“Mr.
Mill is exactly the writer to please people of this description. His arguments
are stated with the utmost affectation of precision; his divisions are awfully
formal; and his style is generally as dry as that of Euclid
“The
style which the Utilitarians admire suits only those subjects on which it is
possible to reason a priori. It grew up with the verbal sophistry which
flourished during the dark ages. With that sophistry it fell before the
Baconian philosophy in the day of the great deliverance of the human mind. The
inductive method not only endured but required greater freedom of diction. It
was impossible to reason from phenomena up to principles, to mark slight shades
of difference in quality, or to estimate the comparative effect of two opposite
considerations between which there was no common measure, by means of the naked
and meagre jargon of the schoolmen. Of those schoolmen Mr. Mill has inherited
both the spirit and the style. He is an Aristotelian of the fifteenth century,
born out of due season. We have here an elaborate treatise on Government, from
which, but for two or three passing allusions, it would not appear that the
author was aware that any governments actually existed among men. Certain
propensities of human nature are assumed; and from these premises the whole
science of politics is synthetically deduced! We can scarcely persuade
ourselves that we are not reading a book written before the time of Bacon and
Galileo,—a book written in those days in which physicians reasoned from the
nature of heat to the treatment of fever, and astronomers proved syllogistically
that the planets could have no independent motion,—because the heavens were
incorruptible, and nature abhorred a vacuum!” [Edinburgh
