NEW PUBLICATIONS.
The Life of S. Alphonsus Liguori. By a Member of the Order of Mercy. New York: P. O'Shea. 1873.
The Life of the Same. By the Rt. Rev. J. Mullock, D.D., Bishop of Newfoundland. New York: P. J. Kenedy. 1873.
S. Alphonsus has never found a perfectly competent biographer, and perhaps never will. F. Tannoja has written full and minute memoirs, containing all the facts and events of his life, but he wrote under the fear of the Neapolitan censorship, and could not speak openly of the miserable infidel Tanucci and the other Jansenists and infidels, or faithless Catholics, of the wretched period in which the saint lived, and the corrupt court with which he had to contend. Moreover, Tannoja had not a sufficiently elevated and comprehensive mind to be able to appreciate and describe the life and times of S. Alphonsus in their higher and broader relations. The Oratorian translation of his life is a most wretched and shabby affair in respect to style and accuracy. The religious lady who has prepared the first of the lives placed at the head of this notice has therefore done a very great service to the Catholic public by compiling a careful and readable biography from the other earlier works of the kind, and adding some interesting particulars concerning the history of the modern Redemptorists.
Bishop Mullock's life of the saint is quite brief and compendious, but of the best quality so far as it goes. The publisher has made a great blunder in omitting the title of Doctor of the Universal Church, which has been given to S. Alphonsus since Dr. Mullock's life was first published, on the title-page.
Archbishop Manning, who has given, though in brief form, the best appreciation of the character and work of the great doctor which we have seen, truly says that S. Ignatius, S. Charles, and S. Alphonsus are the three great modern leaders of the church in her warfare. As one of this great trio, S. Alphonsus deserves to be universally known and honored among the faithful, and we rejoice in the publication of the biography compiled by the accomplished Sister of Mercy as the best we have in English, wishing it a wide circulation, as a means of promoting devotion to the latest of the doctors and one of the greatest of the saints.
Lives of the Irish Saints. Vol. I., No. 1. By Rev. John O'Hanlon. Dublin: Duffy & Co.
It is not often that we have the privilege of noticing such a work as this—the labor of a lifetime, the history of a whole nation's sanctity. Since Alban Butler, no such hagiographer as F. O'Hanlon has appeared, nor has any work on hagiology so full of interest and importance been given to the world. Up to this time the saints of Ireland, with few exceptions, were hidden saints; of the three or four thousand souls who have shed upon her the light of their sanctity, and earned for her the glorious title of the "Island of Saints," the world knew scarcely anything. It was in vain that the ancient annalists compiled voluminous records for the benefit of posterity; those that escaped the hands of the spoiler were left unexamined, and the learned of the nation seemed to have forgotten that their country had a holy and heroic past, whose history it was their sacred duty to look into and perpetuate. No attention was given to traditions of bygone days; no light was thrown upon them; they were fast becoming dim and obscure, and what was, in reality, fact, the rising generation was beginning to regard as fable. This neglect, so ruinous, and even criminal, might have gone on till it became irreparable, had not this learned and devoted priest undertaken the great task of redeeming the past of Erin's sanctity from the oblivion into which it was rapidly sinking. How carefully he prepared himself, and how well qualified he is to perform this labor of patriotism and love, the first number of his work gives ample proof. His acquaintance with Irish lore, his erudition and research, his fine style, all combine to make him the fittest person that could have engaged in so great a work.
Were we disposed to find fault with him at all, we should say he is rather critical; at least, we fancy we perceive in him a tendency to conform to the critical spirit of the age, which perhaps is prudent, after all, and may enhance the historical value of the work, though it will mar somewhat, we think, the poetic beauty it ought to possess.
No literary effort has yet been attempted that appeals so strongly to the national and religious sentiments of the Irish people; and none should receive so large a share of their interest and support. F. O'Hanlon's Lives of the Irish Saints, when completed, will be a noble monument to Erin's faith and Erin's glory, to which his countrymen in every land should feel proud to contribute; the appreciation that he meets with may encourage others to enter the comparatively unexplored mine of Irish history, and bring to light the treasures it contains.
We learn that F. O'Hanlon, who is a citizen of the United States, has copyrighted the work here, and it is to be hoped will make arrangements for its reissue in this country. Meanwhile, intending subscribers may address the author directly, or order the book through "The Catholic Publication Society," New York. It will be published serially, and the American price is fifty cents per number.
Jesuits in Conflict; or, Historic Facts illustrative of the Labors and Sufferings of the English Mission and Province of the Society of Jesus in the Times of Queen Elizabeth and her Successors. By a Member of the Society of Jesus. London: Burns & Oates. 1873. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
Another publication throwing light on the period of the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics, and more especially on the part borne by the Jesuits themselves in this heroic struggle. So many books have appeared lately on this subject that we may almost say that a new branch of Catholic literature has been opened in the English language. The "getting up" of this book is worthy of the subject, and we rejoice that it is so; for, to take a simile from a passage in this very volume, we may say with truth of the outward appearance of a book in these times what the holy lay-brother, Thomas Pounde, considered his rich dress in prison to be: "A means of inspiring Catholics with greater courage, and conciliating authority" (p. 42). The history of the three confessors of the faith, Thomas Pounde, George Gilbert, and F. Darbyshire, is very interesting. In the two former we have examples of lay sanctity and constancy, as distinguished from that of priests, though both saints were in heart members of the Society of Jesus, to which one was affiliated by extraordinary dispensation of the ordinary novitiate, and the other received the habit and pronounced his vows in articulo mortis. Thomas Pounde, of Belmont, a man of old family and high connections, had all the burning zeal of a convert whose soul had narrowly escaped the everlasting infamy of the life of a court minion. Not only his fearlessness and constancy, but his high intellectual attainments, claim our attention. Thirty years of perpetual imprisonment had not enfeebled his mind, and his one desire was a public disputation with his adversaries, nay, "with Beza and all the doctors of Geneva," if it pleased his foes to reinforce themselves with such noted aid. In a lengthy paper, written in 1580 to show that the Bible alone is not the true rule of faith, he brings forward the same reasons which we hear so much about in our day, and after specially dwelling on the many articles of universally held Christian faith that are not directly and plainly traceable to Scripture, he says pointedly: "Do not these blind guides, think you, lead a trim daunce towards infidelitie?" He could not have spoken otherwise had he meant his apology for the XIXth instead of the XVIth century.
George Gilbert, also of a good English family, was one of those rich men who, in truth, make themselves the stewards of the Lord. With him originated the useful and ingenious Catholic Association, in which young men of the world bound themselves to become the temporal guides, helpers, couriers, furnishers of the priests who labored spiritually for the conversion of England. The companion of F. Parsons, as Pounde had been of F. Campion, he, too, was a convert not only from courtly vanities, but from actual Calvinism. Ardently desiring martyrdom, he nevertheless embraced obediently and lovingly the cross of a "sluggish death in bed"; but at least the pain of exile had been added to imprisonment, for he was banished from his native land, and died at Rome in 1583. His whole substance was offered to the service of God, and what little remained at his death he left to the Society for the spiritual needs of his country. It was not till he lay upon his death-bed that he pronounced his vows.
F. Darbyshire was as learned as he was zealous. While in France preparing for his perilous English mission, he refused the honors of the pulpit and the professorial chair, and confined himself to giving catechetical instruction; but God so rewarded his humility that grave scholars and theologians would flock to hear him, and make notes of the wonderful learning he displayed, while they admired the eloquence he could not hide. He and his friend, F. Henry Tichborne, might well congratulate themselves, later on, on the holy efficacy of persecution, which had caused the "confluence of the rares and bestes wittes of our nation to the seminaries," and of the happy increase in the number of fervent inmates of the foreign seminaries They descant, too, on the unwise policy of persecution, and the fact that no religion was ever permanently established by the sword. The faith might have been reft of one of its greatest glories in England had not a short-sighted fanaticism resorted to violent means to uproot it. F. Darbyshire died in exile in France in 1604, in the very same place, Pont-à-Mousson, where he had so signally distinguished himself for learning and for modesty in the beginning of his apostolate.
This book is written in simple, Saxon style. The author trusts rather to facts than to rhetoric, just as of old the acts of the martyrs were chronicled without much comment, whether descriptive or panegyrical. The volume bears "First Series" on its title-page, as a promise that it is but the prelude to other biographies as interesting. Let us hope that the promise will be speedily fulfilled.
The Life of the Blessed John Berchmans. By Francis Goldie, S.J. (F. Coleridge's Quarterly Series, Vol. VII.) London: Burns & Oates. 1873. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
At last we have in English a biography of this angelic imitator of S. Aloysius, as charming as himself. The other lives we have seen are edifying but tedious. This one is equally edifying, but as fascinating as a romance, and published in an attractive style. It is specially adapted for the reading of young people.
Lectures upon the Devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. By the Very Rev. T. S. Preston, V.G. New York: Robert Coddington. 1874.
We cannot do more than call attention to the publication of this work, just issued as we go to press. It embraces stenographic reports of four extempore lectures by the pastor of St. Ann's, New York, upon a subject of special interest at this time. In an appendix is given the pastoral of the archbishop and bishops, announcing the consecration of all the dioceses of this province to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus; together with a Novena, from the French of L. J. Hallez.
THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XVIII., No. 108.—MARCH, 1874.[249]
JOHN STUART MILL.[250]
In 1764, Hume met, at the house of Baron d'Holbach, a party of the most celebrated Frenchmen of that day; and the Scotchman took occasion to introduce a discussion concerning the existence of an atheist, in the strict sense of the word; for his own part, he said, he had never chanced to meet with one. "You have been unfortunate," replied Holbach; "but at the present moment you are sitting at table with seventeen of them."
Whether or not the leading men among the positivists and cosmists of England to-day are prepared to be as frank as the Baron d'Holbach, we shall not venture to say; at all events, John Stuart Mill, to whom they all looked up with the reverence of disciples for the master, has taken care that the world should not remain in doubt concerning his opinions on this subject, which, of all others, is of the deepest interest to man. Among those who in this century have labored most earnestly to propagate an atheistic philosophy, based on the assumption that the human mind is incapable of knowing aught beyond relations, he certainly holds a place of distinction, and, as a representative of what is called scientific atheism, the history of his opinions is worthy of serious attention.
It was known some time before his death that he had written an autobiography; and when it was announced that his step-daughter, Miss Taylor, whom he had made his literary executrix, was about to publish the work, the attention of at least those who take interest in the profounder controversies of the age was awakened.
As an autobiography, the book has but little merit; though this should not be insisted on, since success in writing of this kind is extremely rare. If it is almost as difficult in any case to write a life well as to spend it well, when one attempts to become the historian of his own life, there is every probability that he will either be ridiculous or uninteresting. Mill, too, it must be conceded, had but poor material at his command. His life was uneventful, uninviting even, in its surroundings; and when the patchwork of his philosophical opinions is taken away, there is little left in it that is not wholly commonplace.
He was born in London, in 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, who was a charity student of divinity at the University of Edinburgh, but, becoming disgusted with the doctrines of Presbyterianism, gave up all idea of studying for the ministry, and in a short while renounced Christian faith, and became an avowed atheist, though his atheism was negative; his belief in what is called the relativity of knowledge not justifying him in affirming positively that there is no God, but only in holding that the human mind can never know whether there be a God or not. He, however, did not stop here, but, scandalized by the suffering which is everywhere in the world, forgot his own principles, and maintained that it is absurd to suppose that such a world is the work of an infinitely perfect being, and was rather inclined to accept the Manichean theory of a good and evil principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe. But of God, as revealed in Christ, he had a hatred as satanical as that of Voltaire.
"I have a hundred times heard him say," writes his son, "that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on, adding trait after trait, till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity."[251] In other words—for Mill can mean nothing less—he held that the character of Christ, as portrayed in the Gospel, is the highest possible conception of all that is depraved and repulsive; that Christ, instead of being incarnate God, is the essence of wickedness clothed in bodily form; that, compared with him, or at least with the God whom he called his father, Moloch, Astarte, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Bacchus are pure divinities; and from the manner in which the son narrates these opinions of his father, he evidently desires that we should infer that they are also his own.
The elder Mill, who seems to have been a natural pedagogue, took the education of his son exclusively into his own hands, and was most careful not to allow him to acquire any impressions contrary to his own sentiments respecting religion. Instead of teaching him to believe that God created the heavens and the earth, he taught him to believe that we can know nothing whatever of the manner in which the world came into existence, and that the question, "Who made you?" is one which cannot be answered, since we possess no authentic information on the subject.
To show, however, his father's conviction of the logical connection between Protestantism and infidelity, he records that he taught him to take the strongest interest in the Reformation, "as the great and decisive contest against priestly tyranny for liberty of thought."
"I am thus," he adds, "one of the very few examples in this country of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it; I grew up in a negative state with regard to it."[252]
How he could grow up in a negative condition with regard to religion is not easily understood when we consider that his father instilled into his mind from his earliest years the doctrine that the very essence of religion is evil, since it is, and ever has been, worship paid to the demon, the highest possible conception of wickedness; though he was at the same time careful to impress upon him the duty of concealing his belief on this subject; and this lesson of parental prudence was, as the younger Mill himself informs us, attended with some moral disadvantages.[253]
These moral disadvantages, in his own opinion at least, were without positive influence upon his character, since through the whole book there runs the tacit assumption of his own perfect goodness. I am an atheist, he seems to say, and yet I am a saint; and he is evidently persuaded that his own life is sufficient proof that the notion that unbelief is generally connected with bad qualities either of mind or heart is merely a vulgar prejudice.
"The world would be astonished," he informs us, "if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.... But the best of them (unbelievers), as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title."[254]
This is probably not more extravagant than the assertion that the God of Christianity is the embodiment of all that is fiendish and wicked.
We cannot, however, pass so lightly over this portion of Mill's book, or dismiss without further examination the assumption that the best are they who refuse to believe in God, and hold that man is merely an animal.
The real controversy of the age, as thoughtful men have long since recognized, is not between the church and the sects. Protestantism, from the beginning, by asserting the supremacy of human reason, denied the sovereignty of God, and in its postulates, at least, was atheistic. Hence Catholic theologians have never had any difficulty in showing that rebellion against the authority of the church is revolt against that of Christ, which is apostasy from God. To this argument there is really no reply, and the difficulties which Protestants have sought to raise against the church are based upon a sophism which underlies all non-Catholic thought.
The pseudo-reformers objected that the church could not be of Christ, because in it there was evil; many of its members were sinful; as the deists hold that the Bible is not the word of God, because of the many seeming incongruities and imperfections which are everywhere found in it; as the atheists teach that the universe cannot be the work of an all-wise and omnipotent Being, since it is filled with suffering and death; and that love cannot be creation's final law, since nature, "red in tooth and claw with ravin," shrieks against this creed.
If the imperfections and abuses in the practical workings of the church are arguments against its divine institution and authority, then undoubtedly the "measureless ill" which is in the world is reason for doubting whether a Being infinitely good is its author.
Hence the traditional objections of Protestants to the church are, in the ultimate analysis, reducible to the atheistic sophism, which, because there is evil in the creature, seeks to conclude that the creator cannot be wholly good; not perceiving that it would be as reasonable to demand that the circle should be square as to ask that the finite should be without defect.
The church is, both logically and historically, the only defensible Christianity; as Jean Jacques Rousseau long ago admitted in the well-known words: "Prove to me that in matters of religion I must accept authority, and I will become a Catholic to-morrow." There is no controversy to-day between the church and Protestantism which is worthy of serious attention. All that is important has been said on this subject, and Protestants themselves begin to understand that it is far wiser for them to try to hold on to the shreds of Christian belief which still remain to them than to waste their strength in attacks on the church, which, as they are coming to recognize, is after all the strongest bulwark of faith in the soul and in God.
The ground of debate to-day is back of heterodoxy and orthodoxy; it lies around the central fact in all religion—God himself.
The scientific theories of the present time, if they do not deny the existence of God, are at least based upon hypotheses which ignore him and his action in the world; and the few attempts which have been made to construct what may be called a philosophy of science all proceed upon the assumption that, whether there be a God or not, science cannot recognize his existence.
The faith which the elder Mill taught his son—that of the manner in which the world came into existence nothing can be known—is that which most scientists accept. The desire to organize society upon an atheistic basis is also very manifest and very general.
"Reorganiser, sans Dieu ni roi
Par le culte systematique de l'Humanité."
The idealistic philosophy of Germany, invariably terminating in pantheism, is another proof of the atheistic tendency of modern thought.
Mill, in his Autobiography, has of course made no attempt to prove that there is no God. On the contrary, as we have already stated, he has admitted that this proposition cannot be proved; but he believes there is no God, fails to perceive any evidence of design in the universe, and, from a morbid sense of the evil which abounds, feels justified in concluding that the cosmos is not the work of an infinitely good and omnipotent Being.
Dr. Newman, in his Apologia, a work of the same character as the Autobiography of Mill, but which will be read with delight when Mill and his book will have been forgotten, has seen this difficulty, and given expression to it in his own inimitable manner. "To consider the world," he writes, "in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts; the tokens, so faint and broken, of a superintending design; the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths; the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary, hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the apostle's words, 'having no hope, and without God in the world'—all this is a vision to dizzy and appall, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution."[255]
But, as Dr. Newman expresses it, ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. Difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. When we have sufficient reasons for accepting two seemingly contradictory propositions, the fact that we are unable to reconcile them should not be a motive for rejecting them. The human race has accepted, in all time, the existence of God with an assent as real as that with which it has believed in the substance that underlies the phenomenon. To a countless number of minds, the difficulty to which Mill has given such emphasis has presented itself with a force not less than that with which it struck him.
Millions have approached the mystery of evil, and have asked themselves
"Are God and nature, then, at strife,
That nature lends such evil dreams?"
But they have not weakly refused to believe in God because they could not comprehend his works. They saw the evil; but the deepest instincts of the soul—the longing for immortal life, the craving for the unattainable, the thirst for a knowledge never given, the sense of the emptiness of what seems most real; the mother-ideas of human reason—those of being, of cause, of the absolute, the infinite, the eternal, the sense of the all-beautiful, the all-perfect—made them fall
"Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,"
and stretch hands of faith, and trust the larger hope.
We do not propose to offer any arguments to prove that God is, or to show that his existence is reconcilable with the evil in the world, since Mill has not attempted to establish the contradictory of this; but we wish merely to state that his apprehension of the difficulties which surround this question is not keener than that of thousands of others who have seen no connection between apprehending these difficulties and doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Whilst admitting that science can never prove that there is no God, Mill evidently intended his Autobiography to be an argument against the usefulness of belief in God for moral and social purposes; "which," he tells us, "of all the parts of the discussion concerning religion, is the most important in this age, in which real belief in any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal; and when those who reject revelation very generally take refuge in an optimistic deism—a worship of the order of nature and the supposed course of Providence—at least as full of contradictions and perverting to the moral sentiments as any of the forms of Christianity, if only it is as fully realized."[256] Confessing the inability of the scientists to prove that there is no God, he thinks that they should devote their efforts to the attempt to show that belief in God is not beneficial either to the individual or to society. We shall, therefore, turn to the question of morality, which is enrooted in metaphysics, out of which it grows, and to which it is indebted both for its meaning and its strength.
Can the atheistic philosophy give to morality a solid basis? To deny the existence of an infinitely perfect Being is to affirm that there is no absolute goodness, no moral law, eternal, immutable, and necessary, no act that in itself is either good or bad, no certain and fixed standard of right and wrong.
Hence atheistic philosophy can give to morality no other foundation than that of pleasure or utility:
"Atque ipsa utilitas justi prope mater et aequi,
Nec natura potest justo secernere iniquum."
And, in fact, this has been the doctrine, we may say, of all those who have denied the existence of God.
Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Helvetius, Volney, and the whole Voltairean tribe in France, have all substantially taken this view of the question of morality; and Mill's opinion on the subject did not, except in form, differ from theirs. His father was the friend of Bentham, an advocate of the utilitarian theory of morality, which he applied to civil and criminal law; and young Mill became an enthusiastic disciple of the Benthamic philosophy.
"The principle of utility," he writes, "understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions, a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life."[257]
Bentham sought to save the ethics of utility by generalizing the principle of self-interest into that of the greatest happiness; and it was this "greatest-happiness principle" that gave Mill what he calls a religion. Though less grovelling than the theory of self-interest, yet, equally with it, it deprives morality of a solid foundation, substitutes force for right, and consecrates all tyranny.
If there be no God, and interest is the sole criterion of what is good, in the name of what am I commanded to sacrifice my particular interest to general interest? If interest is the law, then my own interest is the first and highest. If happiness be the supreme end of life, and there be no life beyond this life, in order to ask of me the sacrifice of my happiness, it must be called for in the name of some other principle than happiness itself.
And if "the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns,
"What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's?"
Besides being false, this "greatest-happiness principle" is impossible in practice. Who can tell what is for the greatest good of the greatest number? It is very difficult, often impossible, when we consider only our individual interest, to decide what actions will be most conducive to our happiness, in the utilitarian sense of the word. How, then, are we to decide when the interests of a whole people, of humanity, and for all future time, are to be consulted? Would any atheist of the school of Mill, who is not wholly fanatical, dare affirm that the greatest number would be happier, even in a low and animal sense, without faith in God and a future life? And yet, according to his own theory, unless he is certain of this when he attempts to destroy the religious belief of his fellow-beings, his act is immoral.
Was it not in the name of, and in strict accordance with, the principles of this theory that Comte planned what Mill calls "the completest system of spiritual and temporal despotism which ever yet emanated from a human brain, unless, possibly, that of Ignatius Loyola—a system by which the yoke of general opinion, wielded by an organized body of spiritual teachers and rulers, would be made supreme over every action, and, as far as is in human possibility, every thought of every member of the community, as well in the things which regard only himself as in those which concern the interests of others"?[258]
There is yet another vice in this system. If the good is the greatest interest of the greatest number, then there are only public and social ethics, and personal morality does not exist. Our duties are towards others, and we have no duties towards ourselves. Thus the very source of moral life is dried up.
Let us come to considerations less general and more immediately connected with Mill's life.
Of his father's opinions on this subject he says: "In his views of life, he partook of the character of the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and this was the Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure, at least in his later years, of which alone, on this point, I can speak confidently.... He thought human life a poor thing at best after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.... He would sometimes say that if life were made what it might be by good government and good education, it would be worth having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility."[259]
This certainly is a gloomy, not to say hopeless, view of life, and one which, in spite of Mill's attempt to produce a contrary impression, pervades the whole book. The thoughtful reader cannot help feeling that Mill's state of mind was very like that described by the apostle: "having no hope, and without God in the world." A deep and settled dissatisfaction with all he saw around him, the feeling that all was wrong—society, religion, government, the family, human life, the philosophic opinions of the whole world except himself, together with an undercurrent of despair, which made him doubt whether they would ever be right, gave a coloring of melancholy to his character which he is unable to hide. Life was no boon, and not even the faintest ray of light pierced the black gloom of the grave.
Of his father he writes: "In ethics, his moral feelings were energetic and rigid on all points which he deemed important to human well-being, while he was supremely indifferent in opinion (though his indifference did not show itself in personal conduct) to all those doctrines of the common morality which he thought had no foundation but in asceticism and priest-craft. He looked forward, for example, to a considerable increase of freedom in the relations between the sexes, though without pretending to define exactly what would be, or ought to be, the precise conditions of that freedom."[260]
Here we have an instance of the truth of the inference which we have already drawn from the principles of the utilitarian ethics—that they take no account of personal purity of character, and teach that man's duties are towards others, and not towards himself. There is a still more striking example of this in Mill's Autobiography.
He early in life made the acquaintance of a married lady, for whom he conceived a very strong affection. He spent a good deal of his time with her, and says: "I was greatly indebted to the strength of character which enabled her to disregard the false interpretations liable to be put on the frequency of my visits to her while living generally apart from Mr. Taylor, and on our occasionally travelling together"; though their relation at that time, he tells us, was only that of strong affection and confidential intimacy. The reason which he assigns for this is certainly most curious: "For though," he says, "we did not consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should be such as in no degree to bring discredit on her husband, nor therefore on herself."[261]
In other words, Mill recognizes no obligation of personal purity, even in the married, but holds that unchastity is wrong only when it brings discredit on others; though he was unfaithful even to this loose ethical code, since, according to his own account, his conduct was such as to be liable to misinterpretation, and, therefore, such as might bring disgrace upon the husband of the woman with whom he was associating.
His hatred of marriage and of the restraints which it imposes is seen in several parts of the work before us.
Of the Saint-Simonians he says: "I honored them most of all for what they have been most cried down for—the boldness and freedom from prejudice with which they treated the subject of the family, the most important of any, and needing more fundamental alterations than remain to be made in any other great social institution, but on which scarcely any reformer has the courage to touch. In proclaiming the perfect equality of men and women, and an entirely new order of things in regard to their relations with one another, the Saint-Simonians, in common with Owen and Fourier, have entitled themselves to the grateful remembrance of future generations."[262]
A man who puts himself forward as the advocate of free-love should not, one would think, insist especially on the moralities, or give himself prominence as a proof that belief in God is not useful either to the individual or to society.
Mill's social ethics are of the same character. He is a socialist of the most radical type, and considers the great problem of the future to be how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labor; though the "uncultivated herd who now compose the laboring masses," as well as the mental and moral condition of the immense majority of their employers, convince him that this social transformation is not now either possible or desirable. Still, his ethics lead him to hope that private property will be abolished, and that the whole earth will be converted into a kind of industrial school, in which every man, woman, and child will be required to do certain work, and receive in remuneration whatever the controllers of the general capital may see fit to give them. Thus, in the name of the greatest good of the greatest number, personal purity, the family, private property, society, are all to be no more, and the human race is to be managed somewhat like a model stock-farm, in which everything, from breeding down to the minutest details of food and exercise, is to be under the control of a supervisory committee.
As we have already seen, Mill, after reading Bentham, got what he called a religion: he had an object in life—to be a reformer of the world.
This did very well for a time; but in the autumn of 1826, whilst, as he expresses it, he was in a dull state of nerves, he awakened as from a dream. He put the question to himself: "'Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions to which you are looking forward could be effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No!' At this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.... I seemed to have nothing left to live for.
"At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not.... I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it.... The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection'—I was not then acquainted with them—exactly describe my case:
"'A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.'"[263]
He now felt that his father had committed a blunder in the education which he had given him; that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings and dry up the fountains of pleasurable emotions; that it is a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermines all desires and all pleasures which are the effects of association.
"My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for; no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just as little in anything else.... I frequently asked myself if I could, or if I was bound to, go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year."[264]
This sad state of mind was the protest of the soul against the skeleton of intellectual formulas into which it had been cramped. A man is not going to live or die for conclusions, opinions, calculations, analytical nothings. Man is not and cannot be made to be a mere reasoning machine, a contrivance to grind out syllogisms. He is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, believing, acting animal. We cannot construct a philosophy of life upon abstract conclusions of the analytical faculty; life is action and for action, and, if we insist on analyzing and proving everything, we shall never come to action. Humanity is a mere fiction of the mind, and can be nothing, whilst God, to most men at least, is a living reality, to be believed in, hoped in, loved. Were it possible for us to accept the doctrines of Stuart Mill, we should feel the same interest in his humanitarian projects that we do in Mr. Bergh's society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. We pity the poor brutes, but we butcher them and eat them all the same. If there is nothing but nature and nature's laws, it is perfectly right that the few should live for the many, and that thousands should sweat and groan to fill the belly of one animal who is finer and stronger than those he feeds upon. Neither the law of gravity, nor that of the conservation of forces, nor that which impels bodies along the line of least resistance, nor that which causes the fittest—which means the strongest—to survive, can impose upon us a moral obligation not to do what we have the strength to do. These infidels talk of the intellectual cowardice of those who believe. Let them first be frank, and tell us, without circumlocution or concealment, that there is nothing but force; that whatever is, must be; and that nothing is either right or wrong. If we are permitted to swallow oysters whole, to butcher oxen and imprison monkeys in mere wantonness; and if these are our forefathers, why may not the strong and intelligent members of the human race put the weak and ignorant to any use they may see fit; or why may we not imitate the more natural savage who roasts or boils his man as his civilized brother would a pig?
It is easy to make a show of despising the argument implied in this question; but, admitting the atheistic evolutionary hypothesis, it cannot be answered.
Cannibals hold that it is for the greatest happiness of the greatest number that their enemies should be eaten; and, after all, what is happiness, in the utilitarian and animal sense, but an affair of taste, to a great extent even of imagination? Have not slave-owners in all times held that it was for the greatest good of the greatest number that slavery should continue to exist? Or has the greatest-happiness principle had anything to do with the abolition of slavery among the Christian nations or elsewhere?
Men appealed in the name of right, of justice, of the inborn dignity of the human soul, of God-given liberty, and the conscience of the nations was awakened. They gave no thought to the idle theories of brains, from which the heart and soul had been strained, about a greatest-happiness principle. What have atheists ever done but talk, and mock, and criticise, and seek their own ease whilst discoursing on the general good?
Mill takes the greatest care to record, in more than one place, that he and his father occasionally wrote articles for the Westminster Review without receiving pay for them; thinking it, evidently, worthy of remark that an atheist should even write except for money. Here we may note a vice inherent in atheism, which proves at once its untruth and its impotence. It leaves man without enthusiasm, without hope, without love, to fall back upon himself, a wilted, shrunken thing, to mix with matter, or to vanish in lifeless, logical formalism. It has no heroes, no saints, no martyrs, no confessors. Its advocates either abandon themselves to lust and the senses, or, making a divinity of their own imagined superiority, worship the ghost they have conjured up, whilst looking down upon the rest of mankind as a vulgar herd still intellectually walking on four feet. Mill makes no effort to conceal his contempt for the mass of mankind; and contempt does not inspire love, which alone renders man helpful to man.
The gloom which settled around the life of John Stuart Mill, when he once fully realized that, holding the intellectual opinions which he held, nothing was worth living for, and that he was consequently left without a motive or an object in life, never really left him. He tells us, indeed, that the cloud gradually drew off, and that, though he had several relapses which lasted many months, he was never as miserable as he had been; but it is quite evident, from the whole tone of this Autobiography, that his disappointed soul, like the wounded dove, drew the wings that were intended to lift it to God close to itself, and, hopeless, sank into philosophical despair. Happiness he considered the sole end of life; and yet he says that the enjoyments of life, which alone make it worth having, when made its principal object, pall upon us and sicken the heart. "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life."
In other words, in Mill's philosophy, the end of life is happiness, which can be possessed only by those who persuade themselves that this is not the end of life. The doctrine of philosophical necessity, during the later returns of his despondency, weighed upon him like an incubus: "I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was wholly out of our own power. I often said to myself, What a relief it would be if I could disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances!"[265]
He tries to escape from the fatal web in which his soul hung helpless; but sophisms and quibbles of the brain cannot minister to a mind diseased or pluck sorrow from the heart.
But the saddest part of Mill's Autobiography is the portion devoted to the woman whose friendship he called the honor and chief blessing of his existence. The picture which he has drawn of his childhood is at once painful and ludicrous.
He does not even incidentally allude to a single fact which would lead one to suppose that he had a mother or had ever known a mother's love.
The father, as described by the son, was cold, fanatical, morose, almost inhuman, acting as though he thought children are born merely for the purpose of being crammed with Greek roots and logical formulas. John Stuart was put at Greek vocables when only three years old. His father demanded of him not only the utmost that he could do, but much that it was utterly impossible that he should do. He was guilty, for instance, of the incredible folly of making him read the Dialogues of Plato when only seven years old. He never knew anything of the freshness or joyousness of childhood, or what it is to be "boy eternal." He grew up without the companionship of children, blighted and dwarfed by the abiding presence of the narrow and unnatural man who nipped the flower of his life in the bud, and repressed within him all the sentiments and aspirations which are the spontaneous and healthful product of youth. He was not taught to delight in sunshine and flowers, and music and song; but even in his boyish rambles there strode ever by his side the analytical machine, dissecting, destroying, marring God's work with his lifeless, hopeless theories. The effect of this training was, as we have already seen, that when the boy became a man, he found himself like a ship on the ocean without sail or compass, and there gathered around his life the settled gloom of despair, which his philosophical opinions tended only to deepen.
Without a mother's love, without a father whom it was possible to love, without friends of his own age, without God, dejected, despondent, hopeless, he met the wife of a friend of his father, who, from the manner in which she controlled her first and second husbands, must have been a clever woman, and he became an idolater, giving to her the adoration which his father had taught him to withhold from God. That there is no exaggeration in this statement every one who will take the trouble to read the seventh chapter of Mill's Autobiography will be ready to confess.
He married this woman in 1851, when he was forty-five and she but two years younger, and seven years later her death occurred. Mill wishes the world to believe that this woman was the prodigy of the XIXth century, surpassing in intellectual vigor and moral strength all men and all other women; that to her he owed all that is best in his own writings; and that he is but the interpreter of the wonderful thoughts of this incomparable woman, whom others have deemed merely a commonplace woman's rights woman.
"Thus prepared," he writes, "it will easily be believed that when I came into close intellectual communion with a person of the most eminent faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded itself in thought, struck out truths far in advance of me, but in which I could not, as I had done in those others, detect any mixture of error, the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in the assimilation of those truths; and the most valuable part of my intellectual work was in building the bridges and clearing the paths which connected them with my general system of thought."[266]
Mill seems to have been incapable of a healthful sentiment of any kind. The same quality in his stunted and warped moral nature which caused him to have a false and exaggerated sense of the evil that is in the world, leading him to atheism, made him a blind and superstitious worshipper of the imaginary endowments of his wife. But one must read the book itself to realize how far he carried this idolatry.
When she dies, he again sinks into the gloom which his superstition had seemed to cause him partially to forget; and if he continues to work, it is only with the feeble strength "derived from thoughts of her and communion with her memory." Her death was a calamity which took from him all hope, and he found some slight alleviation only in the mode of life which best enabled him to feel her still near him.
She died at Avignon, and he bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she was buried; and there he settled down in helpless misery, feeling that all that remained to him in the world was a memory.
"Her memory," he writes, "is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up, as it does, all worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my life."[267]
He did not believe in God, in the soul, in a life beyond life; he had scarcely any faith in the practical efforts of the age to improve the condition of the masses, upon whom he looked as the common herd; his own countrymen especially he despised as selfish and narrow above all other men, grovelling in their instincts, and low in the objects which they aim at; happiness he held to be the sole end of existence; and at the close of his life, an old man, in a foreign land, in immedicable misery, he stood beside a grave, and sought with feeble fingers to clutch the shadow of a dream, which he called his religion; and so he died.
We have never read a sadder book, nor one which to our mind contains stronger proof that the soul longs with an infinite craving for God, and, not finding him, will worship anything—a woman, a stone, a memory.
FOOTNOTES:
[249] Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.
[250] Autobiography. By John Stuart Mill. New York: Holt & Co. 1873.
[251] P. 41.
[252] P. 43.
[253] P. 44.
[254] P. 46.
[255] Apologia, p. 268.
[256] P. 70.
[257] P. 67.
[258] P. 213.
[259] P. 48.
[260] P. 107.
[261] P. 230.
[262] P. 167.
[263] P. 134.
[264] P. 140.
[265] P. 169.
[266] P. 243.
[267] P. 251.