Mill's style
"vastly unreadable."
W. MINTO.
VI.
HIS WORK IN PHILOSOPHY
To a savage contemplating a railway train in motion, the engine would
present itself as the master of the situation,--the determining cause
of the motion and direction of the train. It visibly takes the lead,
it looks big and important, and it makes a great noise. Even people a
long way up in the scale of civilization are in the habit of taking
these attributes, perhaps not as the essential ones of leadership, but
at all events as those by which a leader may be recognized. Still that
blustering machine, which puffs and snorts, and drags a vast multitude
in its wake, is moving along a track determined by a man hidden away
from the public gaze. A line of rail lies separated from an adjacent
one, the pointsman moves a handle, and the foaming giant, that would,
it may be, have sped on to his destruction and that of the passive
crew who follow in his rear, is shunted to another line running in a
different direction and to a more desirable goal.
The great intellectual pointsman of our age--the man who has done more
than any other of this generation to give direction to the thought of
his contemporaries--has passed away; and we are left to measure the
loss to humanity by the result of his labors.
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