The time when Mill’s authority was at its height was also the time when political economy was held in greatest honour as a science. The writers on it were numerous; and though, with the exception of Mill, they were not individually very distinguished, their collective work was important. They developed the doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo and Mill; while the speculations of Malthus acquired through Darwin a new importance, until a reaction, brought about more by sentiment than reason, led many to the conviction, or the faith, that they could not possibly be sound. The doctrine of laissez faire, so influential on government during the third quarter of the century, was the work partly of the economists and partly of the practical politicians of the Manchester school. It was never followed out logically, and before the close of the period there were signs of a movement which has since led to an opposite excess. Of the men who did this work Nassau W. Senior (1790-1864), in the earlier part of the period, and J. E. Cairnes (1823-1875) in the later deserve individual mention. The former was a great upholder of the deductive theory of political economy. The latter, in his treatise on The Slave Power (1862), produced one of the most noteworthy special studies in economics, and also one of the most powerful arguments in favour of the action of the Northern States of America.
It was the practical aspect of the science that chiefly interested Mill in economics. It was this still more, if possible, that inspired him in his more specifically political works, the treatises on Liberty, on the Subjection of Women, and on Representative Government. In his schemes of reform Mill was, in his own time, considered extreme; he would now be thought moderate. The caution of his speculation is nowhere more clearly marked than in his Liberty. It pleads certainly for more power to the state than the Manchester School would have granted; but it does so only in order to preserve the real freedom of the individual. In the Subjection of Women Mill was a pioneer on a road which has been well trodden since; and, for good or ill, there has been steady progress towards the triumph of his ideas. In Representative Government he shows a faith, probably excessive, in political machinery; but, whether it can do all Mill supposed or not, such machinery is necessary, and his labour tended to make it better.
William Whewell
(1794-1866).
Over against Mill, with some points of resemblance, but more of difference, may be set William Whewell, who, in 1841, became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and who acquired an immense reputation both for encyclopædic knowledge and for brilliant wit. On the human side he was certainly more attractive than Mill. Like the latter, he was fascinated by the great performances and the boundless promise of science; and he is one of those whose task it has been to formulate a philosophy of science. To this task he devoted himself more exclusively than Mill, and he brought to it a greater knowledge of scientific processes and discoveries. Moreover, his point of view was different. Mill was a pure empiricist. Whewell held that empiricism alone could not explain even itself; and he therefore taught that there was necessary truth as well as empirical truth. This was at once the starting point of his controversy with Mill and the ground-work of his writings, the History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). He is best known by his Novum Organum Renovatum, which was originally a portion of the second work.
Whewell’s strong point is his great knowledge of the history of science. His inductive theory is somewhat loose. It amounts to no more than a succession of tests of hypotheses; and of these tests the most stringent, prediction and consilience of inductions, are open to the fatal objection that they are not and cannot be applied to all inductions. Mill’s inductive methods also are more stringent in appearance than they prove to be in reality; but they at least point to an ideal towards which it is always possible to strive.
Sir William Hamilton
(1788-1856).
Of a widely different school of thought was Sir William Hamilton, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Edinburgh from 1836 to his death. Hamilton was a man of vast reading, and though it has been questioned whether his learning was as exact and profound as it appeared to be, there can hardly be a doubt that it was great enough to hamper the free play of his thought, and that it explains two of his characteristic faults. One is the excessive technicality of his diction. His style, otherwise clear and good, is overloaded with words specially coined for the purposes of the logician and metaphysician. The second fault is his inability to resist the temptation of calling a ‘cloud of witnesses,’ without making any serious attempt to weigh their evidence. Hamilton was a disciple of the Scottish school of philosophy, and a great part of his life was devoted to an elucidation of Reid, of whose works he published an elaborate edition in 1853. But Reid’s principle of Common Sense, as an answer to the philosophic scepticism of Hume, is little better than an evasion; and Hamilton had not much to add to it. Besides the edition of Reid Hamilton published Discussions on Philosophy and Literature (1852); and after his death there appeared the Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1859-1861), by which he is best known.
James Frederick Ferrier
(1808-1864).
Hamilton had a great and not altogether a wholesome influence on James Frederick Ferrier, who in the domain of purely metaphysical thought was probably the most gifted man of his time. Ferrier describes his own philosophy as Scotch to the core. There is in it, nevertheless, a considerable tincture from the German, and Ferrier deserves the credit of being one of the earliest professional philosophers who really grappled with German thought. He was also the master of a very clear and attractive style, which makes the reading of his philosophy a pleasure rather than a toil.
Henry Longueville Mansel
(1820-1871).