Autobiography
hearsay information), as a "made" or manufactured man, having had a
certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce;
and what a change took place in his feelings when he found, in the
discussion on Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all which that
name implies, "belonged" to me as much as to him and his friends. The
failure of his health soon scattered all his plans of life, and
compelled him to live at a distance from London, so that after the first
year or two of our acquaintance, we only saw each other at distant
intervals. But (as he said himself in one of his letters to Carlyle)
when we did meet it was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full
sense of the word, a profound thinker, his openness of mind, and the
moral courage in which he greatly surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow
the dominion which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised over his
intellect; though he retained to the last a great but discriminating
admiration of both, and towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in that
short and transitory phasis of his life, during which he made the
mistake of becoming a clergyman, his mind was ever progressive: and the
advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after an interval,
made me apply to him what Goethe said of Schiller, "er hatte eine
furchtliche Fortschreitung." He and I started from intellectual points
almost as wide apart as the poles, but the distance between us was
always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he,
during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to
several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to
prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much
further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded.
After 1829 I withdrew from attendance on the Debating Society. I had had
enough of speech-making, and was glad to carry on my private studies and
meditations without any immediate call for outward assertion of their
results. I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in
many fresh places, and I never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was
incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I never, in the course of my
transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused
and unsettled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I
had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly
how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them.
The conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in defending the
theory of government laid down in Bentham's and my father's writings,
and the acquaintance I had obtained with other schools of political
thinking, made me aware of many things which that doctrine, professing
to be a theory of government in general, ought to have made room for,
and did not. But these things, as yet, remained with me rather as
corrections to be made in applying the theory to practice, than as
defects in the theory. I felt that politics could not be a science of
specific experience; and that the accusations against the Benthamic
theory of _being_ a theory, of proceeding _a priori_ by way of general
reasoning, instead of Baconian experiment, showed complete ignorance of
Bacon's principles, and of the necessary conditions of experimental
investigation. At this juncture appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_,
Macaulay's famous attack on my father's _Essay on Government_. This gave
me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of
politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of
treating political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in
physical science his notions of philosophizing might have recognised
Kepler, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help
feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which the
writer, at a later period, made the most ample and honourable amends),
there was truth in several of his strictures on my father's treatment of
the subject; that my father's premises were really too narrow, and
included but a small number of the general truths on which, in politics,
the important consequences depend. Identity of interest between the
governing body and the community at large is not, in any practical sense
which can be attached to it, the only thing on which good government
depends; neither can this identity of interest be secured by the mere
conditions of election. I was not at all satisfied with the mode in
which my father met the criticisms of Macaulay. He did not, as I thought
he ought to have done, justify himself by saying, "I was not writing a
scientific treatise on politics, I was writing an argument for
parliamentary reform." He treated Macaulay's argument as simply
irrational; an attack upon the reasoning faculty; an example of the
saying of Hobbes, that When reason is against a man, a man will be
against reason. This made me think that there was really something more
fundamentally erroneous in my father's conception of philosophical
method, as applicable to politics, than I had hitherto supposed there
was. But I did not at first see clearly what the error might be. At last
it flashed upon me all at once in the course of other studies. In the
early part of 1830 I had begun to put on paper the ideas on Logic
(chiefly on the distinctions among Terms, and the import of
Propositions) which had been suggested and in part worked out in the
morning conversations already spoken of. Having secured these thoughts
from being lost, I pushed on into the other parts of the subject, to try
whether I could do anything further towards clearing up the theory of
logic generally. I grappled at once with the problem of Induction,
postponing that of Reasoning, on the ground that it is necessary to
obtain premises before we can reason from them. Now, Induction is mainly
a process for finding the causes of effects: and in attempting to fathom
the mode of tracing causes and effects in physical science, I soon saw
that in the more perfect of the sciences, we ascend, by generalization
from particulars, to the tendencies of causes considered singly, and
then reason downward from those separate tendencies, to the effect of
the same causes when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate
analysis of this deductive process; the common theory of the syllogism
evidently throwing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from Hobbes and
my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best
concrete instances I could find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics,
occurred to me as the most complete example of the logical process I was
investigating. On examining, accordingly, what the mind does when it
applies the principle of the Composition of Forces, I found that it
performs a simple act of addition. It adds the separate effect of the
one force to the separate effect of the other, and puts down the sum of
these separate effects as the joint effect. But is this a legitimate
process? In dynamics, and in all the mathematical branches of physics,
it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not; and I then
recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the
distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena, in the
introduction to that favourite of my boyhood, Thompson's _System of
Chemistry_. This distinction at once made my mind clear as to what was
perplexing me in respect to the philosophy of politics. I now saw, that
a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the
province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are
not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate.
It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared,
that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the
method of philosophizing in politics to the purely experimental method
of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive
method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of
deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches
of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry,
which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or
admit of any summing-up of effects. A foundation was thus laid in my
thoughts for the principal chapters of what I afterwards published on
the Logic of the Moral Sciences; and my new position in respect to my
old political creed, now became perfectly definite.
If I am asked, what system of political philosophy I substituted for
that which, as a philosophy, I had abandoned, I answer, No system: only
a conviction that the true system was something much more complex and
many-sided than I had previously had any idea of, and that its office
was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from
which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be
deduced. The influences of European, that is to say, Continental,
thought, and especially those of the reaction of the nineteenth century
against the eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me. They came from
various quarters: from the writings of Coleridge, which I had begun to
read with interest even before the change in my opinions; from the
Coleridgians with whom I was in personal intercourse; from what I had
read of Goethe; from Carlyle's early articles in the _Edinburgh_ and
Foreign Reviews, though for a long time I saw nothing in these (as my
father saw nothing in them to the last) but insane rhapsody. From these
sources, and from the acquaintance I kept up with the French literature
of the time, I derived, among other ideas which the general turning
upside down of the opinions of European thinkers had brought uppermost,
these in particular: That the human mind has a certain order of possible
progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which
governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an
unlimited extent: that all questions of political institutions are
relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not
only _will_ have, but _ought_ to have, different institutions: that
government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of
whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is,
does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: that any
general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of
human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of
history. These opinions, true in the main, were held in an exaggerated
and violent manner by the thinkers with whom I was now most accustomed
to compare notes, and who, as usual with a reaction, ignored that half
of the truth which the thinkers of the eighteenth century saw. But
though, at one period of my progress, I for some time undervalued that
great century, I never joined in the reaction against it, but kept as
firm hold of one side of the truth as I took of the other. The fight
between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth always reminded me of
the battle about the shield, one side of which was white and the other
black. I marvelled at the blind rage with which the combatants rushed
against one another. I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many
of Coleridge's sayings about half truths; and Goethe's device,
"many-sidedness," was one which I would most willingly, at this period,
have taken for mine.
The writers by whom, more than by any others, a new mode of political
thinking was brought home to me, were those of the St. Simonian school
in France. In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted with some of their
writings. They were then only in the earlier stages of their