310 jects of general philanthropy, he had been careless of winning or keeping personal attachment. But it was not till despair first seized him, as he looked back at the poverty of the results of his work as an apostle, that Mill began to feel the void in his affections and the need of human sympathy. We must remember how little when his ambition was formed he knew of the living world around him. He knew in terms that political and social change must be slow ; he could whisper patience to him self, and say to himself that his life must be happy because the attainment of his great object must occupy the whole of it ; but without experience he could not have been prepared for the actual slowness of the reformer s work, or armed against its terribly oppressive influence. Inevitably he underrated the stolidity and strength of the forces arrayed against him. Four years seems a long time at that age. In 1826 Mill could look back to four years of eager toil. What were the results 1 He had become convinced that his comrades in the Utilitarian Society, who never numbered more than ten, had not the stuff in them for a world-shaking propaganda ; the society itself was dissolved; the Parliamentary Revieiv was a failure ; the Westminster did not pay its expenses ; Bentham s Judicial Evidence pro duced little effect on the reviewers. His own reception at the Speculative Debating Society, where he first measured his strength in public conflict, was calculated to produce self-distrust. He found himself looked upon with curiosity as a precocious phenomenon, a " made man," an intellectual machine set to grind certain tunes. The most clear and cogent reasoning failed to sway his audience. Great things had been expected of this society as a means of bringing together for close discussion the leading young men then in public life or looking forward to it. Its first session proved a fiasco. The leaders that had been expected stayed away. With these repulses to his hopes along the whole line of his activity, Mill must also have suffered from the nervous exhaustion that only the hope and heat of the fight had kept him from feeling before. No wonder that he was disheartened, began to feel defects in his father s training, to question and analyse his own faith, to yearn for the solace of personal affection, and to reconstitute his scheme of life. That in spite of this rude shock the foundations laid by his early training remained stable appears from the facts that all through the period of his gloom he continued working as before, and that he considered himself bound, once convinced that his old plan of life was insufficient, to build up a thoroughly reasoned new plan wherewith to give new heart and hope to his work. The new system was much less different from the old than might be sup posed from what he says of the struggle that it cost him to reach it. Regard for the public good was still his religion, the ruling motive that gave unity to his conduct. But he now recognized that this was too vague and insub stantial an object to be sufficient of itself for the satisfac tion of a man s affections. It is a proof of the dominating force of his father s character that it cost the younger Mill such an effort to shake off his stern creed about poetry and personal emotion. Like Plato, the elder Mill would have put poets under ban as ministers of prejudice and enemies of truth. And he often insisted on the wisdom of restricting as much as possible the private affections, svhile expanding as much as possible the public affections. Landor s maxim of " few acquaintances, fewer friends, no familiarities " had his cordial approval. These doctrines the younger Mill at first took up with boyish enthusiasm and pedantry, but it was against this part of his father s creed that he now felt himself forced in reason to revolt. He stood too much in awe of his father to make him the confidant of his difficulties. He wrestled with them in the gloomy solitude of his own mind. He was victorious ; he reached firm ground at last ; but the struggle left him in several respects changed. He carried out of the struggle as the fruits of victory a more catholic view of the elements of human happiness, a delight in the poetry of nature and the affections as well as the poetry of heroic unselfish character and action, a disposition to study more sympa thetically the point of view of opponents, a more courteous style of polemic, a hatred of sectarianism, an ambition no less noble and disinterested but moderated to practical possibilities. In the course of the next few years Mill wrote compara tively little, but he " carried on," as he says, " a quantity of thinking respecting a host of subjects." It was a period of search, deliberation, germination, and striking root. Coincident if not causally connected with the relief from his spiritual crisis came his first consciousness of power as "an original and independent thinker." In the dia lectic conversations with a small band of students at Grote s house, he regained the self-confidence that had been shaken in the larger and rougher arena of the Speculative Debating Society. The beginning of his works on logic and political economy may be traced back to those discus sions, and he learnt from them, he tells us, the habit of "never accepting half solutions of difficulties as complete ; never abandoning a puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up ; never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored, because they did not appear important; never thinking that he perfectly understood any part of a subject until he understood the whole." He learnt also an important moral lesson from the Speculative Society, besides learning the strong points of other political and social creeds and the weak points of Benthamism from defending it point by point against all comers. With all his despondency, he did not abandon the meetings of the society after the fiasco of the first session. He stood by it firmly, and in a short time had the triumph of seeing its debates famous enough to attract men with whom it was profitable for him to interchange opinions, among others Maurice and Sterling. He ceased to attend the society in 1829, but he carried away from it the strengthening memory of failure overcome by per severing effort, and the important doctrinal conviction that a true system of political philosophy was " something much more complex and many-sided than he had previously had any idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from which the insti tutions suitable to any given circumstances might be deduced." The first sketch of Mill s political philosophy appeared in a series of contributions to the Examiner in the autumn of 1830 on "Prospects in France." He was in Paris soon after the July Revolution, made the acquaintance of the leading spirits among the younger men ; and in his discus sion of what they were doing and what they should do in making a new constitution we find the germs of many thoughts afterwards more fully developed in his Represen tative Government. The division of a man s life into periods must always be a rough partition, but we may conveniently and with tolerable accuracy take these letters as marking the close of his period of meditative search, of radication, and his return to hopeful aspiring activity. It was characteristic of the nature of the man that he should be stirred to such delight by the Revolution in France, and should labour so earnestly to make his countrymen understand with what gravity and sobriety it had been effected. Their own Reform Bill came soon after, and it is again characteristic of Mill at once of his enthusiasm and of his steady deter
mination to do for humanity the work that nobody else