Mr. Mill's achievements
in both branches of philosophy are such as to give him the foremost
place in either. Whether we regard him as an expounder of the
philosophy of mind or the philosophy of society, he is _facile
princeps_. Still it is his work in mental science which will, in our
opinion, be in future looked upon as his great contribution to the
progress of thought. His work on political economy not only put into
thorough repair the structure raised by Adam Smith, Malthus, and
Ricardo, but raised it at least one story higher. His inestimable
"System of Logic" was a revolution. It hardly needs, of course, to be
said that he owed much to his predecessors,--that he borrowed from
Whewell much of his classification, from Brown the chief lines of his
theory of causation, from Sir John Herschel the main principles of the
inductive methods. Those who think this a disparagement of his work
must have very little conception of the mass of original thought that
still remains to Mr. Mill's credit, the great critical power that
could gather valuable truths from so many discordant sources, and the
wonderful synthetic ability required to weld these and his own
contributions into one organic whole.
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