Autobiography
different from his, and he perceived from time to time that I did not
always tell him _how_ different. I expected no good, but only pain to
both of us, from discussing our differences: and I never expressed them
but when he gave utterance to some opinion or feeling repugnant to mine,
in a manner which would have made it disingenuousness on my part to
remain silent.
It remains to speak of what I wrote during these years, which,
independently of my contributions to newspapers, was considerable. In
1830 and 1831 I wrote the five Essays since published under the title of
_Essays on some Unsettled Questions of political Economy_, almost as
they now stand, except that in 1833 I partially rewrote the fifth Essay.
They were written with no immediate purpose of publication; and when,
some years later, I offered them to a publisher, he declined them. They
were only printed in 1844, after the success of the _System of Logic_. I
also resumed my speculations on this last subject, and puzzled myself,
like others before me, with the great paradox of the discovery of new
truths by general reasoning. As to the fact, there could be no doubt. As
little could it be doubted, that all reasoning is resolvable into
syllogisms, and that in every syllogism the conclusion is actually
contained and implied in the premises. How, being so contained and
implied, it could be new truth, and how the theorems of geometry, so
different in appearance from the definitions and axioms, could be all
contained in these, was a difficulty which no, one, I thought, had
sufficiently felt, and which, at all events, no one had succeeded in
clearing up. The explanations offered by Whately and others, though they
might give a temporary satisfaction, always, in my mind, left a mist
still hanging over the subject. At last, when reading a second or third
time the chapters on Reasoning in the second volume of Dugald Stewart,
interrogating myself on every point, and following out, as far as I knew
how, every topic of thought which the book suggested, I came upon an
idea of his respecting the use of axioms in ratiocination, which I did
not remember to have before noticed, but which now, in meditating on it,
seemed to me not only true of axioms, but of all general propositions
whatever, and to be the key of the whole perplexity. From this germ grew
the theory of the Syllogism propounded in the Second Book of the
_Logic_; which I immediately fixed by writing it out. And now, with
greatly increased hope of being able to produce a work on Logic, of some
originality and value, I proceeded to write the First Book, from the
rough and imperfect draft I had already made. What I now wrote became
the basis of that part of the subsequent Treatise; except that it did
not contain the Theory of Kinds, which was a later addition, suggested
by otherwise inextricable difficulties which met me in my first attempt
to work out the subject of some of the concluding chapters of the Third
Book. At the point which I had now reached I made a halt, which lasted
five years. I had come to the end of my tether; I could make nothing
satisfactory of Induction, at this time. I continued to read any book
which seemed to promise light on the subject, and appropriated, as well
as I could, the results; but for a long time I found nothing which
seemed to open to me any very important vein of meditation.
In 1832 I wrote several papers for the first series of _Tait's
Magazine_, and one for a quarterly periodical called the _Jurist_, which
had been founded, and for a short time carried on, by a set of friends,
all lawyers and law reformers, with several of whom I was acquainted.
The paper in question is the one on the rights and duties of the State
respecting Corporation and Church Property, now standing first among the
collected _Dissertations and Discussions_; where one of my articles in
_Tait_, "The Currency Juggle," also appears. In the whole mass of what
I wrote previous to these, there is nothing of sufficient permanent
value to justify reprinting. The paper in the _Jurist_, which I still
think a very complete discussion of the rights of the State over
Foundations, showed both sides of my opinions, asserting as firmly as I
should have done at any time, the doctrine that all endowments are
national property, which the government may and ought to control; but
not, as I should once have done, condemning endowments in themselves,
and proposing that they should be taken to pay off the national debt. On
the contrary, I urged strenuously the importance of a provision for
education, not dependent on the mere demand of the market, that is, on
the knowledge and discernment of average parents, but calculated to
establish and keep up a higher standard of instruction than is likely to
be spontaneously demanded by the buyers of the article. All these
opinions have been confirmed and strengthened by the whole of my
subsequent reflections.
CHAPTER VI.
COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. MY
FATHER'S DEATH. WRITINGS AND OTHER PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840.
It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I
formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my
existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have
attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My
first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years,
consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth
and she in her twenty-third year. With her husband's family it was the
renewal of an old acquaintanceship. His grandfather lived in the next
house to my father's in Newington Green, and I had sometimes when a boy
been invited to play in the old gentleman's garden. He was a fine
specimen of the old Scotch puritan; stern, severe, and powerful, but
very kind to children, on whom such men make a lasting impression.
Although it was years after my introduction to Mrs. Taylor before my
acquaintance with her became at all intimate or confidential, I very
soon felt her to be the most admirable person I had ever known. It is
not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I
first saw her, could be, all that she afterwards became. Least of all
could this be true of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the
highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature; a necessity equally
from the ardour with which she sought it, and from the spontaneous
tendency of faculties which could not receive an impression or an
experience without making it the source or the occasion of an accession
of wisdom. Up to the time when I first saw her, her rich and powerful
nature had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received type of
feminine genius. To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with an
air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her: to the
inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive
intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic nature. Married
at an early age to a most upright, brave, and honourable man, of liberal
opinions and good education, but without the intellectual or artistic
tastes which would have made him a companion for her, though a steady
and affectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem and the strongest
affection through life, and whom she most deeply lamented when dead;
shut out by the social disabilities of women from any adequate exercise
of her highest faculties in action on the world without; her life was
one of inward meditation, varied by familiar intercourse with a small
circle of friends, of whom one only (long since deceased) was a person
of genius, or of capacities of feeling or intellect kindred with her
own, but all had more or less of alliance with her in sentiments and
opinions. Into this circle I had the good fortune to be admitted, and I
soon perceived that she possessed in combination, the qualities which in
all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy to find
singly. In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition
(including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order of
nature and the universe), and an earnest protest against many things
which are still part of the established constitution of society,
resulted not from the hard intellect, but from strength of noble and
elevated feeling, and co-existed with a highly reverential nature. In
general spiritual characteristics, as well as in temperament and
organisation, I have often compared her, as she was at this time, to
Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his powers
were developed in his short life, was but a child compared with what she
ultimately became. Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in
the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same
perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter;
always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and
rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her
mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have
fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and
her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and
her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in
practical life, would, in the times when such a _carrière_ was open to
women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her
intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the
noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her
unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart
which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and
often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively
investing their feelings with the intensity of its own. The passion of
justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her
boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth
upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving the smallest
feeling in return. The rest of her moral characteristics were such as
naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart: the most genuine
modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity
which were absolute, towards all who were fit to receive them; the
utmost scorn of whatever was mean and cowardly, and a burning
indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or
dishonourable in conduct and character, while making the broadest
distinction between _mala in se_ and mere _mala prohibita_--between acts
giving evidence of intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those
which are only violations of conventions either good or bad, violations
which, whether in themselves right or wrong, are capable of being
committed by persons in every other respect lovable or admirable.
To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of
these qualities, could not but have a most beneficial influence on my
development; though the effect was only gradual, and many years elapsed
before her mental progress and mine went forward in the complete
companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received was far
greater than any which I could hope to give; though to her, who had at
first reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a character of
strong feeling, there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be
derived from one who had arrived at many of the same results by study
and reasoning: and in the rapidity of her intellectual growth, her
mental activity, which converted everything into knowledge, doubtless
drew from me, as it did from other sources, many of its materials. What