James Mill

“ The breadth of culture and the perfection of training exhibited by John Stuart Mill need not surprise us when we recollect that his earlier days were spent in the society of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. And the remarkable extent of view, the command of facts, and the astonishing productiveness of such modern Frenchmen as Sainte-Beuve and Littre become explicable when we reflect upon the circumstance that so many able and brilliant men are collected in one city, where their minds may continually and directly react upon each other. ”

“ For James Mill might see where Thompson was wrong, but either did not see, or did not admit that he saw, when he was right, whereas John Stuart Mill, while he shows wherein he considers the author of the pamphlet wrong, does him ample justice in the criticism of his "Catechism on the Corn Laws." It is in this quality of trying to do justice to all men, by patient investigation and incessant labour, that John Stuart Mill stands alone among all the men that have come under my observation in the course of my life. ”

“ James seems to be like a horse in a mill, who, though every time he goes his rounds, may kick up his heels after a new variety, never gets out of the same beaten track, or rises above the same humdrum pace. ”

“ James Mill, he argued, had been equally without the local knowledge which I declared to be necessary to a self-respecting author. Several circumstances had strengthened the feeling. His friend Maine had gone to India in 1862 as legal Member of Council, and was engaged upon that work of codification [234] to which he refers admiringly in the 'View of the Criminal Law.' In November 1866 Fitzjames's brother-in-law, Henry Cunningham, went to India, where he was appointed public prosecutor in the Punjab. His sister, then Miss Emily Cunningham, joined him there. ”

“ Mill's view, for example, seemed to be that all the differences between the sexes were accidental, and that women could be turned into men by trifling changes in the law. To a man of ordinary flesh and blood, who had grounded his opinions, not upon books, but upon actual [317] experience of life, such doctrines appear to be not only erroneous, but indicative of a hopeless thinness of character. And so, again, Fitzjames absolutely refused to test the value of the great patriotic passions which are the mainsprings of history by the mere calculus of abstract concepts which satisfied Mill. ”

“ The fault which he finds with Mill is precisely that Mill's theory would unmoralise the state. The state, that is, would be a mere association for mutual insurance against injury instead of an organ of the moral sense of the community. What, then, is morality? How are we to know what is right and wrong, and what are our motives for approving and disapproving the good and the bad? Fitzjames uses phrases, especially in his letters, where he is not arguing against an adversary, which appear to be inconsistent, if not with utilitarianism, at least with the morality of mere expediency. ”

“ J. S. Mill had begun as an unflinching advocate of the stern old utilitarianism of his father and Ricardo. He had become, as Fitzjames observes, 'humane' or 'sentimental' in later years. He tried, as his critics observe, to soften the old economic doctrines and showed a certain leaning to socialism. In regard to this part of his teaching, in which Fitzjames took little interest, I shall only notice that, whatever his concessions, he was still in principle an 'individualist.' He maintained against the Socialists the advantages of competition ”

“ But to be thus widely effective, a man must not be a specialist. Mr. John Mill, weighty and many-sided as he is by nature and culture, is yet deficient in the æsthetic direction; and the same is true of M. Littré in France. Their lances lack that final tipping with light that made Voltaire's so irresistible. What Henry IV's soldiers followed was his white plume; and that imponderable superfluity, grace, in some shape, seems one factor without which no awakening of men's sympathies on a large scale can take place."
[47] William James, by Theodore Flournoy (Geneva, 1911) , p. ”

“ Sir James must mean, if he means anything, that to trace up the motive affections of human nature to pain and pleasure, is to make personal advantage the only motive. This is to affirm, that he who analyses any of the complicated phenomena of human nature, and points out the circumstances of their formation, puts an end to them. ”

“ To diminish the strength of the social bond would be to enervate not to invigorate [315] society. If Mill's principles could be adopted, everything that has stimulated men to pursue great ends would lose its interest, and we should become a more contemptible set of creatures than we are already.
I have tried to show how these convictions had been strengthened by circumstances. Fitzjames's strong patriotic feeling, his pride in the British race and the British empire, generated a special antipathy to the school which, as he thought, took a purely commercial view of politics ”

“ Mill's leading tenet has been already stated; the only rightful ground of coercing our neighbours is self-protection. Using the Benthamite terminology, we may say that we ought never to punish self-regarding conduct, or again interpolating the utilitarian meaning of 'ought' that such punishment cannot increase the general happiness. Fitzjames complains that Mill never tries to prove this except by adducing particular cases. ”

“ We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen, Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance, and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few,—not omitting even scaffolding,—or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in,—in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.
It should not be overlooked that by the Nebraska Bill the people of a State as well as Territory were to be left "perfectly free," ”

“ It was in fact at the very moment, this element, not absent from what Lord Mark was further saying. "So you're wrong, you see, as to our knowing all about each other. There are cases where we break down. I at any rate give her up—up, that is, to you. You must do her for me—tell me, I mean, when you know more. You'll notice," he pleasantly wound up, "that I've confidence in you."
"Why shouldn't you have?" Milly asked, observing in this, as she thought, a fine, though, for such a man, a surprisingly artless, fatuity. ”

“ It was the handsome girl alone, one of his own species and his own society, who had made him feel uncertain; of his certainties about a mere little American, a cheap exotic, imported almost wholesale, and whose habitat, with its conditions of climate, growth, and cultivation, its immense profusion, but its few varieties and thin development, he was perfectly satisfied. The marvel was, too, that Milly understood his satisfaction—feeling that she expressed the truth in presently saying: "Of course; I make out that she must be difficult; just as I see that I myself must be easy." ”

“ Milly went on, "but mine are larger. Mine are huge."
"Oh, you go her, all round, 'one better'—which is just what I said. But you're a pair. You must surely catch it," he added as if it were important to his character as a serious man not to appear to have invented his plea.
"I don't know one never knows one's self. ”

“ But this danger passed—he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom he would just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed away westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, in this respect, after Milly's death, the silence as to the sense of which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had answered him from Venice twice and had had time to answer him twice again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he had not gone into the question of also enclosing that. ”

“ This principle, for that matter, Milly at present, with a renewed flare of fancy, felt that she should herself have liked to believe in. Eugenic had really done for her more than he probably knew—he didn't after all know everything—in having, for the wind-up of the autumn, on a weak word from her, so admirably, so perfectly established her. Her weak word, as a general hint, had been: "At Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it can be at all managed—you know what I mean—some fine old rooms, wholly independent, for a series of months. ”

“ The old couple listened breathlessly.
“Silas, that’s Milly singing.”
“No, ’tain’t!”
But the denial died on his lips as he recognized the voice.
“A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which seek through the world is ne’er met with elsewhere.”
Clear and sweet came the tones, like pearls in their rounded purity. The mother was crying bitterly.
“An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain.”
These words came with ringing force, and it seemed to the old folks that Milly, far away in Paris, stretched out her hands to them across the water. ”

“ It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting—had his innermost feeling spoken—at the propriety rather, in his interest, of some cutting down, some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would meet that half-way, but the real must also meet him. Milly's sense of it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported, couldn't, or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that fairly showed in his face, after a moment, like the smart of a blow. ”

“ As Milly had beautifully invited her, so she would hold out if she could against the strain of so much confidence in her mind; and the remarkable thing was that even at the end of three weeks she had held out. But by this time her mind had grown comparatively bold and free; it was dealing with new quantities, a different proportion altogether—and that had made for refreshment: she had accordingly gone home in convenient possession of her subject. New York was vast, New York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite backward generations that accounted for anything ”

“ He made his jokes, Lord Mark, without amusement for himself; yet it wasn't that he was grim. "To be seen you must recognise, is, for you, to be jumped at; and, if it's a question of being shown, here you are again. Only it has now been taken out of your friend's hands; it's Mrs. Lowder, already, who's getting the benefit. Look round the table and you'll make out, I think, that you're being, from top to bottom, jumped at."
"Well, then," said Milly, "I seem also to feel that I like it better than being made fun of." ”

“ The only difference," said Milly, "is that I seem now to have no use for it. Besides," she then went on, "I do seem to feel you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little."
He took no more notice of these last words than if she had not said them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. "Are you really in any trouble?"
To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a little a light for herself. "Don't say, don't try to say, anything that's impossible. There are much better things you can do." ”

“ Kate wasn't brutally brutal—which Milly had hitherto benightedly supposed the only way; she wasn't even aggressively so, but rather indifferently, defensively and, as might be said, by the habit of anticipation. She simplified in advance, was beforehand with her doubts, and knew with singular quickness what she wasn't, as they said in New York, going to like. In that way at least people were clearly quicker in England than at home; and Milly could quite see, after a little, how such instincts might become usual in a world in which dangers abounded. ”

“ He had been looking at a man who had done what he had come for, and for whom, as done, it temporarily sufficed. The man had come again to see Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit would have taken place just before or just after luncheon, and it was the reason why he himself had found her door shut.
He said to himself that evening, he still said even on the morrow, that he only wanted a reason, and that with this perception of one he could now mind, as he called it, his business. His business, he had settled, as we know, was to keep thoroughly still ”

“ Why his judgment so mattered remained to be seen; but it was this divination, in any case, that now determined Milly's rejoinder. "No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And you all, here, know each other—I see that—so far as you know anything. You know what you're used to, and it's your being used to it—that, and that only—that makes you. ”

“ Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands in his pockets and looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was: “I say, my dear, is she really very awfully ill?”
“Little Flora? Not so bad but that she’ll presently be better. London will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take your mutton.” ”