When two persons have thoughts and speculations completely in common; when all subjects of intellectual and moral interests are discussed between them in daily life, and probed to much greater depths than are usually or conveniently sounded in writings intended for general readers; when they set out from the same principles, and arrive at their conclusions by processes pursued jointly, it is of little consequence, in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes the least to the composition may contribute most of the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other. In this wide sense, not only during the years of our married life, but during many of the years of confidential friendship which preceded, all my published writings were as much her work as mine, her share in them constantly increasing as years advanced. But in certain cases, what belongs to her can be distinguished and specially identified. Over and above the general influence which her mind had over mine, the most valuable ideas and features in these joint productions (those which have been most fruitful of important results, and which have contributed most to the success and reputation of the works themselves) originated with her, were emanations from her mind, my part of them being no greater than in any of the thoughts which I found in previous writings, and made my own only by incorporating them with my own system of Thought. During the greater part of my literary life I have performed the office in relation to her, which from a rather early period I had considered as the most useful part that I was qualified to take in the domain of thought: that of an interpreter of original thinkers, and mediator between them and the public.
Thus prepared, 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, continually 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.
The steps in my mental growth for which I was indebted to her were far from being those which a person wholly uninformed on the subject would probably suspect. It might be supposed, for instance, that my strong convictions on the complete equality in all legal, political social and domestic relations, which ought to exist between men and women, may have been adopted or learned from her. This was so far from being the fact that those convictions were among the earliest results of the application of my mind to political subjects, and the strength with which I held them was, as I believe, more than anything else, the originating cause of the interest she felt in me. What is true is, that, until I knew her, the opinion was in my mind, little more than an abstract principle. I saw no more reason why women should be held in legal subjection to other people, than why men should. I was certain that their interests required fully as much protection as those of men, and were quite as little likely to obtain it without an equal voice in making the laws by which they were to be bound. But that perception of the vast practical bearings of women's disabilities which found expression in the book on the "Subjection of Women" was acquired mainly through her teaching. But for her rare knowledge of human nature and comprehension of moral and social influences, though I doubtless should have held my present opinions, I should surely have had a very insufficient perception of the mode in which the consequences of the inferior position of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society and with all the difficulties of human improvement. I am indeed painfully conscious of how much of her best thoughts on the subject I have failed to reproduce, and how greatly that little treatise falls short of what would have been if she had put on paper her entire mind on the question, or had lived to devise and improve, as she certainly would have done, my imperfect statement of the case.
The first of my books in which her share was conspicuous was the "Principles of Political Economy." The "System of Logic" owed little to her except in the minute matters of composition, in which respect my writings both great and small have largely benefited by her accurate and clear-sighted criticism. The chapter of the "Political Economy" which has had a greater influence on opinion than all the rest, that on "The Probable Future of the Laboring Classes," is entirely due to her: in the first draft of the book, that chapter did not exist.
She pointed out the need of a chapter, and the extreme imperfection of the book without it: she was the cause of my writing it; and the more general part of the chapter—the statement and discussion of the two opposite theories respecting the proper condition of the laboring classes—was wholly an exposition of her thoughts, often in words taken from her own lips.
The purely scientific part of the "Political Economy" I did not learn from her; but it was chiefly her influence that gave to the book that general tone by which it is distinguished from all previous expositions of "Political Economy" that had any pretension to being scientific, and which has made it so useful to conciliating minds which those previous expositions had repelled.
What was abstract and purely scientific was generally mine; the properly human element came from her: in all that concerned the application of philosophy to the exigencies of human society and progress, I was her pupil, alike in boldness of speculation and cautiousness of practical judgment. For, on the one hand, I was much more courageous and farsighted than without her I should have been, in anticipation of an order of things to come, in which many of the limited generalizations now so often confounded with universal principles will cease to be applicable. Those parts of my writings, and especially of the "Political Economy," which contemplate possibilities in the future such as, when affirmed by socialists, have in general been fiercely denied by political economists, would, but for her, either have been absent, or the suggestions would have been made much more timidly and in a more qualified form. But while she thus rendered me bolder in speculation on human affairs, her practical turn of mind, and her almost unerring estimate of practical obstacles, repressed in me all tendencies that were really visionary.
Her mind invested all ideas in a concrete shape, and formed itself a conception of how they would actually work: and her knowledge of the existing feelings and conduct of mankind was so seldom at fault, that the weak point in any unworkable suggestion seldom escaped her.