 too was never a teacher of philosophy, but had 
 duties extrinsic to the purpose of his life as he 
 had been led to conceive it from the first. A 
 
 3 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 severe and elaborate education by his fiither, 
 James Mill (1773-1836), in ancient literature, in 
 mathematics, and especially in logic, was followed 
 by an official career in the service of the East 
 India Company, v/hich lasted from 1823 to 1858, 
 when the government of India was transferred to 
 the Crown. His education, it may be observed, 
 was in a manner complementary to that of the 
 Polytechnic student. Physical science was a study 
 in which Mill was not directly trained, but in which 
 he eagerly sought information for himself. For 
 his actual work this was not the least important 
 part of his preparation; as, similarly, Comte's 
 historical reading was not the least important 
 part of his. 
 
 To Comte the impulse towards the philosophic 
 work of his life came at once from the thinkers 
 who, before the French Revolution, had speculated 
 with conscious regard to the better ordering of 
 society, and from those who, after the Restoration, 
 were aiming at social reconstruction either by a 
 continuance of the revolutionary movement or by 
 a return to the past. The names he has himself 
 selected from his nearest precursors are those of 
 Condorcet and of Joseph de Maistre. From the 
 former he took the idea that the total movement 
 of history is progressive; but, precisely as the 
 
 4 
 
ANTECEDENTS 
 
 consequence of this idea, found him in detail of 
 little value because, with the eighteenth century 
 generally, he had nothing but condemnation for 
 the Middle Ages. From the latter he took the 
 vindication of the mediaeval order and of its culmin- 
 ation in the papacy, but only, as he says, relatively 
 to the stage then reached by the European mind. 
 Condorcet had failed to recognise the * relative ' 
 justification of the past. De Maistre, in accord- 
 ance with the old theological philosophy, held its 
 justification to be ' absolute.' A sound philosophy, . ; 
 emancipated equally from theological and anti- 
 theological prejudices, and regarding every order 
 relatively to its own conditions, and not as 
 absolutely good or bad, will move towards a 
 synthesis under which the provisional value of 
 both views alike can be recognised. This synthesis, 
 to which the most advanced minds are tending, 
 is declared to be itself pre-eminently ' relative ' ; 
 not merely because it too belongs only to one 
 stage — though the final stage — of the human 
 race, but also for reasons that we shall meet with "'^ 
 later. 
 
 Comte's aim was thus to be a reformer of ) 
 thought for the sake of action. This was also j 
 Mill's aim, directly impressed by his father, who 
 preceded him as a thinker and worker for the 
 
 S 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 cause of political and social reform in England. 
 A disciple of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill indoc- 
 trinated his son with the principles of utilitarian 
 ethics and jurisprudence as they were understood 
 in Bentham's school. To these he added a train- 
 ing in the English psychology of Association as 
 developed especially by Hartley. The works of 
 the Scottish school of Common Sense were also 
 read, but with a view to their correction and 
 development on Associationist principles. For 
 the merely verbal explanation of cohesions of 
 feeling in consciousness by * mental faculties/ 
 called Memory or Imagination or Reason, different 
 for each kind of product, was to be substituted 
 the explanation of them in common by laws of 
 grouping or 'association of ideas,' yielding 
 different results according to the nature of the 
 elements associated and their degree of com- 
 plication. This doctrine James Mill himself 
 worked out, in his Analysis of the Phenomena of 
 the Human Mind (1829), to explain the appear- 
 ance of necessity in mental judgments that 
 present themselves as axioms. The psychological 
 origin of this appearance, he tried to show, is 
 the ' inseparable association ' of mental states that 
 have been constantly conjoined in past experience. 
 From this theory there resulted, in the view he 
 
 6 
 
ANTECEDENTS 
 
 passed on to his son, an almost unlimited power 
 of education, by modifying the associations formed, 
 to change men's modes of thinking and feeling. 
 Associationist psychology was not a part of 
 Bentham's own doctrine, but was added to it by 
 his disciple. Again, though great in legislation, 
 Bentham was found inadequate in pure politics. 
 For a new starting-point Hobbes was recurred to ; 
 but, instead of absolute monarchy, representative 
 democracy was held to be the best form of the 
 State. This position was laid down in James 
 Mill's article on * Government,' contributed in 1820 
 to a supplement of the Encyclopcedia Britannica. 
 Beyond the theories of government and legisla- 
 tion, the social science chiefly studied was 
 Political Economy. The most recent authorities 
 here were Ricardo and Malthus. Ricardo was a 
 personal friend of James Mill, who had first 
 encouraged him to express his views in writing. 
 By Malthus's 4aw of population,' J. S. Mill's 
 social theories were afterwards deeply influenced. 
 He and Comte started in effect equally clear 
 of theology from boyhood. Comte indeed was 
 brought up as a Catholic ; but he was thrown at 
 school (from his tenth year) into the intellectual 
 atmosphere of post-revolutionary France ; and he 
 himself relates that at thirteen he had rejected 
 
 7 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 all historic religion, including theism. James 
 Mill brought up his son in the conviction that 
 ' concerning the origin of things nothing whatever 
 can be known/ Christianity, he held with the 
 school of Bentham in general, is not only false 
 but pernicious, the God of orthodoxy being * the 
 most perfect conception of wickedness which the 
 human mind can devise/ By Bishop Butler he 
 had been convinced that the attempt to argue 
 from the natural order to a benevolent Creator 
 breaks down, since the moral difficulties of the 
 Christian revelation have their analogy in the 
 ordinary course of nature. But, as J. S. Mill 
 observes, during the period in which he grew up, 
 opinion in England on religion was more com- 
 pressed than it has been earlier or later. If the 
 Utilitarians were not to throw away all chance of 
 influence, they must observe a rule of strict 
 reticence in public ; though as a matter of fact 
 their real opinions were well understood. Comte 
 was more fortunately situated in this respect. 
 Even under the restored monarchy he could 
 speak as he liked in lectures as in writing ; and 
 he never left any doubt that he regarded every 
 form of theology, including the Christian, as 
 superseded, to use his own expression, for all 
 minds at the level of their age. 
 
 8 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 comte's first phase 
 
 For a very short time Comte classed himself, 
 along with others who aimed at continuing the 
 work of the revolutionists against the reaction, 
 simply as a political liberal. This youthful stage 
 is just perceptible in his earliest correspondence; 
 but it was not long before another side of his 
 mind responded to the influences of the counter- 
 revolution. As in the case of Hegel, personal 
 circumstances had little or nothing to do with 
 this. The conservative element in Hegel's mind 
 is clearly marked in his first great work, written 
 before he occupied any official position. So 
 Comte, making the transition with more pre- 
 cocity from his early revolutionary enthusiasm, 
 expressed to his friend Valat his sense of the 
 relative justification of the party that was con- 
 tent if it could preserve order against anarchy. 
 The revolutionary party, he found, had no con- 
 
 9 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 structive plan. The destructive work of the 
 eighteenth century had now been sufficiently 
 accomplished. A new synthesis must be thought 
 out before any further direct action ought to be 
 undertaken. When this was adequately devel- 
 oped, it would be found to supersede mere 
 ' negativism,' or revolutionary liberalism and free 
 thought, as well as the old theology, by a pro- 
 gramme whicli the conservative party or its 
 dictators, no longer fearing social dissolution, 
 would see the wisdom of accepting at the hands 
 of ' positive ' thinkers. 
 
 In his quest of constructive ideas Comte 
 thought at first that he had found what he 
 desired in the social projects of Henri de Saint- 
 Simon (1760-1825), with whom he came into 
 contact in 1818. Saint-Simon is a characteristic 
 figure of the transition from the eighteenth cen- 
 tury to the nineteenth. A noble of reforming 
 aspirations, he had with varied success devoted 
 himself to finance in order to acquire the means 
 of procuring assistance in elaborating the schemes 
 evolved in his fertile but theoretically untrained 
 f mind. Comte, with his encyclopaedic training in 
 ? the sciences, presented himself as exactly the 
 ^ assistant he required; and the connection be- 
 tween them lasted for seven years. From Saint- 
 
 lO 
 
COMTE'S FJRST PHASE 
 
 Simon Comte undoubtedly first took up some 
 of the phrases and modes of thought that were 
 his own starting-points. Among these was, for 
 example, the antithesis between * organic' and 
 ' critical ' periods, the Middle Ages being regarded 
 as organic and the eighteenth century as critical. 
 The general name given by Saint-Simon to his 
 conception of the new social order was 'indus- 
 trialism/ Industrial capacity is to hold in 
 modern life the place that military capacity held 
 in the Middle Ages. The practical direction is 
 now to pass from feudal nobles to industrial 
 chiefs. In the new 'organic' period there will 
 be a new ' spiritual power ' corresponding to the 
 mediaeval Church. For the clergy will be sub- 
 stituted men of science, artists, and generally the 
 theoretical as distinguished from the practical 
 class. The spiritual power, however, is to be 
 strictly subsidiary. The aim of society is 'pro- 
 duction ' in its industrial sense, and the practical 
 chiefs are the supreme directors and judges. To 
 them belongs the selection of the doctrines to 
 be taught. 
 
 Comte for a time called himself a Saint- 
 Simonian, and worked out the new ideas in 
 papers of which he did not claim the authorship. 
 One of these, dated 1820, and entitled ' Sommaire 
 
 II 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 appreciation de Tensemble du passe moderne,' is 
 reprinted in the series of 'opuscules' appended 
 to the last volume of the Systeme de Politique 
 Positive. Comte himself, in the preface to the 
 * opuscules/ notes two points in this as original : 
 first, the separation of the destructive and recon- 
 structive, or ' negative ' and ' positive,' movements 
 that have been the components of the 'Occi- 
 dental revolution' since the eleventh century; 
 and, secondly, the contrast drawn between France 
 and England according as the 'central' or the 
 'local' power gained the predominance. The 
 two antithetic movements, he concluded, have 
 been everywhere simultaneous; but in France 
 the old 'temporal power' was prepared for final 
 supersession by a provisional predominance of 
 the monarchy in alliance with the commons, 
 while in England the commons allied with the 
 aristocracy reduced the monarchy to a position 
 subordinate to the latter. For the rest, this paper 
 is not otherwise original, being in the main simply 
 a glorification of the joint triumphs achieved or 
 to be achieved by the spontaneous progress of 
 science and industry. Comte had not yet seized 
 his own problem. 
 
 The break between the master and the pupil 
 came with the next paper, dated 1822, and now 
 
 12 
 
COMTE'S FIRST PHASE 
 
 entitled 'Plan des travaux scientifiques ne- 
 cessaires pour reorganiser la societe/ In that 
 year only a few copies were distributed. The 
 short treatise was not effectively published till 
 1824, when Saint-Simon repudiated Comte's 
 distinctive views. It then bore the title ' Systeme 
 de Politique Positive/ thus anticipating the title, 
 as Avell as the ideas, of the later great ' Treatise 
 on Sociology ' now known by that name. The 
 point of difference was that, according to Comte, 
 the work of the theoretical class must come first 
 and give the direction for the new social order ; 
 whereas, according to Saint-Simon, 'industrial 
 capacity ' is in the first line, and all else is to 
 work for its advantage. Also, Saint-Simon found 
 that Comte had not developed the ' sentimental 
 and religious ' part of his system. This will not 
 seem surprising when we know that the name 
 given to the religious doctrine was 'Neo- 
 Christianity.' By his successors this was put 
 forward as the consecration of the socialistic side 
 of his teaching, which they carried further. For 
 Saint-Simon, while his practical scheme is 
 essentially a kind of benevolent capitalism, has 
 a place among the precursors of socialism in so 
 far as he proposes to abolish the inheritance and 
 bequest of property, and to substitute a selection 
 
 13 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 of industrial aptitudes by the community or its 
 chiefs. Here it would be easy to find relations 
 with Comte's ideal polity; but Saint-Simon is 
 admittedly incoherent, and his immense projects 
 were never systematically worked out. Now the 
 last thing of which Comte can be accused is 
 incoherence. Even the mechanism of his system 
 is all there to be criticised in detail. It was not 
 strange, though it Avas regrettable, that he should 
 afterwards repudiate any obligation to Saint- 
 Simon. The connection, he declared at last, had 
 only fettered the course of his spontaneous 
 meditations. 
 
 The early Politique Positive is certainly an 
 astonishing work. At the age of twenty- four, 
 Comte appears already as a master, clearly in 
 possession of the central ideas of his system. 
 Here was originally formulated his ' law of^JJie 
 three. state s/ Of this his disciple Littre, who 
 became a dissentient from his later doctrine, and 
 thus fulfils the condition of impartiality, has 
 failed to find any trace in Saint-Simon. As a 
 separate thought it is anticipated in a passage he 
 has brought to light from Turgot ; but the idea, 
 as he points out, was by Turgot left quite un- 
 developed. In Comte it is undoubtedly inde- 
 pendent, and by him first it was made the basis 
 14 
 
COMTE'S FIRST PHASE 
 
 of sociology conceived as a positive science. The^, 
 general idea is that the human mind first 
 explains the course of nature by ' theological ' 
 fictions, in which objects are imagined to be 
 moved by a quasi-human will; these are then 
 reduced to depersonalised abstractions, or ' meta- 
 physical' entities; finally, every attempt is 
 renounced to go behind the ' positive ' or scientific 
 law of the successions and resemblances of 
 phenomena. This formula having been arrived 
 at historically, society itself becomes the subject- 
 matter of a positive science. For the character- 
 istic of social phenomena, in distinction from all 
 others, is the peculiar kind of continuity that 
 unites the historical past with the present and 
 the future ; and the formula of this is the law of 
 the three states, now discovered. Social science, 
 as it develops, will, like the other sciences 
 (astronomy, for instance), be made the ground of 
 prevision. The thinkers who work out this new 
 science will be able to show that a certain type 
 of social order is in the future inevitable, as the 
 past stages have been in their time. Its advent 
 can indeed be retarded by want of insight, but 
 that is all. Nothing can prevent its final realisa- 
 tion. By showing this, the insight of theorists 
 may cause many otherwise inevitable revolu- 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 tionary disturbances to be avoided on the way. 
 The final movement, Comte holds, is towards 
 supersession of a theologico-military by a scientific 
 industrial order. The intermediate system, in 
 which metaphysicians and jurists took the lead 
 as respectively the theoretical and practical 
 directors, is merely transitional. Men of science, 
 when science has been systematised and unified 
 under a positive conception, will form the 
 spiritual powder. The temporal power will be 
 that of the industrial directors, by * industry' 
 being understood in general the action of man 
 on nature. This will have taken the place of 
 ' conquest,' or the effort to reduce other men to 
 subserviency, which was the characteristic activity 
 A of militarism. 
 
 In the next ' opuscule,' entitled ' Considerations 
 sur les sciences et les savants' (1825), Comte 
 gives an outline of the classification of the 
 sciences afterwards set forth by him in detail in 
 the Philosophie Positive. The paper contains 
 some further development of his views on the 
 'spiritual power,' but these are more explicitly 
 stated in the 'Considerations sur le pouvoir 
 spirituel' (1826). Here he definitely declares for 
 the institution of a scientific or philosophical 
 clergy, separate from the State, and corresponding 
 
 i6 
 
COMTE'S FIRST PHASE 
 
 to the mediaeval church. This, he maintains now 
 as later, is the only cure for the temporary- 
 anarchy brought on by the division of labour and 
 the dispersive specialism that accompany the 
 generally beneficent march of a progressive 
 movement. The theological base of the old 
 ' organic ' order as it stood having been irrevoc- 
 ably destroyed by criticism, the problem is to 
 find for the new order a positive base that shall 
 be indestructible by criticism because it is 
 perfectly rational. 
 
 17 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 The result of Comte's development so far was to 
 turn him away for several years from schemes of 
 direct social reconstruction. This he had decided, 
 as against the Saint-Simonians, was premature, 
 till a philosophy, itself scientific, had been 
 founded on the positive sciences. He had 
 already in his mind the scheme of such a new 
 theoretical construction, and was able to draw up 
 the plan of a * Course of Positive Philosophy ' in 
 1826. The * fundamental work' in which it was 
 embodied — the Gours de Philosophic Positive^ in 
 six volumes — occupied in actual publication the 
 twelve years from 1 830 to 1842. At the end of the 
 last volume he declared himself at Itogth ready to 
 set to work on the elaboration of the social doctrine 
 adumbrated in the early treatises. This he com- 
 pleted in the later Systeme de Politique Positive, 
 which must be reserved for another chapter. 
 i8 
 
THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 By ' positive philosophy ' we are to understand 
 a philosophy not only founded on the sciences, 
 but in its whole substance consisting of their 
 higher generalisations. The structure is thus 
 homogeneous, but there is no thought of deduc- 
 ing all scientific laws from some single law or 
 principle. Such a deduction is admitted to be 
 impossible. Each science has methods and laws 
 peculiar to itself The abstract sciences form a 
 hierarchy, beginning with MathejnaXics, which is 
 fundamental as method and also as doctrine, 
 being itself one of the sciences of phenomena. 
 Beginning with Calculus (in the most general 
 sense), it proceeds through Geometry to Rational 
 Mechanics. Next come the sciences of inor- 
 ^nic n.atji£e — Astronomy, Terrestrial Physics, 
 and Chemistry. Above these are the sciences of 
 the organic group — Biology (ending with Cere- 
 bral Physiology) and Sociology. On these^ six 
 abstract sciences depend the concrete and the 
 applIeSTscien^es. Science, Comte recognises, is 
 really one. The laws of its component sciences 
 interact, and it grows as a whole. But, while it 
 is divided only for convenience, the grouping 
 adopted, he contends, is the natural one. That 
 is to say, it has been discovered as something 
 given, not invented and then imposed on the 
 
 19 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 facts. For the series of sciences is determined by 
 a corresponding series of distinguishable pheno- 
 mena, the more simple, general, and independent 
 preceding the more complicated, special, and 
 dependent. Social phenomena are at the ex- 
 treme at once of dependence, speciality, and 
 complexity. To deal with the first point, the 
 relation may be traced all through. For social 
 phenomena depend on the nature of the organisms 
 comprising the society ; the phenomena of organic 
 life again depend on chemical and physical, and 
 these on astronomical phenomena ; and the con- 
 ditions of investigating astronomical and physical 
 phenomena are furnished by mathematics. This 
 order of successive terms does not exhibit the 
 whole dependence. The phenomena of society 
 are further directly influenced by those investi- 
 gated under the heads of chemistry, physics, 
 and astronomy. To take the most remote from 
 man : consider the difference that would be 
 made to the human lot by some astronomically 
 very slight change in the solar system. On the 
 other hand, mathematics, directly applicable to 
 astronomy, is somewhat less applicable to physics, 
 and still less to chemistry ; and when organic and 
 social phenomena are reached it is almost without 
 efficacy. The Scale of the sciences from mathe- 
 
 20 
 
THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 matics onward, Comte observes, is the descending 
 scale of perfection in the sense of quantitative 
 exactitude ; but perfection is not to be confounded 
 with certaint3^ The less perfect sciences are no 
 less certain, though they are less exact, than 
 those that precede them. Since all phenomena 
 without exception are capable of being brought 
 under positive laws or formulre, there can be, 
 when the scale is complete, no difference as 
 regards the positive character of the sciences. 
 Sociology, once formed, will be as positiA^e as 
 mathematics. 
 
 The primary reason by which Comte determines 
 his hierarchy is the relation of the several 
 sciences to the 'law of the three states,' to 
 which we must now return. The sciences, it 
 appears historically, do not all pass simultan- 
 eously through the theological, metaphysical, and 
 positive stages. Taken as wholes, those that deal 
 with the simplest and most general phenomena 
 are the first to become positive. The historical 
 order is that of the scale given. The sciences of 
 organic life, in Comte's view, had reached the 
 positive stage only just before his own time. 
 For him it remained to complete the hierarchy by 
 making the science of society positive. This he 
 was able to do by assigning a law of intellectual 
 
 21 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 development with which other social phenomena 
 could be connected, for there is a consensus 
 among all of them. It is enough for the present 
 that one law has been determined. We have in 
 this something quite distinctive of social pheno- 
 mena. There is nothing even in organic life 
 quite like the linking of each generation of 
 mankind to those that preceded it by the pre- 
 servation and successive modification of the 
 products of thought. Hence results a unique 
 method, altogether unlike the ' introspective ' 
 method of the psychologists. His historical law, 
 he insists, has been determined, not by the 
 necessarily illusory method of * self-observation,' 
 which is impossible because the observed and 
 the observer are one, but by an examination of 
 the results of man's mental processes as they lie 
 before us in the actual system of objective 
 knowledge. 
 
 ^ The only method Comte recognised of investi- 
 gating the individual mind, prior to social con- 
 sideration of it, was an attempt, such as had 
 been made in the phrenology of Gall, to connect 
 the difierent regions of the brain with corre- 
 sponding mental faculties. It is sufficiently 
 remarkable that, with no more satisfactory posi- 
 tion than this to start from, he determined the 
 
 22 
 
THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 mode of establishing generalisations in sociology 
 which was adopted by Mill, who had long been 
 in search of it, and confesses that without the aid 
 of Comte he might never have arrived at it. ^ 
 The procedure is this. A^ law of historical 
 development having been attained by empirical 
 generalisation from experience, it is tested by 
 trying whether it can be deduced from previ- 
 ously known laws of human nature: biological 
 laws, they are called by Comte ; by Mill, psycho- 
 logical. Comte, it must be observed, regards his 
 law of the three states as also a law of the indi- 
 vidual human mind, in which the historical stages 
 of the general mind are recapitulated. How this 
 is ascertained, or whether it is a happy illustra- 
 tion of the method, we need not discuss. Comte's 
 'historical method' itself stands secure. It has 
 taken its place in Mill's logical doctrine as the 
 'inverse deductive method,' in distinction from 
 the 'direct deductive method' characteristic of 
 physics. In actual historical work of a generalis- 
 ing kind it may be seen constantly in use, and 
 by Dr. Tylor it has been further developed as a 
 method applicable in the special researches of 
 anthropologists. 
 
 Comte himself carried his sociological theoris- 
 ing beyond the limits of recorded history. His 
 23 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 explanation of the origin of religion ascribes 
 to primitive man a doctrine of universal anima- 
 tion, called by him ' fetishism.' At the beginning 
 of the theological stage, men spontaneously 
 regarded each particular thing exhibiting active 
 powers as alive. It was thus at first the par- 
 ticular object that was deified. By a pro- 
 cess of abstraction and generalisation, classes 
 of objects were brought under the imaginary 
 dominion of a separable deity. The stage of 
 polytheism was thus reached. Further general- 
 isation led to monotheism, the last phase of 
 theology. Through all this process 'metaphysi- 
 cal' thought was already at work, reducing by 
 its dissolvent criticism the potency of theological 
 explanations. Finally, it has attenuated even 
 theism to the point where it becomes superfluous. 
 The God of the Deist is equivalent to the meta- 
 physical abstraction Nature, and becomes merely 
 a name that is allowed to furnish no element of 
 detailed explanation, this being left to the grow- 
 ing sciences. When the sciences are mature, the 
 'causes' (more than phenomenal) of the theo- 
 logian and the metaphysician are alike dismissed ; 
 and, as Avas said, nothing is left but a formulated 
 law. Not till this mode of thinking has succes- 
 sively extended itself through the series of the 
 
 24 
 
THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 sciences, and prevailed in Sociology also/can the 
 human mind be considered as having finally 
 reached the positive state. 
 
 Already in the Philosophie Positive Comte has 
 arrived at his conception of Humanity as the 
 organic unity within which sociological law is 
 manifested. This organism consists of men past, 
 present, and future; excluding, however, from 
 participation its anti-social elements, w^hile, on 
 the other hand, the useful domestic animals are 
 associated Tvith man in a subsidiary relation. 
 Humanity is conceived as having a beginning 
 and an end in time, though Comte does not 
 speculate about origins. It tends as a whole to 
 a final order, which will approach equilibrium but 
 never actually reach it. After this closer and 
 closer approximation to a fixed ideal, there will p^vnu* 
 be an inevitable decadence as the earth ceases to 
 be fit for human habitation, and the problem for 
 man will then be to adapt himself with dignity 
 to the descent. With this, however, sociology 
 need not now concern itself: we are still in the 
 movement of ascent, which is of more interest. 
 The progressive movement with which we are 
 specially concerned is that which has gone on 
 continuously in the West from the period of 
 Asiatic or Egyptian theocracy to the attainment 
 25 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 of the positive stage by the most advanced minds 
 of contemporary Europe. To explain historica l 
 s/ progress, Comte does not recur to theories abou t 
 race or climate . These, indeed, are not excluded. 
 They may, it is allowed, furnish minor explana- 
 tions when the time comes to carry sociology into 
 detail, but the progress now dealt with is held 
 to be a necessary evolution of man as man, not 
 due essentially to the character of some partic- 
 ^ ular race or races. What is at present the most 
 advanced part of humankind will afterwards 
 extend its completed type to the whole, all men 
 as such being capable of assimilating the progress 
 at first achieved only by favoured societies or 
 ^ individuals. 
 
 With his law of intellectual evolution Comte 
 seeks to connect a corresponding law of practical 
 evolution. To the theological stage corresponds 
 militarism. This first takes the form of aggres- 
 sive warfare and systematic conquest. As 
 theology passes into its last or monotheistic 
 phase and becomes attenuated into metaphysics, 
 defensive is substituted for oiffensive war. Then, 
 as positivity grows, militarism is slowly super- 
 seded by industrialism. These, Comte maintains, 
 are necessary phases of human progress, and 
 their treatment belongs to abstract sociology; 
 
 26 
 
THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 but in the concrete we find the first realised in 
 different degrees in Asia and Egypt and in clas- 
 sical antiquity, the second in the Middle Age of 
 Western Europe, and the third in the outlines of 
 a new positive order now appearing in the most 
 advanced nations of the West. 
 
 By the Greek States, although their history 
 belongs generally to the theologico-military phase 
 of offensive warfare, this is not typically repre- 
 sented. Since no one State could subjugate the 
 rest, the characteristic movement was checked 
 on the side of activity, and the distinctive develop- 
 ment of Greece became intellectual. The last 
 result of this was to reduce polytheism to mono- 
 theism, and to prepare for the Catholic type ; 
 though Catholicism, in the account it gave of 
 itself, traced its monotheism exclusively to its 
 Jewish predecessors. The Romans successfully 
 carried forward the system of conquest, in which 
 the Greeks had failed ; and the stage of offensive 
 w^ar culminated in the Roman Empire. The 
 problem for this, and for the social groups into 
 which it broke up, became henceforth defence. 
 The Middle Ages represent the system of defen- 
 sive warfare combined with a reduced form of 
 theology. In this period, the greatest advance is 
 the separation of the temporal and the spiritual 
 27 
 
OOMTE AND MILL 
 
 powers, confused both in the theocratic East and 
 in classical antiquity. This advance was made 
 only by the Catholic West. Byzantine Christianity 
 and Islam — the rival form of reduced theology 
 that shared in the division of the Roman world 
 — alike retained the confusion. The Catholic 
 synthesis reaches its typical form in the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries. Ever since, it has been 
 breaking up under the joint action of the critical 
 or revolutionary 'metaphysics' and the growing 
 positive sciences, now tending, along with the 
 rising industrial system, to a definitive recon- 
 struction of European life. During the fourteenth 
 and fifteenth centuries the decomposition was 
 spontaneous, and was shared in by all the Western 
 populations. After that it became systematic, 
 first in Protestantism and then in Deism, and 
 brought with it first the break of the Reformation 
 in the sixteenth century, and then the revolu- 
 tionary crisis at the end of the eighteenth. This 
 crisis can only be terminated when the positive, 
 as distinguished from the negative, movement 
 has furnished the elements of a new and final 
 synthesis. 
 
 The practical or ' temporal ' power of the 
 positive age, dawning in the nineteenth century, 
 will be that of industrial, and no longer of 
 
THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 military, chiefs. Its supreme ' spiritual ' power 
 will consist of philosophers who have undergone 
 an encyclopaedic training in the positive sciences, 
 and are able to view them in their systematic 
 unity. These positive philosophers will be 
 properly a special class of scientific men set apart 
 to deal with generalities, since the specialists in 
 particular branches are clearly incompetent for 
 the work of co-ordination. The highest social 
 rank will be conceded to them, but they will 
 have no material power. Thus they will take 
 the place of the mediaeval priesthood, which 
 has furnished the ideal pattern of a theoretical 
 class standing apart from practical life, but 
 directing it through the consultative voice it has 
 in affairs and, above all, by its system of education 
 applied to all the other social classes and per- 
 meating them from youth with its dominant 
 conceptions. 
 
 We can now see how Comte, in his 'funda- 
 mental work,' while moving away for a time from 
 the social problem he had set himself to resolve, 
 was preparing the ideas that were to be brought 
 together in a more concentrated form in the 
 Politique Positive. Naturally he found it difficult 
 to understand on what ground disciples and 
 admirers of the Philosophy could repudiate the 
 29 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 Polity, which was to him its necessary sequel. 
 A partial understanding, however, is possible. 
 The chapter of the Philosophy vindicating the 
 progressive character of the Catholic Middle 
 Age opens with some pages in which he sets 
 forth a doctrine regarding the separation of 
 the spiritual from the temporal power which 
 Liberals like Grote and Mill might think them- 
 selves able to accept. The direct dominance of a 
 theoretical class is there described as superficially 
 plausible, since it places intelligence apparently 
 at the summit, but as in reality the most fatally 
 unprogressive of social orders. It renders in- 
 eftective the most powerful and original minds 
 of theoretic type, for which an administrative 
 hierarchy has no proper place. By the im- 
 mediate connection of the theoretical class with 
 practice, no room is left for speculative research 
 undertaken without reference to material needs. 
 Yet this detachment is of supreme importance 
 for the progressive character of the practical arts 
 themselves. The true form of a spiritual power 
 is one in which the few eminent theoretical 
 minds are protected by the State in freely doing 
 their own work, but do not aim at any place in 
 a governing corporation. 
 
 This is, of course, a very singular prelude to a 
 30 
 
THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 defence of the mediaeval hierarchy, not simply as 
 an institution adapted to its time, but as a model 
 for the future. It may be compared with a para- 
 graph in one of the early ' opuscules,' where the 
 position of the Catholic clergy in the Middle Ages 
 is declared to be analogous to that of the Greek 
 philosophers in relation to the State as compared 
 with the hierarchs of Asia. The presupposition, 
 however, that European history has been continu- 
 ously progressive, whence it followed that the 
 Middle Ages must embody a progressive phase, 
 was not peculiar to Comte. Mill was quite willing 
 to accept the whole view so far as the past was 
 concerned ; and, in critical articles, commended 
 to English readers the work of French historians 
 by whom what he thought to be Protestant pre- 
 judice was controverted. The difference appeared 
 when Comte fully recognised his own affinities, 
 ceased to recur to merely fanciful combinations, 
 and left no doubt that it was of the essence of his 
 own spiritual power to be an authoritative cor- 
 poration, which he no longer hesitated to treat 
 as analogous to an Egyptian or Chaldean 
 theocracy. 
 
 By way of comment it need only be remarked 
 that Comte certainly did not in the end fulfil the 
 condition of impartiality he at first laid down for 
 31 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 himself in rebuking the revolutionary hatred of 
 the mediaeval past. The antipathy he has ex- 
 pressed again and again for the ' critical ' periods 
 of Greece and modern Europe is quite equal to 
 that of any Protestant or revolutionary Deist for 
 the Middle Ages. This apparent necessity to 
 hate the one type and love the other seems to 
 indicate contrasts hard to deal with on any theory 
 of continuous progress. And, indeed, it may be 
 observed that there is a place in Comte's socio- 
 logical doctrine for pathological phenomena and 
 reversals of progressive movements, though he has 
 given it little theoretical development. 
 
 32 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 mill's logic and metaphysics 
 
 In the preceding chapter I have dealt only with 
 the generalities of the Philosophie Positive, as set 
 forth at the beginning, and with the Sociology 
 contained in the last three volumes. The inter- 
 mediate part of the work contains the systematisa- 
 tion of the five preparatory sciences, Mathematics, 
 Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. 
 Comte himself did not claim the knowledge of a 
 specialist in any of these except mathematics, 
 nor did he exaggerate the importance of his pre- 
 liminary work. Perhaps afterwards, when those 
 who had accepted it almost without qualification 
 would follow him no further, he came to under- 
 rate it. It had a genuinely emancipating influence, 
 especially in England, where it soon began to draw 
 more attention than it had gained in France. 
 
 Among the most enthusiastic readers of the 
 successive volumes was Mill, who in 1841 began a 
 C 33 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 correspondence with Comte which continued till 
 1846. At first Mill announced himself as a 
 disciple, but he was a disciple who claimed the 
 right to criticise, and thought to exercise as well 
 as to receive influence. Later, what seemed to 
 him the appallingly systematic character of 
 Comte's mind, for which everj^ principle was 
 settled and every detail had the certainty of 
 positive science, showed him that the kind of 
 interchange he had hoped for was impossible. To 
 Mill, as to early friends, Comte frankly declared 
 that he had no use for criticism, except regarding 
 the legitimacy of deductions. That any one who 
 remained at the theological or at the metaphysical 
 stage should not accept the new system was in- 
 telligible ; but for a mind that had reached full 
 positivity he did not see what attitude was 
 possible but adhesion. At first, however, the 
 correspondence was extremely cordial. Comte 
 read with interest Mill's System of Logic, pub- 
 lished in 1843, making for it an exception from 
 his rule of not reading contemporary work. He 
 found in it the most advanced position, next to 
 his own, occupied by any European thinker ; and 
 this, he perceived, had been independently 
 arrived at. It was MilPs generosity, he declared, 
 that had led him to cite the Philosophie Positive 
 
 34 
 
MILL'S LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS 
 
 so frequently. The development of his thought 
 would have been substantially the same with- 
 out it. 
 
 This is true, as Mill showed himself aware later. 
 Still, in the history of inductive logic Comte ranks 
 as his immediate precursor, his remoter precursors 
 being Bacon and Hume. His direct studies for 
 his work had been mainly in actual science and 
 in contemporary English writers of minor origin- 
 ality. As the essential problem, he fixed at last 
 on the question: What constitutes scientific 
 proof in the experimental investigation of nature ? 
 It is here that he himself came to see his distinc- 
 tive strength as compared with that of Cofi^e, 
 who, he found, had never attained a just concep- 
 tion of the conditions of proof as distinguished 
 from method. The problem of method had of 
 course been specially raised by Bacon, who gave a 
 first sketch of the procedure formulated by Mill 
 in his 'canons of induction' as the ground for 
 applying his test of truth. On the question of 
 ultimate truth in science, which was Hume's 
 special problem. Bacon was quite vague. Here 
 Comte and Mill were equally clear in substance, 
 and, by more serious occupation with the actual 
 processes of science, had disentangled the idea of 
 fixed law or order ; which, while it had been put 
 
 35 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 forward by Hume, had received from him a 
 sceptical colour. This, he said, is all that there 
 seems to be in science; but, if our scholastic 
 dogmatists are right, there ought to be something 
 more. That the order was really positive or 
 certain, Comte was assured by the applicability 
 of mathematics to the things of nature. For the 
 power of dealing with them by quantitative 
 measurement implies positive law. With this 
 insight he was content; and here he fell short 
 of Mill. In the proper sense of the term — not in 
 Comte's rather abusive sense — Mill was a meta- 
 physician ; that is to say, he was concerned, like 
 Hume, with the first principles of knowledge or 
 science. He could not be content till he had 
 determined on what most general ground we are 
 entitled to assert one fixed order and no other in 
 each particular case. 
 
 We may see this even where Mill is thought to 
 have failed. Take Comte's opening mathematical 
 chapters. He starts with a discussion of the end 
 of mathematical science, not indeed its practical 
 end, but its end as pure theory. This he defines 
 as ' indirect measurement.' Then he applies his 
 immense analytic and synthetic power to determine 
 and classify its methods. The problem, how we 
 know mathematical propositions to be true, is 
 
 36 
 
MILL'S LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS 
 
 scarcely touched. Essentially he regards mathe- 
 matics as a natural science of given phenomena. 
 A problem like that raised by Kant does not exist 
 for him. Mill, on the other hand, though not in 
 close contact with Kant's thought, regards the 
 question about the evidence of geometrical axioms 
 as fundamental. Are they ' synthetic judgments 
 a priori,' or are they generalisations from ex- 
 perience ? His conclusion that they are general- 
 isations from experience is not now accepted, at 
 least in the form he gave to it ; but he dealt with 
 the problem. 
 
 Where Mill completely succeeded was in putting u 
 the logic of Induction on a firm basis. To begin "^ 
 with, he had been thoroughly trained in the 
 scholastic logic and its Aristotelian original, and 
 knew exactly what it could do and could not do. 
 With a view partly to refuting the indiscriminate 
 prejudice against it that had reigned in scientific 
 quarters since the seventeenth century, and was 
 only now beginning to give way, he first worked 
 out the theory of Syllogism on lines of his o-^vn. 
 Only when he had disposed of this did he go on 
 to Induction, by which he was for a long time 
 stopped. The question was, How can we get, 
 from the result of a particular experiment, a 
 general law which we know to be true? The 
 37 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 formal logicians had little to say on this. What 
 they called 'perfect induction' was a barren 
 summary of particulars already known, not a 
 process leading to new knowledge. An impression 
 was left that scientific induction — all of it formally 
 ' imperfect ' — is a kind of mystery, producing con- 
 viction no one can say how. This air of mystery 
 Mill at length dissipated. Certain forms of ex- 
 perimental ' method,' he showed, yield a valid 
 general conclusion because it can be seen that no 
 conclusion but this is compatible with the axiom 
 called the ' uniformity of nature/ The expression 
 he chose for this uniformity was the ' law of 
 causation,' which he stated as the proposition 
 that every event has an 'invariable and uncon- 
 ditional antecedent,' which we call its cause. 
 That is to say, there is some determinate phen- 
 omenon or group of phenomena, the existence of 
 which being given, the phenomenon we call the 
 effect will follow. His attempt to assign the 
 ground of our belief in this law itself, like his 
 theory of mathematical axioms, has not found 
 permanent acceptance; but none the less his 
 determination of the valid forms of inductive 
 inference remains definitive. This does not mean 
 that it was incapable of improvement, or even that 
 he left it relatively as perfect as Aristotle left the 
 
 38 
 
MILL'S LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS 
 
 theory of syllogistic logic. Physical science has 
 been going on ever since, and logicians formulate 
 and justify its methods after they have been 
 invented, not before. It is now generally admitted, 
 for example, that Mill underrated the place of 
 deduction from hypotheses in physical science. 
 He had a theory of rational deduction that was in 
 great part true, but he limited it too much to a I 
 tracing of the consequences of known generalisa- 
 tions from experience. There is more place than 
 he cared to allow for conjecture as the starting- 
 point of deduction — of course with a view to 
 verification by facts. But, as far as the process of 
 induction is concerned, the ' new organon ' that 
 Bacon had called for was at last created. Every 
 induction was shown to imply at once some 
 particular experience, and a deduction from the 
 ' law of causation' assumed to be universal. There 
 can be a system of scientific truths, because nature 
 as seen in the relation of cause and effect is 
 uniform. 
 
 With respect to the idea itself of ' cause,' Mill 
 and Comte differ only in the form of expression. 
 When Comte rejects the use of the word, and 
 prefers to speak only of ' law,' he means to dismiss 
 ontological causes, supposed realities behind 
 phenomena that have intrinsic power or efiicacy 
 
 39 
 
 U 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 to produce certain effects. Mill retains it because 
 he thinks it is most properly regarded simply as 
 a name for the phenomenal antecedents that 
 'invariably and unconditionally' precede their 
 phenomenal consequents. The negative result 
 of Hume's analysis is accepted, implicitly or 
 explicitly, by both. We have no knowledge of 
 any power in the cause to produce this effect 
 rather than that, or of any tie between the cause 
 and the effect. The laws of nature are pheno- 
 menal laws, not laws of ' things-in-themselves,' 
 and our knowledge of them depends wholly on 
 experience. 
 
 Nevertheless there is in Comte a negative 
 dogmatism to which Mill did not commit himself, 
 and which he did not hold as a belief Comte 
 has at bottom no doubt that a real world of 
 mindless objectivity composes the sum of existence 
 prior to the appearance of animal life. On the 
 origin of life, as on the origin of man, he has no 
 theory. His position is distinguished from 
 materialism by the rejection, on principle, of 
 every attempt to derive the higher from the 
 lower. Thus he can take an essentially teleo- 
 logical view both of life and mind. A true pro- 
 vidential order, he holds, has been introduced 
 into the world by man. He has no objection to 
 40 
 
MILL'S LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS 
 
 the association of this doctrine historically with 
 a teleological optimism like that of Leibniz. Yet, 
 while he rejects the name of 'atheism' (with 
 some asperity, as Mill remarks), the rejection 
 means only that he has no interest in atheistic 
 cosmogonies. His objection to them indeed is 
 that they are in essence a kind of theology or 
 metaphysics, seeking explanation where the 
 human mind can find none. He would not even 
 permit a speculative interest in the physical 
 universe beyond the solar system, because 
 nothing external to this can have any sufficiently 
 direct bearing on the human lot. With the 
 humanistic, as against an attempted cosmic, 
 point of view. Mill had much sympathy ; but he 
 was more aware than Comte ever became that 
 the limitations of objective science are narrower 
 than those of the human mind. 
 
 Mill's metaphysical positions are to be found 
 partly in the Logic, but chiefly in the Examina- 
 tion of Sir Williain Hamilton's Philosophy 
 (1865). This treatise was written, as he has him- 
 self explained, with an aim that was ultimately 
 practical. He regarded the kind of philosophise 
 ing rather vaguely called Intuitionism as the 
 enemy of all reform, because its tendency was to 
 treat mere customary associations of ideas, dis- 
 41 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 soluble by analysis, as 'necessary truths' known 
 prior to experience. Of this philosophy Sir 
 W. Hamilton (1788-1856) seemed to him the 
 best and strongest representative ; descending as 
 he did from the Scottish school of Common Sense 
 founded by Reid, but deriving some of his ideas 
 from Kant, and generally impressive by the 
 copiousness of his learning. To Kant and his 
 successors, representing the latest phase of 
 Continental Rationalism (as distinguished from 
 English Experientialism), eclectic thinkers both 
 in France and England had turned under the 
 impression that this was somehow an antidote to 
 the irreligious 'philosophy of the eighteenth 
 century' descending from Locke. Hence arose 
 hybrid philosophies like those of Cousin, of 
 Whewell, of Hamilton himself, and of Hamilton's 
 disciple Mansel. The relations to religion on 
 both sides, if Ave take the complete historical 
 series in England and on the Continent, are rather 
 varied. Mill has noticed the paradox that in 
 his time those who regarded the law of causation 
 as an intuitive truth were understood to allow 
 miracles, and those who derived it only from 
 experience to reject them. The controversy that 
 burst forth over the Examination of Hamilton 
 (in which Mansel also was dealt with) may be 
 42 
 
MILL'S LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS 
 
 considered as having closed this particular phase 
 of the opposing philosophies in England. 
 Successors may be found both of the ' Intui- 
 tionists' and of Mill, but none would now class 
 themselves precisely with either side. 
 
 Much of the Examination of Hamilton is 
 constructive. In pure philosophy the most 
 effective chapters are those in which Mill has 
 restated and developed Berkeley's idealism as 
 against the ' natural realism ' or ' natural dualism ' 
 of the Common Sense school. According to this 
 characteristic doctrine of Reid and Hamilton, 
 consciousness has an immediate intuition of its 
 object in contrast with itself. Matter and mind 
 are directly known as antithetic realities. 
 Against this, Mill worked out on psychological 
 grounds a positive explanation of our belief in 
 the external world, reducing what we come to / 
 know of matter wholly to phenomena and their 
 relations. The grounds were furnished partly by 
 Reid's successor, Thomas Brown, who had 
 developed the Scottish philosophy in the direction 
 of Associationism, and partly by Professor Bain, 
 then rising as an original psychologist of the 
 Associationist school. Having defined matter, 
 in a phrase that has become famous, as 'per-w 
 manent possibility of sensation,' Mill goes on to 
 43 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 investigate the nature of the psychological 
 subject. This he finds more resistant to analysis 
 than the object. If we call mind a ' series of 
 feelings/ we must add that it is ' aware of itself 
 as a series/ and this makes it something quite 
 peculiar and not finally explicable. Thus he 
 remains in the end nearer to Berkeley than to 
 Hume (whose Treatise perhaps he had not read). 
 Mind is for him ultimately more real than 
 matter. 
 
 Against all attempts to establish 'necessary 
 truths ' on the mere deliverance of consciousness, 
 he urges the law of 'inseparable association/ 
 recurring here to his father's Analysis. He 
 would like to reduce not only arithmetical and 
 geometrical axioms, but the formal laws of 
 thought, to generalisations from experience. 
 Free-will, which Hamilton made the basis of 
 morals, he declines to accept as a deliverance of 
 consciousness; but puts forward a doctrine 
 of his own which, while fundamentally deter- 
 minist, allows in each person a certain power to 
 modify his own character if he has the desire. 
 From ethical theism, as we can now see in the 
 light of his later work, he is not averse. Indeed 
 he shows himself rather anxious to prove, in 
 opposition to sceptical theologians who would 
 44 
 
MILL'S LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS 
 
 ground theism itself on belief in revelation, that 
 the idea of a God with moral attributes is not 
 irrational. What he will have nothing to do 
 with is an ontology of the Absolute, such as 
 Hamilton and Mansel attempt to combine with 
 personal theism and acceptance of revealed 
 religion. At the point where an ontology of his 
 own, differing from that of his antagonists, might 
 have been expected, his idealistic theory breaks 
 off. It serves merely to limit dogmatic affirma- 
 tions, without suggesting any doctrine concerning 
 the reality of the universe that goes beyond 
 particular scientific hypotheses. In later chapters 
 we shall see more in detail both his likeness and 
 unlikeness here to Comte. 
 
 45 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 Between the last volume of the Fhilosophie 
 Positive and the first of the Politique Positive 
 there took place what is sometimes regarded as 
 a revolution in Comte's manner of thinking. In 
 definitely returning from the laws of social 
 development to a scheme of social reconstruc- 
 tion, he no longer called himself simply a philo- 
 sopher, but came forward as the founder of a 
 religion. This has been explained by thorough- 
 going disciples as merely a change in expression. 
 In his earlier works he spoke uniformly as if 
 rejecting everything that was called religion, and 
 made philosophy the highest name. But by 
 'religion,' it is said, he then meant only theology. 
 Later he distinguished more exactly, and, while 
 continuing to reject every theology, took religion 
 instead of philosophy for the name of what is 
 highest in his synthesis. This may serve as a 
 
 46 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 partial explanation ; but there was also something 
 unforeseen. The germinal ideas of the social 
 reconstruction that afterwards took form are 
 indeed present in the earlier works, but the 
 organised 'cult of humanity' is new. The men 
 of science or philosophers who constitute the 
 revived 'spiritual power' are now not merely 
 successors of the mediseval clergy, but are defi- 
 nitely clothed with sacerdotal attributes. The 
 ideal for the future is theocracy minus theology. 
 The sciences are conceived as co-ordinated finally 
 in authorised text-books in a way that was hardly 
 prefigured in the first outlines, where we were 
 left to suppose special theoretical researches still 
 going on in freedom side by side with the work 
 of the class that is to co-ordinate them. And 
 Comte at first had an apparently clearer sense 
 that the work of co-ordination could not be done 
 once for all by any one man. There is in him, 
 after the completion of the PJdlosophie Positive, 
 an undeniable ' exaltation,' as Littre called it. 
 
 The revolution, however, is more apparent than 
 real. A well-known distinctive point in his later 
 system, for example, is the supreme position 
 assigned to the life of the affections. To this, 
 in the ideal order, the intellectual life will be 
 secondary, while practical activity comes third. 
 47 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 Mill, in his Anguste Comte and Positivism^ traced 
 this prescription for mankind in general to the 
 circumstances of Comte's life. With his disposi- 
 tion to organise everything, he would have made 
 the life of feeling supreme for all during the 
 whole of life, because during the short period of 
 his attachment to Madame Clotilde de Vaux 
 (before her death in 1846) he himself had found 
 full satisfaction in it. In an earlier correspon- 
 dence, however (not published when Mill wrote), 
 Comte had expressed precisely the same view. 
 In fact, a biographical explanation no more 
 applies than in the somewhat similar case of 
 Mill himself, who has pointed out that his 
 advocacy of equal social and political rights for 
 both sexes was not originally due to the influence 
 of his wife. His position that justice absolutely 
 demands equality dated from his youth, when he 
 had maintained it against his father's view, inci- 
 dentally expressed, that democratic government 
 does not strictly require that women should take 
 part in electing representatives. The mental 
 history of both philosophers, it may be observed, 
 suggests something very like ' innate ideas.' 
 
 An occasion for bringing forward his new con- 
 ceptions with practical effect seemed to offer itself 
 to Comte in the Revolution of 1848. It was in 
 48 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 that year that he published his Discours sur 
 VEnsemhle du Fositivisme, afterwards incorpor- 
 ated in the first vokime of the Politique Positive. 
 From the chiefs of revolutions and reactions 
 alike, however, nothing but discouragement was 
 to come to him. We may completely assent to 
 what his disciples say of his heroic persistence 
 in his own course, now as during the rest of his 
 life. At the same time, there came in more and 
 more an element of illusion that was absent from 
 his first period. The new religion, he predicted 
 later, would have received official recognition in 
 Europe at the end of a century from the Revolu- 
 tion of 1789. He himself, if he lived long enough, 
 would be saluted as the High Priest of Humanity. 
 But to say more on this is not worth while, even 
 if there were space. The social reconstruction 
 forms an imaginative synthesis not affected in 
 its real interest by failure, actual or prospective, 
 to realise itself in the expression that Comte 
 gave to it. 
 
 His later doctrine is expounded in the Systeme 
 de Politique Positive (4 vols., 1851-1854) and in 
 the Synthese Subjective (1856). The superiority, 
 in some respects, of these works over the earlier 
 ones is admitted even by Mill, who was least in 
 sympathy with them. Their retrograde character 
 D 49 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 is seen chiefly in the growing antipathy, which 
 Mill notes, to intellect as such. But, as an intel- 
 lectual structure, they themselves rise above the 
 earlier works, both in discrimination and in 
 breadth of view, not to speak of the advance 
 generally allowed as regards imagination and feel- 
 ing. The superiority may be seen especially in 
 the historical exposition ; where it was less to be 
 looked for, since Comte \vas more preoccupied 
 than he had been formerly w^ith ' order ' as dis- 
 tinguished from 'progress,' with what he called 
 ' social statics ' as distinguished from * dynamics.' 
 The religious type of Western Asia is now far 
 more clearly marked off than in the PhilosapJty 
 from that of Greece and Rome. The highly 
 organised theocracy of the first type is classed 
 as distinctively industrial rather than military. 
 Thus the term ' theologico-military,' as a general 
 name for the old order, loses its typical value, 
 though it is never quite discarded. ' Progressive ' 
 took the place of 'conservative' polytheism, 
 Comte now finds, precisely through the superior 
 position gained in the West by the military class. 
 This Avas at most adumbrated in the 'funda- 
 mental work.' In the Philosophy y the 'revolu- 
 tionary transition' essentially kept in view con- 
 sisted only of the five modern centuries from the 
 
 SO 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 end of the thirteenth. In the Polity ^ the analogy 
 of the modern West to ancient Greece being 
 more clearly seen, the break-up of the old order 
 is found to occupy (with intermediate reactions) 
 thirty centuries from the Homeric age. If the 
 unfairness to the ' critical' periods has become 
 intensified, the insight into their analogies has 
 deepened. There is added further a remarkable 
 speculation on prehistoric man. Before the typi- 
 cal theocracy, Comte places a kind of fetishistic 
 Golden Age, in which man felt himself at one 
 with nature, conceived as universally animated. 
 An interesting suggestion is thrown out that it 
 was at this stage that animals were first domesti- 
 cated. Man, being then less removed from them 
 in intelligence and sympathy, could put himself 
 with more spontaneity in relation with them. 
 The period of force and dominance came later. 
 Had it been necessary to begin by violent 
 subjugation, no taming could ever have been 
 ejBfected. 
 
 These, however, are relatively subordinate ^^ 
 developments. Both in method and in doctrine, 
 Comte's later phase is marked by one unquestion- 
 able advance of the highest scientific generality. 
 At first Sociology was conceived by him as the 
 supreme science. He held it to be dependent on 
 
 51 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 Biology as the next in order in the hierarchy. 
 From Biology (or a special department of it) 
 sociological laws must be deduced. He had seen, 
 however, from the first, that Sociology is not 
 wholly thus dependent. It has a method and a 
 doctrine of its own : namely, the historical method 
 and the law of the three states. But this brings 
 into relief another aspect of the individual man. 
 By the time he had completed the Cours de Philo- 
 sophie Positive, Comte perceived the necessity 
 of a revision, as he told Mill in their correspon- 
 dence. Hitherto the individual had not been 
 explicitly considered at all, except as a biological 
 organism. This point of view he now perceived 
 to be even more inadequate than he had thought. 
 Individuality had seemed at first to be a mere 
 biological notion, and then to be effaced under the 
 conception of a social unity. From Comte's later 
 point of view the individual person in the full 
 sense can be restored as an object of science, not 
 indeed as a unit that enters into society, but as 
 determined by sociological laws. There is a true 
 science of man as individual ; but it is posterior, 
 not prior, to Sociology. To this science Comte 
 gave the name of Morality, making it the seventh 
 in his hierarchy. Moral science being conceived 
 as supreme, all below must be ordered from its 
 
 52 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 point of view. With this conception there 
 naturally goes (according to his social scheme) 
 the position that the philosophers or priests are, / 
 above all, to be moral teachers. Being the 
 educators of the community, they will direct 
 practice from the ethical point of view, to which 
 all intellectual pursuits can now more definitely 
 than ever be subordinated. '^ 
 
 Theoretically, it must be noted that Comte's :^ 
 new science is properly not ethics, but psychology 
 of the individual. For such a science, his insight 
 into its true relation to sociology is undoubtedly 
 of immense importance; but he failed to dis- 
 tinguish it from moral philosophy, which is not 
 the same thing. Just as he does not discuss 
 philosophically the criterion of scientific know- 
 ledge, but takes it for granted, so he does not 
 discuss the criterion of action, but supposes it to 
 emerge as a matter of course from his theoretical 
 'moral science.' He has, indeed, an ethical 
 doctrine, but it is nowhere critically justified. 
 
 His ethical principle is Love or Altruism. The 
 supreme precept of his morality is *Live for 
 others.' Sympathetic as well as selfish feelings, 
 he finds, are in fact innate in man though they 
 are weaker. In the stages of human history, in 
 spite of this weakness, altruism slowly gets the 
 
 53 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 better of egoism. Taking the historical view as 
 sufficient, and passing over 'critical' questions 
 about the proof for the individual conscience, 
 supposed autonomous, and claiming the right to 
 give or refuse its assent according to the reason 
 of the case, he goes straight to the practical social 
 question. The principle granted, as he thinks it 
 cannot but be, how is it to be brought to bear 
 systematically on every action ? His answer is, 
 by a religion, — the Religion of Humanity. On 
 Humanity as the highest form of life upon earth, 
 the * Great Being' of the planet, each person 
 depends for all that he is and does. Humanity, 
 we have seen, is an organism in a higher than the 
 biological sense. Its continuity is that of history 
 and not of merely organic life. It is a real 
 providence, in distinction from the imaginary 
 supra-mundane providence of the theologians. 
 Thus it becomes for us the supreme object of 
 devotion. Through the graduated unities of family 
 first, then city or country, the individual rises to 
 the conception of the highest real being known to 
 him, having a life in the past and in the future 
 that far transcends the mere present. Humanity, 
 then, can become the object of a cult, of which 
 the devotion to incarnate god§) or goddesses was 
 an adumbration. Of this cult the founder of the 
 
 54 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 religion proceeded to draw up the outlines and a 
 considerable part of the details. j- 
 
 The new religion is the ' Religion of Humanity ' 
 not only in the sense that its practice issues in the 
 service of man, but also in the sense that it is 
 destined to become finally the religion of the 
 human race. From its beginnings in the central 
 people of Western Europe, where it is directly the 
 heir of Catholic monotheism, it will spread over 
 the rest of the world, aiding the populations that 
 have remained polytheist or fetishist to rise to the 
 stage of positivity without the painful theological 
 and metaphysical transition that has been 
 necessary in the historic past. Agreement having 
 been arrived at intellectually, ^ he religion will ' 
 aim at the systematic cultivation of the sym- 
 pathetic feelings by exciting emotions of love 
 and gratitude. The cult, in the definitive order^ 
 will be both public and private. Woman as 
 domestic goddess will be the object of the private 
 cult. In its public form, the adoration of 
 Humanity will be organised in a series of feasts 
 dedicated to the constituent elements and stages 
 of man's life impersonally conceived, the private 
 cult being directed rather to personal objects. 
 The well-known Positivist Calendar is intended I 
 only to prepare the way for this definitive form ' 
 
 55 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 of ' Sociolatry.' The months and weeks and days 
 of the provisional calendar are dedicated to the 
 great names, theoretical and practical, that stand 
 for all the progressive movements from the ' initial 
 Theocracy ' to the modern ' Republic of the West,' 
 consisting of the *five advanced populations,' 
 French, Italian, Spanish, British, and Germanic. 
 The dating to be brought into use in substitution 
 for the preceding era of Europe is in years of the 
 ' great crisis/ the opening of the French Revolu- 
 tion in 1789 being taken as the beginning. 
 
 I do not propose here to give any account of 
 the hierarchical order to be imposed on the 
 society of the future. As a scheme to be adopted 
 outright, few Positivists now accept it ; though, if 
 not taken too literally, others as well as Positivists 
 may find in it suggestions of great value con- 
 cerning the stages of an encyclopaedic education 
 and the practical ordering of life. I pass on to give 
 a few points from Comte's last work, the Synthese 
 Subjective, which represents in some respects the 
 highest stage of his thought. 
 
 i No more than the rest of his later writings 
 
 I is it a reversal of his earlier doctrine. It is, 
 
 / as he maintained, a completion of it from the 
 
 '] other term of the series. The stages in his 
 
 1 hierarchy of the sciences he still holds to be 
 
 56 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 objectively given; but his view all along was 
 that they lead up to man as the end. Every- / 
 thing, then, has to be gone over again from the "> 
 human point of view when this has at last 
 become positive. The sciences in general, objec- ^ 
 tive though they be, were never supposed to be 
 other than ' relative ' ; and this means finally that 
 they are relative to man. That is to say, no 
 'objective synthesis' is attainable. The only 
 possible synthesis is 'subjective/ This does not 
 mean that it is merely individual. A subjective 
 synthesis is attainable from the point of view 
 of humanity and not merely of some particular 
 thinker. But no synthesis is objectively universal. 
 The objectivity that exists is only that of abstract 
 science, and carries with it no knowledge of the ^ 
 whole. "^ 
 
 . This is, I think, a fair representation of Comte's 
 thought. He did not live to work it out in full, 
 but in the only volume published of what was to 
 be a third series of writings (after the Philosophy 
 and the Polity), he applied it to mathematics, 
 always in his view the fundamental science both 
 as regards method and doctrine. The most 
 remarkable part of this volume is the opening 
 section, in which the Religion of Humanity is 
 extended to the universe — or at least to that 
 57 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 portion of it with which man is in effective rela- 
 tion — by what is confessedly poetic fiction. The 
 * fictions ' of the theologians, according to Comte, 
 were of course not deliberate. Primeval fetishism, 
 the fundamental form of ' theology,' by which 
 objects were endowed not only with will and 
 feeling, but with intelligence, was a spontaneous 
 belief. Like later theologies in their degree, it 
 served the purpose of giving to human curiosity 
 a sufficient stimulus till the formulation of posi- 
 tive laws could be substituted for the futile search 
 after 'causes.' The positive philosopher, how- 
 ever, when the whole series of stages has been 
 traversed, may deliberately restore in the con- 
 templation of nature what he knows to be a 
 purely subjective and human mode of thought. 
 First, the birthplace and home of man may be 
 endowed with sympathy and will for human 
 good. An imaginative extension of this hypo- 
 thesis makes the Earth the 'Great Fetish,' as 
 Man is the 'Great Being.' Further, to abstract 
 laws we may assign as their seat Space, which 
 thus becomes the ' Great Medium,' imagined not 
 indeed as actively volitional like the Earth, but 
 as benevolent. Space, the Earth, and Man form 
 the Positivist Trinity. The other planets of the 
 solar system may be regarded in like manner as 
 
 58 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 animated, and the Sun and Moon especially may- 
 be made the subject of poetic personifications. 
 
 Unaware, probably, of the remarkable coin- 
 cidences between these suggestions and the 
 personifications in the last Act of Prometheus 
 Unbound, Comte leaves them to the poets of the 
 future. By Shelley, it is worth observing, not 
 only these * fictions,' which with the poet were 
 of course no less fictions than with the philo- 
 sopher, but many of Comte's distinctive theoretic 
 ideas were anticipated. The glorified humanity 
 of the future is conceived not in terms of ' atomic 
 individualism,' but as the Great Being — Man, not 
 men. To develop this further might seem to the 
 reader fanciful; but the comparison was worth 
 making in order to show how easily the general 
 conception of a Religion of Humanity can be 
 cleared of what is merely personal in it. And, 
 indeed, Comte himself, in this last stage, is visibly 
 getting beyond anything that may appear to us 
 sectional in his choice of models. From the 
 typical mediaeval conception of the world, with 
 its agency of external spirits acting on matter, 
 nothing could be more remote. 
 
 59 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 mill's politics, economics, and ethics 
 
 /^" It has been mentioned that Mill derived from 
 Comte the Inverse Deductive or Historical 
 Method, which he finally came to regard as the 
 only possible method for the more complex 
 investigations in the science of society. This is 
 set forth in the sixth book of the Logic (' On the 
 Logic of the Moral Sciences'). At an earlier 
 stage of his political thinking he had already 
 received an impression from Comte, and had 
 come under the influence of the Saint-Simonians, 
 as may be seen in the letters to his friend 
 Gustavo d'Eichthal, who was a member of the 
 group. The contact was one of those that con- 
 tributed to modify his Benthamism, others being 
 his relations with what may be called generally 
 the counter-revolutionary movement in England. 
 Here, as in France, recognition that errors had in 
 fact been swept away was accompanied in many 
 60 
 
MILL'S POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND ETHICS 
 
 educated minds by a disposition to find, mainly 
 in the order that had been singled out as the 
 object of revolutionary hate, something more 
 noble and beautiful than that which seemed to 
 be taking its place. The structure of Catholic 
 feudalism and the mediaeval Church attracted not 
 only theological reactionaries, but some who, like 
 Carlyle, saw that the old system of belief was 
 irreparably destroyed. It is noteworthy that 
 Hegel, for all his Prussian conservatism, never 
 took this direction, but sought a true organic 
 base, as against mere anarchism, not essentially 
 in a Church at all, but in the classical or the 
 modern national State. This, as an organic 
 order, had not impressed any of the minds by 
 which Mill was especially influenced. And, as 
 he had never abandoned what Comte called the 
 * revolutionary metaphysics,' the effect of the new 
 influences was not one of unqualified attraction. 
 He was willing to find something impressive in 
 the mediaeval past that periods like the eighteenth 
 century had lost, but the critical spirit remained 
 alert. He found already in Comte's early 
 Politique Positive an excess of system, and 
 remarked on the special favour he shows to the 
 Middle Ages as contrasted with his unfairness to 
 classical antiquity. Mill himself might come to 
 6i 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 be over-impressed later by the 'rehabilitation of 
 the Middle Ages ' ; but the large part played by 
 Greek studies in his early education gave him 
 the superiority over Comte in actual knowledge 
 concerning the other term of the contrast. To 
 the Saint-Simonians, with their zeal for industrial 
 'production/ he insisted on the disadvantages 
 that accompany the success in it in England, 
 which they were disposed to envy. A profound 
 egoism of tone, not merely in formed men of the 
 world, but in young men, who in France and 
 Germany are usually full of generous enthusiasm, 
 is what he finds to result from the predominance 
 of the life of commerce. With the aspirations of 
 the Saint-Simonians to a new order of society, 
 and even to a new religion, he was at the same 
 time completely in sympathy, though already 
 afraid of the sectarian spirit which would try to 
 impress on entire communities a single direction 
 to be fixed by the doctrine of a school. 
 
 Before the time of his correspondence with 
 Comte, he had found himself obliged to give up 
 the rigorous position of his father, set forth in the 
 article on 'Government.' Macaulay's attack in 
 the Edinburgh Review (1829) had convinced him 
 that what he afterwards called the 'geometrical 
 method' of direct deduction from principles of 
 62 
 
MILL'S POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND ETHICS 
 
 human nature cannot give valid propositions 
 applicable to the whole of a society. The purely 
 experimental or ' chemical ' method (as he called 
 it later) of Macaulay is, however, equally invalid. 
 Specific experience is here too complicated to 
 permit the application of the inductive methods. 
 The method has to be some kind of scientific ' 
 deduction. With abstract Political Economy he 
 had no special difficulty. If men are assumed to 
 be actuated only by one class of motives — in 
 this case, those that refer to wealth — then the 
 problem is sufficiently simplified to be treated 
 in the manner of a deductive science like 
 astronomy or physics. Having reached con- 
 clusions hypothetically valid, we can correct them 
 by restoring the data provisionally set aside. 
 When, however, all the phenomena of a society 
 are to be taken into account at once, the con- 
 sensus of its elements deprives us of the resource 
 furnished by this kind of abstraction. For the 
 problem of method thus left over, he found the 
 solution, as has been said, in Comte. With some 
 reserves intended to conciliate English prejudice 
 regarding Comte's use of the term ' theo- 
 logical,' he also accepted his doctrine expressed 
 in the 'law of the three states.' Further than 
 this it cannot be said that he ever proceeded in 
 63 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 Sociology as a science. The later developments 
 of his own thought in its application to society 
 were in Economics, in Politics considered as a 
 practical art depending to some extent on philo- 
 sophical principles, and in the theory of Ethics. 
 
 A project referred to in the correspondence 
 with Comte, but not carried out, was a work on 
 the science Mill called Ethology, or the formation 
 of human character, regarded as derivative from 
 Psychology, or the science of the elementary laws 
 of mind. This, in Mill's view, would have been 
 a step on the way to a scientific Sociology. The 
 lines on which it was conceived were, however, 
 'individualistic' in the sense in which Comte 
 was now fully aware of his own advance on 
 individualism. Mill came to perceive that his 
 scheme was, at least for the present, impracticable, 
 and turned instead to the subject of Political 
 Economy, with the development of which, up 
 to the point it had reached, he was perfectly 
 familiar. Here again there was a divergence 
 from Comte, Avho, though not condemning out- 
 right Mill's project of a treatise on economics, in 
 reality thought the abstract science of the 
 economists of very slight value. He had already 
 expressed himself to this eflfect. The separate 
 treatment of the phenomena of wealth, in his 
 
 64 
 
MILL'S POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND ETHICS 
 
 view, was the source of antithetic errors : in- 
 dustrial laissez-faire on the one side, and social- 
 istic schemes for nationalising the instruments 
 of production on the other. The only kind of 
 social science that could henceforth give any true 
 guidance was a science of social phenomena in 
 their totahty. Mill, however, seeing no clear 
 light in this direction, and retaining his belief 
 in economics within its own limits, now began 
 his second great treatise, the Principles of 
 Political Economy, which appeared in 1848. 
 What gave the work its essential interest for 
 him was the hope, by application of the new 
 doctrines attained since Adam Smith by Ricardo 
 and Malthus, to point the way to social reform. 
 In particular, the doctrine of Malthus on popula- 
 tion was applied by him to refute despairing 
 views as to the future of the labouring classes. 
 Population, it is true, by its unchecked increase 
 tends to press on the means of subsistence, and 
 thus to reduce the remuneration of the labourer 
 to no more than will support life; but the 
 standard of living can be raised, and the increase 
 of population brought under control by prudence.^it^ 
 All through. Mill showed himself anxious to 
 mark the limitations of the economic view. If 
 the laws of production of wealth are in the main 
 E 6s 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 fixed, the laws of its distribution differ according 
 to the customs and the social order of different 
 societies, and a better order may be thought out 
 than that which exists. The present distribution 
 is so unjust that even a scheme of communistic 
 equality would be preferable ; and, if communism 
 can be reconciled with the free play of individu- 
 ality, this may be the ideal order to be realised 
 in the future. Mill, however, will not resign 
 individual freedom. He puts forward no scheme 
 of his own that can be called properly socialistic. 
 In spite of the new influences under which he 
 had come, his work could in fact be regarded as 
 a text-book of the 'classicar political economy, 
 for which laissez-faire was the general rule ad- 
 mitting only of occasional exceptions. 
 
 Another point of difference between Mill and 
 Comte related to the position and the mental 
 qualities of women. On biological grounds, 
 Comte argues that women are intellectually in- 
 ferior to men. This Mill cannot admit. All 
 actual differences are to be traced to circum- 
 stances, such as mode of education, opinion of 
 society constantly impressed, and so forth. No 
 legal or political difference ought to exist. This 
 was afterwards the thesis maintained with passion 
 in The Subjection of Women (1869). Mill came 
 66 
 
MILL^S POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND ETHICS 
 
 to think later that in the correspondence he had 
 made too many concessions. The deep cleft, 
 however, between his view and Comte's is mani- 
 fest. The weakness of his position controversially 
 is on the biological side. He will hardly admit 
 at any time, whether in discussing sex or race, 
 that any mental difference whatever can be trace- 
 able to the organism. His strength is in the 
 feeling that justice between the sexes, as in every 
 other relation, implies a certain equality as its 
 condition. Economic dependence legally enforced, 
 for example, is incompatible with this. In com- 
 menting on the deification of women in the 
 Positive Polity as the ' moral providence,' he 
 remarks that Comte concedes to them everything 
 except justice. Comte's view about the impor- 
 tance of the relative superiorities on each side 
 had to some extent changed, but his practical 
 inference as regards social institutions remained 
 the same. 
 
 In the sphere of politics, each point in turn 
 'could be treated as a case of antithesis between 
 the two thinkers. Mill's Representative Oovern- 
 ment (1861), for instance, takes up the problem 
 of developing precisely that political system which 
 Comte regarded not only as transitional but as 
 already superseded. For Comte, the way to the 
 
 67 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 ideal order is henceforth through a series of 
 dictatorships. Democracy as a permanent system 
 is anarchical. Now Mill, while he was always 
 a democrat, came to fear rather that the rule of 
 the numerical majority would tend to suppress 
 individual variation. Hence he shows himself 
 eager to adopt any device that may be proposed 
 for reducing this danger. Parliamentary institu-^ 
 tions in general he accepts above all because of 
 the educational value of voting and discussion 
 for the individual citizen. A benevolent des- 
 potism, though not to be condemned in all times 
 and places, since the historical relativity of 
 institutions must be recognised, would not be 
 the best form of government even if it were the 
 most efficient. Whether the particular devices 
 taken up b)' Mill are such as to promote the ends 
 he had at heart is a disputed question; but 
 events have not refuted either his own doctrine 
 or that of the school from which he sprang, as 
 far as their hopes lay in the development of a 
 parliamentary as distinguished from a dictatorial 
 system. 
 
 I Mill's most famous contribution to the defence 
 |of individuality is of course the Liberty (1859). 
 I This is first of all a philosophical defence of 
 j freedom in the expression of opinion, especially 
 
 68 
 
MILL'S POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND ETHICS 
 
 when opposed to popular orthodoxy. Here at 
 last Mill was able to plead with effect, as he 
 had long desired, for intellectual liberty against 
 the silencing, by social intolerance, of open dis- 
 belief in Christianity. In an often-quoted passage 
 where the defects of Christian as contrasted with 
 the best pagan ethics are insisted on, he gave an 
 illustration of the freedom he claimed. The 
 persuasiveness and eloquence of the writing 
 helped to win the cause, in England, of free 
 thought and speech. Although some who agree 
 in Mill's general conclusion do not find the proof 
 as stringent as might be desired, none deny the 
 effectiveness of the plea at the time; and the 
 Liberty has taken classical rank with Milton's 
 argument for unlicensed printing. To a logical 
 persecutor, doubtless, neither the Liberty nor the 
 Areopagitica would carry conviction; but both 
 came at a time when the public mind was slowly 
 becoming more sensitive to the interests of truth 
 and justice; and the literary rather than 
 technically philosophical clothing of the argu- 
 ments did not tell against them. 
 
 What has perhaps been most commented on 
 
 in the Liberty is the contention for limitations on 
 
 the control exercised by society over the actions 
 
 of the individual. Not merely freedom of 
 
 69 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 I thought, but practical ' experiments in Hving,' 
 ought, in Mill's view, to be encouraged as against 
 the tendency, which he feared in modern civilisa- 
 tion and in political democracy, to an enforced 
 uniformity. Here especially we see the thinker 
 who had shown himself so sensitive in youth 
 to the influences of the counter-revolution. 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, we must remember, 
 were in reaction first against the European 
 tyranny by which the Revolution was followed, 
 and had cared much less about temporary 
 anarchy. Again, through social interactions 
 which it would take long to discuss. Mill's 
 
 i argument against pressing the coercion of public 
 opinion too far has been taken up by later con- 
 servative thinkers. Hence this side of his 
 thought, by enabling both parties to appeal to 
 it, has indirectly helped to strengthen the 
 authority of his name. 
 
 The principal statement of Mill's ethics is the 
 Utilitarianism, which appeared first in Frasers 
 Magazine in 1861, and was separately published 
 in 1863. While guarding himself against what 
 he thinks the errors of Comte's teaching in so 
 far as it overrides the claims of liberty and 
 individuahty. Mill here in effect adopts the 
 Religion of Humanity. The supreme end of action 
 
 70 
 
MILL'S POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND ETHICS 
 
 is human happiness, under which is included 
 (as also by Comte) the happiness of other sentient 
 beings in relation with man. Of the properly 
 philosophical positions connected with acceptance 
 of this as the end, Mill attempts such proof as 
 he thinks them capable of. There is an express 
 argument against the ' transcend en talis t ' view 
 that justice is irreducible to utility (or con- 
 duciveness to happiness), and can only be derived 
 from an immediate intuition of what is univer- 
 sally obligatory without reference to ends. The 
 feeling for justice, like other moral sentiments, 
 is found to have its origin in assignable circum- 
 stances of human history, and to acquire its 
 peculiar character in the individual from the 
 type of moral education that has been determined 
 by those circumstances. In the case of the 
 Utilitarianism as of the Liberty, those who are 
 in general agreement with Mill's conclusions have 
 not found his proofs in all respects satisfactory. 
 What has been most frequently disputed from 
 one side or the other is the modification attempted 
 by him in Bentham's definition or description of 
 happiness. For Bentham, happiness consists of 
 pleasures quantitatively estimated, pains being 
 deducted as negative. The net sum — the 
 greatest possi ble happiness — is the end. Mill 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 (after Plato in the Republic) proposes to dis- 
 tinguish pleasures as also qualitatively higher or 
 lower. Yet happiness is still regarded by him 
 as a sum. Thus, as opponents have pointed out, 
 all the apparent simplicity of Benthamism is 
 destroyed, while its principle is not expressly 
 abandoned. Indeed, Mill incidentally accepts the 
 most rigorous Benthamic view in the admission 
 that the end is to maximise the sum without 
 reference to its distribution. An adherent of 
 utilitarianism like Professor Bain holds therefore 
 that it would have been better tactics if Mill had 
 declined to commit himself to any but the 
 broadest statement of the utilitarian position, 
 which is not specially Benthamic. The only 
 difference of quality, relative to ethics, that Bain 
 can admit, is the difference between egoistic and 
 altruistic feelings. This too is a departure from 
 rigorous Benthamism. An obvious objection to 
 Mill's use of the principle of * inseparable associa- 
 tion ' to explain the origin of moral sentiments 
 is that this seems to reduce them to illusions 
 destructible by analysis. It is indeed paradoxical 
 that Associationists, having shown how, for 
 example, the love of money arises from associa- 
 tion of means with the ends of action, till at last 
 they come to be substituted for the ends them- 
 
 72 
 
MILL'S POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND ETHICS 
 
 selves as the object of desire, should complacently 
 argue that the regard for moral virtue is psycho- 
 logically explicable in the same way. Mill is 
 conscious of the difficulty, and in one place gives 
 an answer by pointing out that love of virtue 
 is so far natural to man as not to be dissolved 
 by analysis when it has been acquired; but on 
 the whole his hopes were so much in educability 
 that he preferred to dwell on the power of 
 teachers and legislators to produce by public or 
 private education any type of character they 
 choose. Since he wrote, ethical discussion has 
 taken new forms through the entrance into 
 the controversy of factors like 'evolution' and 
 the 'social medium.' Practically innate moral 
 sentiments, according to the Spencerian theory 
 of evolution, have their source in the experience 
 of the race, though the experience of the in- 
 dividual cannot wholly account for them. Again, 
 from the Positivist or the Hegelian point of view J 
 if man is a social being before he is properly man,! 
 the attempt to derive the profoundest moralf 
 sentiments from an explicit mental process inl 
 the individual is an inversion of the true order, i 
 All this, however, belongs to the psychology of 
 ethics rather than to ethics proper. The rational 
 problem of ends and criteria remains. Of this 
 
 73 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 the new factors furnish no ready-made solution ; 
 but only, like the Associationist psychology itself 
 at an earlier stage, contribute materials for the 
 ethical philosopher. It may be said of Mill that 
 he was primarily a philosopher or logician rather 
 than a psychologist, and in his time cleared the 
 discussion of many irrelevancies. 
 
 74 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE ESSAYS ON RELIGION 
 
 The year 1873 saw the publication of Mill's Auto- 
 biography. In 1874 appeared the posthumous 
 essays on ' Nature/ ' The Utility of Religion/ and 
 ' Theism/ Of these the first two were composed 
 during the period between 1850 and 1858, to 
 which belongs also the composition of the Liberty 
 and the Utilitarianism. The third was written 
 much later, and had been very imperfectly re- 
 vised. It was not the kind of work that had 
 been expected either by Mill's friends or by his 
 opponents ; yet it is not really inconsistent with 
 anything he had written elsewhere on religion. 
 
 While Mill is often classed as having the type 
 of mind of the eighteenth century, the essay on 
 Nature contains the strongest possible attack on 
 a favourite abstraction of that period. Against 
 every attempt to find moral guidance for man 
 in nature unmodified by human agency, Mill 
 
 75 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 proclaims war. Natural forces act in ways that 
 would be regarded as involving the highest 
 degree of criminality in human agents. When 
 we turn to man himself, we find that what is 
 best in him is artificial, being the comparatively 
 late product of culture. ' Nature's god ' and the 
 'noble savage' are sophistic fancies. The only 
 morally admissible theory of Creation, in view of 
 the facts both of nature and of human history, 
 is that the Principle of Good is limited by ex- 
 traneous conditions ; that not otherwise than by 
 struggle with the powers of evil, and by gradual 
 growth, could the moral order of civilised human 
 life be attained. 
 
 The next essay starts from the discussion in 
 the work entitled Analysis of the Influence of 
 Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness 
 of Mankind, by ' Philip Beauchamp ' (1822). This 
 is now known to have been written by George 
 Grote, with assistance from the fragmentary 
 manuscripts of Bentham. Its conclusions are 
 completely hostile to the utility of theism, and, 
 by implication, of Christianity. Mill thinks that 
 it presses many parts of the argument too hard ; 
 and his own view allows some value historically 
 to the ' supernatural sanction ' as an aid to ethics. 
 In the end, however, he points out the danger of 
 
 76 
 
THE ESSAYS ON RELIGION 
 
 associating sound moral precepts with doctrines 
 intellectually unsustainable, and for himself ex- 
 plicitly accepts the Religion of Humanity, not 
 as an imperfect substitute for the supernatural 
 religions, but as equal to them in their be&t, 
 manifestations and superior to them in any of 
 their others. 
 
 The essay on Theism develops the thought 
 expressed incidentally in the first essay, that, not- 
 withstanding the spectacle presented by nature, 
 a moral theory of creation is admissible on the 
 hypothesis that the Deity is limited in power. 
 The limitation. Mill adds, may also be in know- 
 ledge, and even in benevolence. Yet, if there 
 are any grounds for the belief in such a creative 
 God, this kind of theism may aid and fortify 
 the purely human religion which, with or with- 
 out supernatural sanctions, he cannot doubt is 
 destined to be the Religion of the Future. 
 
 The grounds that Mill finds for this hypothesis 
 are essentially those that have always furnished a 
 basis for the design-argument. The eye appears 
 to have been made for seeing, and the ear for 
 hearing. The Darwinian theory, he recognises, 
 cannot be disregarded as one possible explanation 
 of the apparent adaptations of organisms to their 
 conditions; yet it does not seem to him to be 
 
 n 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 more than plausible as a substitute for intelligent 
 design. On the whole, a creative God working 
 on matter is, he contends, still the theory for 
 which, as a speculation, most can be said. 
 
 Matter is, of course, taken here in its common- 
 sense meaning as something real and opposed to 
 mind. Mill, however, could easily have adapted 
 the argument to his own idealism. For the ' per- 
 manent possibilities of sensation ' into which 
 matter is resolved by him metaphysically are 
 not to be supposed correspondent to nothing at 
 all. They may signify some non-rational condi- 
 tions of the manifestation of intelligence. As to 
 the nature of these conditions, Mill does not 
 speculate. All that is necessary for him is that 
 they should be limiting conditions. His creative 
 Deity is clearly not the Absolute. He may be 
 the most powerful being in the universe, but he 
 is not to be identified with the reality of the 
 whole. Mill, as was noted before, does not regard 
 his own idealism as a possible foundation for 
 ontology. The only definite use he makes of it 
 is to show that it leaves room for a belief in the 
 natural immortality of the individual soul. That 
 it does not directly prove immortality he allows. 
 At the same time he points out that mind, 
 according to idealism, has a higher degree of 
 
 78 
 
THE ESSAYS ON RELIGION 
 
 reality than matter as phenomenally known. 
 Thus it may, notwithstanding anything that is 
 proved as to the impermanence of material com- 
 binations, survive the organism in association 
 with which it has been temporarily manifested. 
 
 In theism, as distinguished from idealism, Mill 
 finds very little to confirm the belief in immor- 
 tality. The most that can be made out is that 
 it permits the hope for a future state as a possi- 
 bility. Generally his treatment here gives ground 
 for the view that he would like to discover some 
 residue of truth in the doctrines of 'natural 
 theology,' though not for the inference that he 
 felt any need of them himself. In pantheistic or 
 evolutionary speculations it is clear that he felt 
 no interest. Hence he remains in the end more 
 in sympathy with the tenets common to Chris- 
 tian and non-Christian theists than Comte, the 
 fictions of whose 'subjective synthesis' have a 
 decided affinity with the monistic ontology which 
 he nevertheless completely repudiated. And 
 Comte, with all his admiration for the Catholic 
 type of life, makes no such concession to the 
 claim that there is anything unique in Christian 
 ethics as is made by Mill in the section of his last 
 essay which he devotes to ' Revelation.' 
 
 To whichever side our sympathies may incline, 
 79 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 both philosophers here give us less satisfaction 
 than we have intellectually a right to expect, and 
 point to something beyond themselves. Hypo- 
 theses or fictions may be permissible ; but in 
 philosophy we ought to have grounds for saying, 
 as Plato did of his myths, that the meaning 
 contained in them, though not any particular 
 imagination we can clothe it with, is the truth of 
 things. For a religion, Comte's dogmatic asser- 
 tions, whether negative or positive, seem at any 
 rate more satisfying than Mill's suspension of 
 judgment. The Positivist ' subjective immor- 
 tality,' or preservation in the memory of 
 survivors, for example, is held out as a certainty. 
 With Mill 'objective immortality' is indeed a 
 possibility, as it was not for Comte; but its 
 realisation is quite uncertain. Yet it is here 
 rather than in relation to personal theism that 
 his philosophical principles gave him tenable 
 grounds for an attitude not wholly suspensory. 
 
 80 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ASPECTS OF LATER THOUGHT 
 
 The most genuinely philosophical advance made 
 since Comte and Mill has consisted in a 
 renewed eflbrt to lay hold of the traditional 
 speculative problems they had in different degrees 
 set aside. While Mill was applying destructive 
 dialectic to the conglomerate constructions of 
 Hamilton and the attenuated Kantianism of 
 Mansel, Herbert Spencer, with even less direct 
 knowledge than Mill of German thought, was 
 working out, from the very imperfect version of 
 it before him, a metaphysical theory not wanting 
 in universality. Taking the Absolute of Hamilton 
 and Mansel seriously, and ignoring their Christian 
 theism, he put forth as the prelude to a system 
 of scientific philosophy the ontological doctrine 
 that that which lies behind the phenomena 
 accessible to science is a demonstrably positive 
 but at the same time demonstrably unknowable 
 F 8i 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 real Being. The unknowable is the object of 
 what is permanent in the religious sentiment, 
 of which the essence is the consciousness of an 
 insoluble mystery. This was as far as Spencer 
 carried metaphysics; but later thinkers, not 
 acquiescing in his resignation of further search 
 into reality as distinguished from appearance, 
 have tried again, with or without aid from newer 
 scientific ideas, to grasp the whole. Some of 
 these attempts could easily be brought into 
 relation with the ideas of Comte and Mill last 
 discussed. An atheological doctrine of personal 
 immortality, for example, though it was not 
 Mill's actual belief, has some affinity with his 
 metaphysical conclusion regarding consciousness. 
 And for a doctrine of pampsychism Comte's 
 'fictions' might take the place of anticipatory 
 ;Platonic myths. 
 
 To discuss this aspect of their thought is, 
 
 however, to take both thinkers on their less 
 
 characteristic side. The strength of both 
 
 . positively was in the ordering of scientific 
 
 1 knowledge from general points of view, and its 
 
 = direction to rationalise the life of man. The 
 
 difference that goes with this resemblance may 
 
 perhaps best be put thus : that Comte was not 
 
 more superior to Mill as a system-builder than 
 
 82 
 
ASPECTS OF LATER THOUGHT 
 
 Mill was to Comte as a critic, the word 'critic* 
 being taken in the widest sense. The observation 
 of Professor Bain, though it may not have been 
 made with Comte in view as the antithesis to 
 Mill, seems here particularly apt. * A multitude 
 of small impressions may have the accumulated 
 effect of a mighty whole.' Thus in a summary 
 it is more difficult to do justice to Mill than to 
 Comte. The essays, for example, collected in the 
 four volumes of Dissertations and Discussions, 
 which cannot well be brought into a short general 
 view, would add more varied interest to the 
 outline than Comte's subsidiary expositions of 
 his system, such as the CatecJtisme Positiviste or 
 the Appel aux Conservatenrs, to which reference 
 has been similarly omitted. 
 
 But this is not all that there is to say. While 
 Comte was essentially a systematiser, his system 
 is at certain points demonstrably wrong, not 
 merely from the imperfect knowledge of the 
 time, but from the very nature of its exclusions. 
 His doctrine is not in conception at the level of 
 Platonism or Aristotelianism, failing as it does to 
 give any adequate consideration to ' dialectic ' 
 or ' first philosophy.' Doubtless it will be found 
 to have less permanent aesthetic value. On the 
 other hand, if we refuse to be compelled to take 
 
 83 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 it or leave it as a whole, it remains profoundly 
 suggestive both in relation to science and practice. 
 The stimulative power that might seem to belong 
 more naturally to the comparatively dispersive 
 thinking of Mill, with his cultivated openness of 
 mind, is now far more present in the rigorous 
 dogmatism of the Positive Philosophy and Polity. 
 Mill's miscellaneous work was for his own 
 generation, and contributes little, directly or 
 indirectly, to solve newer problems. To complete 
 the antithesis. Mill, though he has left no system 
 of philosophy, has done a single piece of work 
 that marks a definitive step forward in human 
 thought such as has not been taken by any of 
 the great systematisers who appeared in his 
 century. For Mill's Inductive Logic is unques- 
 tionably a ' new organon,' susceptible of common 
 use by other minds. This cannot be said of 
 Hegel's Logic. And Comte, to adopt the accurate 
 distinction of his disciple Mr. Frederic Harrison, 
 has indeed * instituted,' but he has not 'con- 
 stituted,' Sociology. All that is definitive in his 
 treatment is the discovery of the * historical 
 method,' which merely contributes one chapter 
 to Mill's Logic. 
 
 That neither Mill nor Comte was affected by 
 the evolutionary biology which had been rising 
 
 y 84 
 
ASPECTS OF LATER THOUGHT 
 
 into notice in Germany even before it received 
 scientific proof from Darwin or speculative de- 
 velopment from Spencer, does not seem impor- 
 tant in relation to the special work of either. 
 So far as the idea of organic development had a 
 bearing on Comte's own work, he accepted it. 
 ' Social evolution ' is a phrase that he constantly 
 employs, perhaps before any one else. And the 
 rational problems that Mill attacked in his theory 
 of knowledge and in his ethics are not really 
 solved by bringing in the experience of the race 
 to supplement that of the individual. The full 
 acceptance of biological evolution by Spencer 
 before the appearance of the Origin of Species, 
 and his cosmical extension of the idea, did not 
 enable him to get rid of the individualism that 
 Comte had left behind from the beginning. 
 Thus his Sociology is in some respects belated 
 as compared with Comte's. His * social organism ' 
 is thought of in biological terms, much like the 
 ' body politic ' of Hobbes. For, of course, the term 
 ' individualism ' is not used here in reference to 
 a theory of government. The point is that 
 Commonwealth, or the 'social organism,' what- 
 ever may be regarded as the ideal mode of its 
 regulation, is conceived only as composite Man, 
 and not also as in its social character a condition 
 
 8s 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 prior to the existence of its component units as 
 human ' individuals/ Comte, we have seen, had 
 fully attained this latter conception. Here at 
 least no fault can be found with him from the 
 evolutionary side. No doubt it was inevitable 
 that evolution should at first seem to overshadow 
 everything else; but we can now see that to 
 social and political science the distinctively 
 evolutionary thinkers contributed less than either 
 Comte or Mill. It is not in relation to their 
 distinctive work, but where that reaches its limit, 
 that we shall find an advance due to evolution- 
 ary thought. 
 
 The real scientific advance made by Spencer 
 on Comte is the result not of his evolutionism, 
 but of his studies in subjective psychology, and 
 his consequent recognition that this, and not 
 biology, immediately precedes the science of 
 society. Prior to sociology, it has been allowed, 
 the individual cannot be properly known; but 
 there is a preliminary science of the more 
 elementary laws of mind, worked out subjectively, 
 which does for the sociologist what Comte 
 erroneously attributed to cerebral physiology. 
 That in psychological introspection the observed 
 and the observer are identical is no doubt a 
 paradox from the point of view of the objective 
 
 86 
 
ASPECTS OF LATER THOUGHT 
 
 sciences; but introspection is not therefore illu- 
 sory. Comte's own historical method is no less 
 real because it cannot be applied in biology. 
 The distinctiveness of his insight into the nature 
 of history is undeniable ; but he partially failed 
 when he came to deal with the ' pre-history ' 
 that is the more special province of Spencer and 
 the anthropologists. And his failure here was 
 closely connected with his non-recognition of the 
 introspective method. What he missed was 
 precisely the ' animism ' which, according to 
 Tylor and Spencer, was started by primitive 
 man in order to explain the peculiarities of that 
 subjective consciousness which psychologists re- 
 gard as the material of a positive science. In 
 Comte's view, as we have seen, all the theologies 
 can be explained by derivation from a primitive 
 theory that objects themselves are animated. 
 The gods of polytheism being the result of 
 generalisation from resemblances between objects 
 of the same class, a god who, since he is common 
 to all, can no longer be localised, comes to be 
 thought of as separable from any object whatso- 
 ever. Now it cannot be absolutely denied that 
 the notion of a separable deity might arise in 
 this fashion. And, if it did, subsequent general- 
 isation would no doubt suffice to explain mono- 
 87 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 theism also. A more natural explanation of the 
 separability of the god seems, however, to be 
 furnished by primitive animism. The notion of 
 a separable soul is first evolved as an explanation 
 of the phenomena of life and mind in man himself, 
 and then (according to Dr. Tylor's form of the 
 'ghost-theory') a similar soul is imaginatively 
 projected into objects. The 'ghost-sour (accord- 
 ing to both Tylor and Spencer) is at first con- 
 ceived as a shadowy semblance of the bodily form, 
 and is supposed to go away and return because 
 this hypothesis seems required by the alternations 
 of personal consciousness and unconsciousness, 
 the imagery with which the separable entity is 
 clothed being supplied by reflexions, shadows, 
 and other accompaniments of the tangible person. 
 Thus what is primitive is 'animism,' or the 
 notion of a population of separable spirits. From 
 these, the separable deities are derivative, directly 
 or indirectly. 'Fetishism,' or the notion that 
 there is a soul in certain objects, is secondary; 
 and the idea of universally animated matter is 
 a generalisation out of man's reach at the earliest 
 stage. Now this ' ghost- theory,' since it has been 
 founded on careful collation of evidence about 
 the beliefs of savages at all stages, does not seem 
 likely to be displaced as a whole. Had Comte's 
 
 88 
 
ASPECTS OF LATER THOUGHT 
 
 insight not been defective in pure psychology, 
 it is probable that the hints of * metaphysical ' 
 precursors like Hobbes would have suggested 
 it to him. As it is, no shade of a suggestion 
 of it, so far as I recollect, occurs in any of his 
 writings. 
 
 Yet it must be allowed that there is a tendency 
 of late to regard the strictest interpretation of 
 the 'ghost-theory' as overstrained. The notion 
 that the world of objects is itself animated, some 
 modern theorists maintain, was directly suggested, 
 apart from all ideas of ghosts, by the phenomena 
 of moving things. To all things that are appar- 
 ently active, life is directly ascribed by analogy 
 with active persons. The case is, perhaps, one 
 where combination of theories may be permis- 
 sible. The ghost-theory undoubtedly, and per- 
 haps even Comte's derivation of all later develop- 
 ments from fetishism, might with ingenuity be 
 stretched to cover the facts; but we have no 
 sound reason for attempting to work exclusively 
 either with one or the other, if there is evidence, 
 as there may be, of independent origins. The 
 law called by Sir William Hamilton the ' law of 
 parsimony,' as Mill pointed out, is not a law of 
 nature, but only a methodological rule. We must 
 not invent hypothetical causes where known 
 
 G .89 
 
COMTE AND MILL 
 
 causes suffice to explain the phenomena; and, 
 if we have to recur to hypotheses, we must not 
 multiply hypothetical causes without necessity; 
 but, when we know of more than one, or of many 
 experienced causal processes, we need not dismiss 
 a portion of them for the mere sake of simplifying 
 our explanations. The processes of nature are 
 frequently complex. 
 
 This was fully recognised by Comte, who was 
 himself strongly opposed to the chimerical uni- 
 fications that are not content with carrying 
 scientific explanation into everything, but aim 
 at the reduction of all laws to one. The excess 
 of system here can be redressed by his own 
 principles. It is not the result of too great a 
 striving after speculative unity, but of a too 
 absorbing desire to unify human life. Neither 
 in Comte nor in Mill do we meet with the barren 
 formulae that seem to explain everything while 
 actually explaining nothing. Indeed, the demand 
 for precision and applicability becomes on one 
 side a defect, as limiting the speculative outlook. 
 Both are too exclusively humanist. Here is the 
 real failing in their philosophy that might have 
 been corrected by application of evolutionary 
 theories with their appeal to 'cosmic emotion.' 
 In Mill, as in Comte, there is a theoretical oppo- 
 
 90 
 
ASPECTS OF LATER THOUGHT 
 
 sition of man to the cosmos which seems to make 
 of him a kind of miracle in nature. Evolution 
 in its larger aspects restores a wholeness that 
 both were sometimes too willing to renounce. 
 
 91 
 
SELECTED WORKS 
 
 MAINLY BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Notice sur VCEuvre et sur la Vie d' Augusta Comte. Par le 
 Docteur Robinet. 2nd ed., 1864. 
 
 Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive. Par E. Littr^ 
 2nd ed., 1864. 
 
 Lettres a M. Valat, 1870. 
 
 Testament d/ Auguste Comte, 1884. 
 
 The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely translated 
 and condensed by Harriet Martineau. With an Intro- 
 duction by Frederic Harrison. 3 vols., 1896. 
 
 Correspondance de John Stuart Mill et d Auguste Comte, avec 
 une Introduction par L. L^vy-Bruhl, 1899. 
 
 J. S. Mjll, Autobiography, 1873. 
 
 Correspondance inidite avec Gustave dEichthal, 1898. 
 
 John Stuart Mill. A Criticism : with Personal Recollections. 
 By Alexander Bain, 1882. 
 
 Life of John Stuart Mill. By W. L. Courtney, 1889. 
 
 The English Utilitarians. By Sir Leslie Stephen (vol. iii. : 
 John Stuart Mill), 1900. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constablk, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
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